Knowledge

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (620)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.123

   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.

   This knowledge, however, is effective only as long as it is privileged. When it becomes 'common knowledge', it rapidly loses its power and efficacy.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.178

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The status of the law

   Theoretical move: The moral law in Kant has the structure of an enunciation without a statement—a "half-said"—and is constituted retroactively by the subject's act rather than pre-existing it; this convergence with Lacan's account of desire as the desire of the Other allows Zupančič to distinguish two ethical paths: the superego's pursuit of an Other that knows, versus the act that creates what the Law wants.

   The subject knows very well that the Other doesn't exist; this is, even, the only real certitude she has.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.185

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Some preliminary remarks

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

   this rupture is connected to the role of knowledge in human action ... the change brought about by the introduction of knowledge into the field of the tragic narrative.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.195

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that guilt is constituted by the moment when the desire of the Other becomes the subject's own desire (finding surplus-enjoyment in objective necessity), and that Oedipus escapes guilt precisely because his desire is stolen from him from the outset — he is 'robbed of his desire' and given over to the social order in exchange, a structural theft that distinguishes his tragedy from those of Hamlet, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra.

   The knowledge in question is a double knowledge. On the one hand, it is the knowledge Lacan terms 'the knowledge of the Oedipal crime'; on the other hand, it concerns something which we might call 'the knowledge of death'.

5. #05

   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.

   Lacan takes as his starting point the thesis that knowledge has two faces: a knowledge that 'knows itself' and a knowledge that 'does not know itself'.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.219

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

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

   the hero finds himself, by this very fact (i.e. the fact that he acts), caught in an opposition between knowledge and lack of knowledge... the knowledge that does and the knowledge that does not know itself.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.258

   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.

   Le savoir qui se sait and le savoir qui ne se sait pas. These two formulae, which we translate as 'the knowledge that knows itself' and 'the knowledge that does not know itself'

8. #08

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.64

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

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

   A goal, then, of Marxist criticism is not only to appreciate or evaluate cultural production but to enter into conversation with cultural products in order to produce situated knowledge, which is itself a factor in the war of positions.

9. #09

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

   <span id="ch10.xhtml_page_1"></span>[Introduction to ‘Reading the <span class="italic">Écrits</span>’: <span class="italic">La trahison de l’écriture</span>](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-002)

   Theoretical move: The Écrits is theorized not as a conventional book but as a labyrinthine, desire-engendering psychoanalytic tool whose deliberate obscurity, resistance to writing, and symptomatic relation to the seminars position it as a transference-inducing object rather than a vehicle of rational comprehension.

   inducing in us the perplexity and the suspension of knowledge that the analysand experiences in respect of the analyst

10. #10

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.9

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Situation in time and place of this exercise

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is theorized as a repetition-with-difference (après-coup) that counters the ego-psychological Americanization of psychoanalysis, which is diagnosed as a symptomatic repression of the unconscious behind an adaptive, autonomous ego and a medicalized analyst-as-knower structure that inverts the true knowledge-relation of the clinic.

    the analyst–analysand rapport is one in which knowledge resides on the side of the analysand and ignorance on the side of the analyst.

11. #11

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

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing speaks of itself

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious, personified as a speaking Thing (la Chose freudienne), is not a hidden depth but a surface-inscribed, linguistically constituted truth that invariably manifests itself — and that the analyst's proper technique is to attend literally to the signifying text of the analysand's speech, treating all analytic material as language-immanent variables.

    Lacan appears to associate the Hegelian List der Vernunft with the speaking truth and its unconscious knowledge that, in and through whatever detours, deferrals, twists, turns...inevitably will have their effects

12. #12

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.38

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The other’s discourse

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology is mobilized to demonstrate that the ego is structurally an alienating sedimentation of the other's discourse and a device of resistance against the unconscious, such that the proper analytic use of the ego is as a *via negativa* — a negative index pointing toward the speaking subject of the unconscious rather than a therapeutic ideal to be strengthened.

    knowledge resides on the side of the analysand, not the analyst

13. #13

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

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The training of analysts to come

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is argued to be a return to the structures of language operative in the unconscious, which grounds a critique of medicalized, dogmatic analytic training and calls for a perpetually self-renewing pedagogy open to the structuralized human sciences and mathematics — with the Real (as the impossible-yet-condition-of-possibility) underwriting both the necessity and the limits of analytic practice.

    hermetically sealed training facilities run by expert doctors dispense a purportedly self-sufficient body of specialist knowledge and know-how exclusively to candidates selected from established medical schools

14. #14

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.68

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > A sign of alarm

    Theoretical move: This passage contextualizes Lacan's 1957 essay "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching" within the institutional conflicts of French psychoanalysis, arguing that Lacan's theoretical insistence on humanistic, structuralist, and intersubjective foundations for analytic training was simultaneously a militant political intervention against the positivist-medical orthodoxy represented by the IPA and Nacht.

    The forms of knowledge deemed acceptable or desirable within a discipline shape the way in which that discipline is taught (and vice versa).

15. #15

    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 text

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a close reading of Lacan's essay title, arguing that the double meaning of 'teaching' (noun/verb) reveals a structural interdependence: the content of psychoanalytic knowledge and the act of its transmission are mutually constitutive.

    the noun—the contents of what psychoanalysis teaches (or is thought to teach)—affects and is affected by the verb—the act of its teaching

16. #16

    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) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis, by assimilating to scientism's demand for universally quantifiable knowledge, betrays Freud's founding intention—which was to preserve access to the symbolic (the unconscious) rather than reduce analysis to mere technical practice under the IPA's institutional aegis.

    universal, 'liberal' truths, which necessarily mow down differences in kinds of knowledge in the service of assimilation

17. #17

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.97

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Freud’s desire

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's reduction of psychoanalytic training to standardized technique (rather than a humanistic, symbolic "style") constitutes the repression of Freudian truth, and that the only genuine transmission of psychoanalysis is through a demonstrative style that enacts the very mechanisms of the unconscious it describes — not through institutional affiliation or positivist technique.

    Affiliation with the IPA had become dominant over real engagement with the theory and experience of psychoanalysis.

18. #18

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.112

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Mirages and other narcissistic extravagances

    Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical critique of mid-century psychoanalytic institutionalism — its narcissistic 'good object' ideology, fetishization of technique, and anal-stage ritualism — is shown to ultimately serve his core theoretical claim that the unconscious is structured like a language, grounding rhetorical tropes as defenses and linking style to the Real beyond meaning.

    Indeed, Swift, with his glorious sarcasm proposes that shit is the very source of knowledge itself. And so it seems in the Lacanian parable that knowledge—at least some knowledge—can be reduced to a crock of shit.

19. #19

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

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The number two is odd

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic dimension irreducibly introduces a third term into the analyst-analysand dyad, making "two" structurally odd (*impair*), and uses this mathematical-structuralist move to critique ego psychology's reduction of drive to instinct, to align psychoanalysis with conjectural sciences, and to expose how the IPA's group dynamics reproduce the imaginary mechanisms of identification Freud himself theorized.

    the knowledge it has conquered can only be situated as organized around that... no training of Freudian analysts has as yet concerned itself with disciplines that teach how to read like the conjectural sciences or mathematics do

20. #20

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.288

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > IV. Toward an ethics

    Theoretical move: By situating Lacan's commentary on Lagache alongside Kant's dual wonder (starry heavens / moral law within), this passage argues that psychoanalysis enacts a double disenchantment — of nature through science and of morality through the discovery of the Other's voice as the ground of the superego — and that the proper analytic ethics requires confrontation with objet petit a rather than ego-strengthening or the surrender of desire.

    Can psychoanalysis be thought of in terms of a removal of ignorance? Lacan refers to Latin here and plays on the difference between ignoscit and noscit – ignorance and knowledge, respectively

21. #21

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.93

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Myth Was Not Proto- Science

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Greek myth's true function was not proto-scientific explanation but a deliberate aesthetic and ethical opening onto the unknowable Real; by mobilizing Lacan's concept of das Ding and his gloss on mythos, Boothby reframes myth as a form of sublimation that intentionally preserves the inscrutability of the divine rather than resolving it into credible narrative.

    True, such stories typically helped imagine relationships between various gods, and between gods and mortals... But the Greek myths also played another role... that of underscoring the ultimately unknowable status of the gods.

22. #22

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.102

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > From Odysseus to Oedipus

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transition from epic to tragic hero marks a structural shift from external to internal conflict, and that Oedipus exemplifies Lacan's account of 'subjective destitution' - the mortifying rupture of imaginary ego-identity required for the subject to access its desire - making tragedy the privileged site for psychoanalytic insight into the subject's unknowing.

    his overweening pride about his own claims to knowledge, his insistence on solving the riddle of the sphinx 'not by birds and omens' but by his own wits.

23. #23

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.104

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

    Theoretical move: The philosophical revolution initiated by early Greek thinkers (from Thales onward) constitutes a sacrilegious transgression against the mythopoetic ethos by replacing the unknowable sacred void behind appearances with conceptually knowable first principles — a move that Heidegger reads as the "oblivion of Being" and that the passage reframes as the birth of metaphysical dualism and disenchantment. Socrates's condemnation is reread as the guardians of archaic culture punishing this desecration of the sacred unknown, though Socrates's own profession of ignorance gestures back toward the mythopoetic reverence for unknowable depths.

    the philosophers proposed not only that one could know the invisible depths but that one could know those hidden truths with even greater certainty than the appearances themselves.

24. #24

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.109

    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.

    women's proximity to the dark forces that drove the cosmos hinted at their possession of an occult knowledge unavailable to men

25. #25

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.165

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

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

    Belief is less a mode of knowledge than a psychical means of compensating for the lack of it. Indeed, far from replacing ignorance with knowledge, belief appears on the contrary to cover over and defend against a baseline unknowing.

26. #26

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.181

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

    Theoretical move: By aligning the Kyoto School's Buddhist paradox of "knowing of non-knowing" (docta ignorantia) with Lacan's das Ding as the unknown dimension of the Nebenmensch, the passage argues that the deepest intimacy—with others, with God, with oneself—is constitutively unknowable, making radical unknowing the shared ground of Buddhist and psychoanalytic accounts of the sacred.

    the ultimate meaning of Zen enlightenment, or satori, is to recognize and embrace 'a knowing of non-knowing, a sort of docta ignorantia.'

27. #27

    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.

    In 'Le séminaire XXI' Lacan states this straightforwardly: 'There has been no desire for knowledge but . . . a horror of knowing.'

28. #28

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.181

    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.

    Knowledge, not mastery, becomes the source of social authority. The reign of expert systems is the denouement of the process that originates when, at the dawn of the capitalist epoch, 'all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.'

29. #29

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

    I > Against Knowledge > Th e End of Class Consciousness

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

    Knowledge thus helps us to enjoy not in the way that we might think — that is, by showing us what is good for our well-being — but by giving us something to sacrifice.

30. #30

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.192

    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.

    emancipatory politics is stuck with knowledge, which provides enjoyment only for the experts themselves (and those who identify with them).

31. #31

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.194

    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.

    University discourse attempts to succeed where the master's discourse fails. It places knowledge in the position of the agent and surplus enjoyment in the position of its other.

32. #32

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.197

    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 internal horrors mount. This is a ramification of the rule of knowledge.

33. #33

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.201

    I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

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

    The more Fahrenheit takes the side of knowledge against Bush's obscene enjoyment, the more it cements the identifi cation between supporters and him through a shared enjoyment.

34. #34

    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.

    The commitment to the documentary form by the forces of emancipation testifies to their continued faith in the power of knowledge and their continued willingness to cede the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism.

35. #35

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.209

    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.

    It is not more knowledge that will bring about our emancipation but more enjoyment.

36. #36

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.267

    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.

    The subject who grasps belief as a necessity and God as a structural entity recognizes that even God doesn't know — and this is the fundamental recognition inherent in every politicization.

37. #37

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.278

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Political Deadlock

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental political deadlock is constituted by a structurally missing binary signifier (the signifier of the feminine in patriarchal society) whose absence is both the source of injustice and the condition of possibility for politics and justice itself; a properly psychoanalytic politics transforms this deadlock from an obstacle into a point of identification, redefining emancipation as an embrace of the limit rather than its transcendence.

    For us, knowledge replaces the missing signifier and functions in its stead, but it remains by definition incomplete. There will always be more to know.

38. #38

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.331

    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.

    he must conceive of forms of knowledge, like the genealogy form (which he takes over from Nietzsche), that do not function in the way that knowledge typically does in order to avoid becoming part of the problem he analyzes.

39. #39

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.345

    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.

    He recognizes that there is a point of nonknowledge within the known world that no amount of speculation or scientific discovery can penetrate, and he opts to take the side of this nonknowledge over all the calculable certainties in the world of utility.

40. #40

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.348

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 11. The Case of the Missing Signifier

    Theoretical move: This passage's endnotes collectively argue that the missing (binary) signifier is an internal gap within the signifying structure rather than an external absence, and that genuine political transformation requires identification with this internal structural position rather than its replacement—a claim developed through engagements with Hegel, Lacan, Badiou, Derrida, and feminist theory.

    Lacan defines the binary signifier as knowledge because, strictly speaking, there is no other binary signifier.

41. #41

    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.

    'language is without doubt made of lalangue. It is an elucubration of knowledge [savoir] about lalangue' (S20, 127).

42. #42

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_119"></span>***méconnaissance***

    Theoretical move: Méconnaissance is theorized not as mere ignorance but as an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge the subject already possesses, structurally homologous between neurotic ego-formation and paranoiac delusion, making all connaissance 'paranoiac knowledge'.

    Méconnaissance is to be distinguished from ignorance… méconnaissance is an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge (savoir) that the subject does possess somewhere.

43. #43

    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_143"></span>**paranoia**

    Theoretical move: Paranoia is theorised not merely as a clinical structure but as a privileged site for disclosing fundamental features of the psyche itself—ego, knowledge, and the analytic relation all share a paranoiac structure—while Lacan's replacement of Freud's homosexuality thesis with the concept of foreclosure marks his decisive theoretical departure from Freud on psychosis.

    Knowledge (connaissance) itself is paranoiac (E, 2, 3, 17).

44. #44

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_196"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0223"></span>**subject suppposed to know**

    Theoretical move: The passage elaborates the Subject Supposed to Know as a transferential function—not a person but a position the analyst comes to embody—whose establishment and dissolution structure the entire arc of analytic treatment, while also showing that the function is reversible: the analyst equally institutes the analysand as a subject supposed to know via the fundamental rule of free association.

    Psychoanalysis demonstrates that KNOWLEDGE (savoir) cannot be located in any particular subject but is, in fact, intersubjective.

45. #45

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_ncx_212"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_page_0243"></span>***U***

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's concept of the unconscious, arguing that against biologistic reductions by Freud's followers, the unconscious is irreducibly linguistic, symbolic, and transindividual — structured like a language, constituted as the discourse of the Other, and identical with the determination of the subject by the symbolic order.

    Since it is an articulation of signifiers in a signifying chain, the unconscious is a kind of knowledge (symbolic knowledge, or savoir). More precisely, it is an 'unknown knowledge'.

46. #46

    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.

    S2 = the signifying chain/knowledge

47. #47

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_193"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0219"></span>**split**

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

    Lacan theorises the split subject in terms of a division between truth and knowledge (savoir)

48. #48

    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_145"></span>**pass**

    Theoretical move: The passage defines and contextualises Lacan's institutional procedure of 'the pass' (la passe), arguing that it operationalises the principle that the end of analysis must be articulable in language and extractable as knowledge (savoir), thereby serving a teaching rather than clinical function.

    it is supposed to testify to the capacity of the passant to theorise his own experience of psychoanalytic treatment, and thereby to contribute to psychoanalytic knowledge.

49. #49

    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_54"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0069"></span>**discourse**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically presents Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses as four possible social bonds founded in language, each defined by rotating four algebraic symbols (S1, S2, $, a) through four structural positions, with the discourse of the master as the generative base from which the others derive—and with the discourse of the analyst positioned as the structural inverse of mastery, making psychoanalysis inherently subversive.

    S2 = knowledge (le savoir)

50. #50

    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_178"></span>**Science**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving and ambivalent relationship to science, arguing that his model of psychoanalysis oscillates between claiming scientific status (via mathematical formalisation, the isolation of objet petit a as its object) and disavowing it (as a "delusion" awaiting science), while insisting throughout that psychoanalysis operates the "subject of science" and must align with structural linguistics rather than natural sciences.

    science is based on the exclusion of any access to knowledge by recourse to intuition and thus forces all the search for knowledge to follow only the path of reason

51. #51

    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_207"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0236"></span>**training**

    Theoretical move: Lacan abolishes the IPA distinction between therapeutic and training analysis, arguing that all analyses are potentially training analyses, and that the formation of the analyst is an ongoing, subject-transforming process irreducible to institutional certification.

    There are two sources from which analysts learn how to conduct psychoanalytic treatment: their own experience of treatment (first as patients, then as analysts), and the experience of others which is transmitted to them via psychoanalytic theory.

52. #52

    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_208"></span> **transference**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.

    Later on, Lacan will remark that if transference often manifests itself under the appearance of love, it is first and foremost the love of knowledge (savoir) that is concerned.

53. #53

    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.

    Lacan distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: imaginary knowledge (connaissance) which is knowledge of the ego, and symbolic knowledge (savoir), which is knowledge of the subject.

54. #54

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.278

    xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI:** *Western moralism.*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is a dialectical art whose foundational operator is 'ignorantia docta' — the analyst's formative ignorance that guides the subject along the paths of error toward truth — and that symbolic investiture (not psychological capacity) constitutes the dimension in which being is realised, with transference, the signifier, and non-sense articulated as interconnected structural phenomena.

    He doesn't have to guide the subject to a Wissen, to knowledge, but on to the paths by which access to this knowledge is gained.

55. #55

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.171

    **Xffl**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes méconnaissance (misrecognition) from simple ignorance by arguing that misrecognition presupposes a correlative knowledge behind it, and uses this distinction to pivot from ego-psychology's conception of the ego as a synthesising function toward a Lacanian account of the ego as fundamentally imaginary and constituted through the specular/linguistic relation to the other.

    There must surely be, behind his misrecognition, a kind of knowledge of what there is to misrecognise.

56. #56

    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.

    knowledge 168 absolute 264 in animals 168 and ignorance 167 paranoiac 163 and signs 265-8

57. #57

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.26

    BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic teaching cannot rest on mere cataloguing or analogical methods, but must operate through a "function of the key" — the signifying function — grounded in the unary trait as the primordial signifier that precedes the subject and justifies any ideal of straightforwardness in teaching.

    the analyst is reckoned to know something. Why not even admit that he does know a thing or two? But can he teach what he knows?

58. #58

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.239

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Descartes's cogito as the paradigm case of the vel of alienation — the forced choice between annihilation of knowledge and scepticism — arguing that Descartes's error is to mistake the 'I think' for a knowledge rather than a point of fading, and that this error is sutured only by positing God as the Subject Supposed to Know who guarantees the field of all suspended knowledge.

    one might say that his mistake is to believe that this is knowledge. To say that he knows something of this certainty.

59. #59

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.149

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan resists assimilating the unconscious to any existing ontological framework (Plotinus, Being/non-Being) because to do so would over-substantify it; instead he insists the unconscious harbours a non-completable corpus of knowledge (savoir), and that the subject is "magnetised" behind a screen in a state of split/dissociation—the Gordian knot of psychoanalytic theory.

    In the unconscious there is a corpus of knowledge (un savoir), which must in no way be conceived as knowledge to be completed, to be closed.

60. #60

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the tuché (the traumatic real encounter) is not merely a clinical concept but a structural principle animating all development through accident/obstacle rather than biological stages, linking psychoanalytic repetition to pre-Socratic philosophy's search for a first cause (clinamen), and positioning this as the true originality of psychoanalysis over ontogenetic stage theories.

    analysis posits itself as modulating in a more radical way this relation of man to the world that has always been regarded as knowledge.

61. #61

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.248

    OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transference is constituted precisely by the subject's positioning of another as the "subject supposed to know," and that the analysand's withholding of information from the analyst reveals that what most limits the analytic process is not fear of deception by the analyst but fear of being understood too quickly—i.e., fear that the analyst will reduce the symptom to an organic or biographical cause, foreclosing the analytic work itself.

    I am not here for you to find an organic cause for them.

62. #62

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes genuine Pyrrhonian scepticism (as a subjective position of knowing nothing) from the Cartesian move, in order to situate Montaigne not as a sceptic but as the historical embodiment of the aphanisis of the subject — the living moment of the subject's fading — thereby grounding the vel of alienation in a concrete historical context.

    His aim is not to refute uncertain knowledge. He is happy to let such knowledge run around quite freely, and with it all the rules of social life.

63. #63

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.240

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan leverages Descartes's voluntarist solution to the problem of the guaranteeing subject (God as the subject supposed to know) to introduce the analytic transference as a structural replacement for that theological guarantee, and simultaneously grounds his concept of alienation in the non-trivial logic of cardinal addition, showing that the vel of alienation cannot be collapsed into simple arithmetic totality.

    God is supposed to know?... the subject who is supposed to know, in analysis, is the analyst.

64. #64

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively reads Freud's Wahrnehmungszeichen as signifiers, establishing that the unconscious is structured by the interplay of signifying synchrony and constituent diachrony (metaphor/metonymy), and grounds psychoanalysis in the Cartesian subject rather than any pre-modern notion of the soul, thereby distinguishing analytic 'recollection' from Platonic reminiscence.

    Freud says this all the more in that he does not know that he is saying it fifty years before the linguists

65. #65

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.59

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan aligns Freud's method with Cartesian doubt by showing that Freud's 'certainty' (Gewissheit) rests not on conscious statement but on the constellation of signifiers—including doubt itself as part of the text—thereby establishing that the subject (Ich) is the locus of the network of signifiers, not the ego, and that the unconscious is the subject's proper home: 'Wo es war, soll Ich werden.'

    not in its statement, which still bears all of this knowledge to be put in doubt

66. #66

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    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 is the constitutive condition of transference, and that Freud occupies a uniquely legitimate—and unrepeatable—position as the one analyst who genuinely held the knowledge he was supposed to know, making his function the permanent horizon against which every analytic position is measured.

    no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge. That is why… if there is someone to whom one can apply there can be only one such person. This one was Freud.

67. #67

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Cartesian search for certainty within the dialectic of alienation and separation, arguing that Descartes' method is not a universal epistemology but a singular, desire-driven path—distinguishing it from ancient episteme and scepticism—and that this singularity will serve to articulate the structure of transference.

    Does this mean that no knowledge is aimed at? Does it mean that knowledge weighs lightly in Descartes? Not at all

68. #68

    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.

    connaissance (with its inevitable concomitant, 'méconnaissance') belongs to the imaginary register, while savoir belongs to the symbolic register.

69. #69

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.150

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

    Theoretical move: Lacan indicts a conformist, adaptationist tendency within psychoanalytic theory—where analysts flee the unsettling implications of the unconscious into orthopedic, evolutionist therapeutics—positioning this as a betrayal of the still-young, subversive discovery of the unconscious.

    on the plane of the theory of psychological knowledge, in so far as the analyst finds himself placed in a field in which he has no other course but to flee

70. #70

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.59

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan aligns Freud's method with Cartesian doubt to argue that the unconscious subject is not the ego but the complete locus of the signifier network — thus correcting the Ego Psychology misreading of "Wo es war, soll Ich werden" and insisting that Freud's certainty (Gewissheit) is grounded in the constellation of signifiers, not in any psychical function.

    not in its statement, which still bears all of this knowledge to be put in doubt

71. #71

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.78

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: The passage grounds the Lacanian concept of the tuché in the fort-da game as the child's response to the trauma of separation, arguing that psychoanalytic development is not organised around biological stages but around the accident of the real encounter—linking the tuché back to pre-Socratic philosophy's need for a clinamen to motivate the world.

    analysis posits itself as modulating in a more radical way this relation of man to the world that has always been regarded as knowledge

72. #72

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.149

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan resists assimilating the unconscious to any existing ontological framework (being/non-being), insisting instead that the unconscious harbours a corpus of knowledge that is irreducibly open and unsuturable, while the split/dissociation of the subject behind the 'screen' constitutes the central Gordian knot of psychoanalytic theory.

    In the unconscious there is a corpus of knowledge (un savoir), which must in no way be conceived as knowledge to be completed, to be closed.

73. #73

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Cartesian search for certainty from ancient episteme and scepticism by grounding it in the double function of alienation and separation, arguing that Descartes' method is driven by a *desire* to distinguish true from false in order to act—making it a singular, practical path rather than a universal epistemology, and thereby anticipating the subject's constitution through desire rather than knowledge alone.

    Does this mean that no knowledge is aimed at? Does it mean that knowledge weighs lightly in Descartes? Not at all

74. #74

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.238

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes genuine scepticism (the subjective position that nothing can be known) from mere successive doubt, and identifies Montaigne as the historical embodiment not of scepticism proper but of the 'living moment of aphanisis of the subject' — thereby locating the emergence of the subject in the vel of alienation against the backdrop of Cartesian method.

    His aim is not to refute uncertain knowledge. He is happy to let such knowledge run around quite freely

75. #75

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.239

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Descartes's passage through doubt to map the structure of alienation: the Cartesian cogito arrives at a point of subjective fading rather than knowledge, and the reintroduction of God as guarantor of the eternal verities installs the 'subject supposed to know' as the structural support for certainty—a move that prefigures the Lacanian vel of alienation and the path of desire.

    one might say that his mistake is to believe that this is knowledge. To say that he knows something of this certainty.

76. #76

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is constitutively tied to the position of the Subject Supposed to Know, and uses Freud's unique historical status as the one analyst who *actually* knew (rather than merely being supposed to know) to clarify both the function of that position and the institutional drama it generates within analytic communities.

    no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge.

77. #77

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

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

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

    Up till the advent of psycho-analysis, the path of knowledge was always traced in that of a purification of the subject, of the percipiens.

78. #78

    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.

    In Lacan, connaissance (with its inevitable concomitant, 'méconnaissance') belongs to the imaginary register, while savoir belongs to the symbolic register.

79. #79

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.290

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

    Theoretical move: Milner's presentation argues that Plato's *Sophist* anticipates the logic of the signifier by showing that non-being is not an additional term in a series but the very condition of computation itself — the 'locus of zero' — and that this structure is homologous to the Lacanian subject as non-being inscribed in discourse; Lacan closes by anchoring this in his tripolarity of subject, knowledge, and sex as derived from the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real.

    The three edges, the three terms of subject, knowledge and sex which are, of course, the tripolarity which is essentially extracted from our experience as analysts

80. #80

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.232

    **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.

    This ambiguous dimension of the fact that there is something to be known, and that it is indicated, can be extended to the whole field of psychiatric symptomatology in so far as analysis introduces into it this new dimension, which is precisely that its status is that of the signifier.

81. #81

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.291

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst is structurally excluded from the Real by his position and technique, and that this exclusion—symptomatically mirrored in logic's reduction of reference to truth/falsity (Frege)—necessitates organizing a new logic around three irreducible terms (knowledge, subject, sex) in order to situate sense, meaning, and the subject's division within analytic experience.

    One might happily construct, therefore, a correspondence, a superimposition of three terms: knowledge, subject, and sex.

82. #82

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 2 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the failure of dialogue—especially sexual dialogue between men and women—to ground the anti-dialogic structure of psychoanalysis, then pivots to frame the seminar's programme as hinging on the analyst's relationship to truth and knowledge, triangulated through Frege's logic and Plato's *Sophist*, introducing a "tertiary function" as the structural condition for any genuine transmission.

    The relationships between truth and knowledge, this is where we are carried onto the terrain of logic

83. #83

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.322

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: Through a psychoanalytic reading of Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein*, the seminar argues that the subject is constituted in a "perpetual division" between the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the Gaze), and that the subject can only be grasped "at the zero point of her desire" through the discourse of the other's desire — that is, Lol's subjectivity is structured entirely around a fundamental lack that is both sustained and circulated by the o-object as Gaze.

    our unique knowledge is established in a desire, a desire itself caught up in the net of a phantasy, that this knowledge is never fixed, always relative, possibility, one story among others

84. #84

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position as "subject supposed to know" is structurally paradoxical—Freudian discovery itself forecloses the possibility of a complete knowledge-subject—and grounds the subject's existence not in a harmonious closure of signifiers but precisely in the *lack* of a signifier, which is further illustrated by contrasting the God-like Newtonian subject of absolute knowledge (who "is nothing" because he lacks nothing) with the subject that only emerges where knowledge is incomplete.

    everything that the foundations of psychoanalysis involves, precisely in terms of knowledge, affirms to us that there cannot be this subject who is supposed to know for the reason that the discovery of Freud excludes the fundamental knowledge of psychoanalysis.

85. #85

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.300

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the modern subject by displacing truth onto the big Other (God), thereby inaugurating a science of accumulative knowledge severed from truth; psychoanalysis, precisely because it works at the split (Entzweiung) between "I think" and "I am," is the practice that can finally articulate the radical relationship between truth and knowledge — a relationship structured topologically, as in the Möbius strip.

    Knowledge from Descartes on, is what can serve to increase knowledge. And this is a completely different question to that of the truth.

86. #86

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The analyst's position is defined not as a bearer of knowledge but as a structural marker — a "boundary mark" or "joist" — of the impossibility of sustaining knowledge, aligning the analytic function with the field of the impossible rather than with mastery.

    not at all the fatalism of knowledge but fetishism, that the analyst would be something like the boundary mark or the joist of a knowledge that is impossible to sustain.

87. #87

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis has mapped out its clinical procedures without genuinely theorising them — transference, identification, the symptom as knot — and that Freud's founding discovery (the Signorelli forgetting) demonstrates that the unconscious operates at the level of signifying material (phonemes), not repressed content, grounding the claim that the subject is primordially determined by language/discourse rather than by any substantial soul or intentional consciousness.

    It is not enough to know how to do something - turn a vase or sculpt an object - to know what one is working on.

88. #88

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.254

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses game theory (Pascal, Von Neumann) as a structural analogy for the analytic situation: the 'saddle point' of game theory models the convergence of analyst and analysand as potentially the 'same person' sharing a common interest (the cure), while the stake of every game is identified with objet petit a — the divided subject's being — and the game itself is theorized as fantasy rendered inoffensive and desire made isolable.

    the subject who is supposed to know constitutes the conjunction of this pole of the subject to the pole of knowledge, regarding which the subject has first of all to know that at the level of knowledge a subject should not be supposed since it is the unconscious.

89. #89

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.294

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan organizes his year's work around the triad Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit, arguing that the Freudian discovery of compulsion (Zwang as Entzweiung/Spaltung of the subject) and Plato's identification of the Good with Number together illuminate the distinctive status of Truth in psychoanalytic experience—a truth that is irreducibly personal and constituted through means that exceed ordinary medical reference.

    the fundamental relationships of the subject - in the modern sense of the term - and knowledge.

90. #90

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.302

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the asymmetry of sexual difference — irreducible to any symmetrical dyadic opposition — is precisely what the subject encounters as the Objet petit a: every time the subject reaches toward truth, what is found is transformed into the o-object, which stands as the veiled third term linking subject to knowledge through the symptom rather than through certainty.

    far from it being a relation to certainty, the one which is grounded only on the relationship of the vanishing of the subject with respect to knowledge, it is the reality called symptom

91. #91

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position is defined by a "logic of desire" grounded in singularity, lack, and the signifier's structure (representing a subject for another signifier), and that the Subject Supposed to Know is not a classificatory knower of universals but one who guides the analysand to the moment of emergence where an unknown signifier retroactively constitutes the subject — demonstrated clinically through Dora's symptoms.

    what ought to be, how is there presented, what we will call the status of knowledge? ... What he has to know is not a classificatory knowledge, is not knowledge of the general

92. #92

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115

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

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

    a general logic in that its functioning is formal with respect to all the fields of knowledge which may specify it, including that of psychoanalysis

93. #93

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.305

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real is constituted through the impossible — not as a condition of possibility (the Kantian-psychological error) but as the remainder produced when the possible is negated — and links this structure to the triad of subject, knowledge, and sex via the topology of the Möbius strip and the concept of Entzweiung, grounding the analytic relationship to the symptom in this splitting.

    the result of Descartes' approach is to render possible this something that I characterised after him as the accumulation of a knowledge. The foundation, the end, the brand, the style of knowledge of science, is above all to be a knowledge which can be accumulated

94. #94

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.266

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Plato's *Sophist*, the passage argues that the question of non-being (the status of the *phantasma*/simulacrum) is ultimately a question about the subject's particular, perspectival position with respect to a universal, and that the Sophist's art—producing illusions calibrated to the observer's viewpoint—anticipates the psychoanalytic concept of *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz* and fantasy. The dialogue's apparent concern with ontology is recast as a topology of the subject's place.

    he must be purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he knows and no more.

95. #95

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.309

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the topological structure of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, cross-cap, and projective plane is not mere formal play but indexes the subjective positions of being: specifically, the o-object (objet petit a) is identified as the topological element that closes the cross-cap/projective plane, and its function is to cover over the Entzweiung (division) of the subject, making fantasy the fallacious conjuncture of that division with the o-object, while castration names the fundamental relation of the subject to sex/truth.

    If *Sinn,* if what is sense is interpretable, belongs to the subject from the side of knowledge, in the difficulties of discourse, in the stumbling of the signifier

96. #96

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a refused, foreclosed signifier (a "not-knowing"), and that the sexual dyad—whose nature remains fundamentally unknowable—is the radical foundation of all signifying opposition; this grounds Lacan's claim that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the subject who avoids knowledge of sex, linking the structure of the signifier to the biological fact that sex is not reducible to reproduction but is bound to death.

    the knowledge capable of giving an account of itself, the knowledge that knows how to articulate the subject - there is no other one to give its status to the unconscious

97. #97

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious, the subject, and sex form a triadic system of "rotating dominance" (analogous to scissors-stone-paper) in which knowledge is unconscious and indeterminate with respect to the subject, the subject finds his certainty only in the "pure default of sex," and sex itself remains the impossible-to-know pole that any game (including analysis) converts into a manageable stake—thereby grounding the analytic operation as a game whose rule excludes the Real as impossible.

    The unconscious is a knowledge, whose subject remains undetermined, in the unconscious. What does it know? Well sex

98. #98

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological phenomenon of meiosis and the expulsion of polar globules as a speculative material analogue for the lost object in fantasy, then turns this into a critique of psychoanalysts' systematic avoidance of biological discoveries about sex—arguing that this avoidance is symptomatic of the analyst's own structural exclusion from knowledge of the sexual relation, which aligns the analytic position with the subject defined only by the missing signifier rather than by any positive knowledge.

    everything indicates that the position of the analyst finds itself no less excluded than that of any established subject who preceded him... knowledge has been let go far from the subject and that the subject that is involved is only the subject in relation to the missing signifier.

99. #99

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus) as the necessary formal apparatus for grasping the subject as a surface, aligning this with Hegel's Phenomenology and its loop of Absolute Knowing, and connecting both to the analytic concept of the Subject Supposed to Know as the structural foundation of transference.

    by taking this term of subject identified to the loop of knowledge

100. #100

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**

     Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a structural (not merely psychoanalytic) category that describes how a subject is produced in discourse through the articulation of an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain, arguing against Leclaire's reduction of his theoretical discourse to the position of an analysand's speech, and insisting that the signifier's identity is constituted at its root by the non-identical-to-itself, i.e., by lack.

     if he stamps his position with the point of certainty in order to give a content to his knowledge, he makes himself, in that way, supposedly adequate to the real

101. #101

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

     Theoretical move: Milner's presentation reads Plato's *Sophist* as a proto-logical account of the signifier: non-being is not a sixth genus but the very condition of computability (the "locus of zero"), and the subject—identified with non-being—disappears into the proper name, thereby anticipating the Lacanian structure of the subject as effect of the signifier. Lacan closes by anchoring his own project in the triad subject/knowledge/sex mapped onto the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real.

     the three edges, the three terms of subject, knowledge and sex which are, of course, the tripolarity which is essentially extracted from our experience as analysts

102. #102

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual difference introduces an irreducible asymmetry into any dialectic of being and number, and that this asymmetry is what drives analytic experience to posit the objet petit a as the subject's inevitable substitute for truth — wherever the subject reaches his truth, he transforms it into the o-object, making the objet petit a the structural locus of the real beyond knowledge.

     far from it being a relation to certainty, the one which is grounded only on the relationship of the vanishing of the subject with respect to knowledge

103. #103

     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.

     The knowledge of the unconscious is unconscious in that, on the side of the subject, it is posited as the indetermination of the subject, we do not know at what point of the signifier there is lodged this subject who is supposed to know.

104. #104

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a *rejected* signifier (a not-knowing), and that this structure — the signifier representing the subject for another signifier — recapitulates the whole dialectic from Plato's Sophist to the present; further, it grounds the dyadic signifying opposition (Other/One, being/non-being) in the sexual dyad, while insisting that sex itself is radically unknowable and is not primarily a reproductive mechanism but a relationship with death.

     What is at stake so that knowledge, I mean the knowledge capable of giving an account of itself, the knowledge that knows how to articulate the subject — there is no other one to give its status to the unconscious

105. #105

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological figure of meiosis and polar body expulsion as a speculative metaphor for the lost object, then pivots to argue that the analyst's position is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject — and that psychoanalytic knowledge must be sharply distinguished from 'oriental' (e.g. Taoist) traditions that begin from the male/female signifying opposition, since analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier.

     analysis remains completely in the tradition of the subject of knowledge on the single condition that we should carefully note that for a long time knowledge has been let go far from the subject.

106. #106

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.299

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito installs a constitutive split (Entzweiung) between the subject of sense and the subject of being, and that this division—wherein the subject is what is *lacking* to accumulated scientific knowledge—is precisely what psychoanalysis radicalises: the unconscious is an "I think" that knows without knowing it, and truth returns not through confrontation with knowledge but through the stumbling intervals of discourse, the symptom being its privileged site.

     Knowledge from Descartes on, is what can serve to increase knowledge. And this is a completely different question to that of the truth.

107. #107

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     http://www.lacaninireland.com

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier's essential function is to represent the subject for another signifier, not to produce meaning through a signifier/signified relation alone; and that "non-sense" (the face sense presents on the side of the signifier) is the operative barrier that psychoanalytic experience explores, distinguishing this from any philosophical or developmental-psychological recuperation of loss through meaning.

     every science, and for him it is science that is involved, must be able to declare what must be translated as its object... In analysis it is in effect the subject that is involved. Here no displacement is possible to permit him to make an object of it.

108. #108

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.279

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 2 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the failure of sexual dialogue as the paradigm for his claim that psychoanalysis is not a dialogue, then pivots to frame the seminar's programme around the relationship between truth and knowledge—grounded in Frege's logic and Plato's *Sophist*—as the proper route to defining the analyst's position.

     the relationship of the effective analyst to these two terms, for example, like those of the truth and of knowledge

109. #109

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.309

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the topological structure of the Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle formally captures the subjective position of being, and that the objet petit a—conceived as a topological "rag" completing the cross-cap—is the operative term that closes the Entzweiung of the subject, enabling the passage from alienation to separation and grounding the structure of fantasy as a fallacious suturing of the subject's division over the real.

     if what is sense is interpretable, belongs to the subject from the side of knowledge, in the difficulties of discourse, in the stumbling of the signifier.

110. #110

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.305

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real is constituted precisely by the impossible (what cannot be), positioning this against the Cartesian-Kantian project of grounding knowledge in conditions of possibility; the Freudian discovery returns what Descartes foreclosed by offloading eternal truths onto divine arbitrariness, and the three poles of subject, knowledge, and sexed being—articulated through Entzweiung and the Möbius strip topology—structure the fundamental psychoanalytic dialectic.

     the result of Descartes' approach is to render possible this something that I characterised after him as the accumulation of a knowledge. The foundation, the end, the brand, the style of knowledge of science, is above all to be a knowledge which can be accumulated

111. #111

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The seminar presentation reads Marguerite Duras's novel *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* as a clinical-literary staging of the subject's constitution through the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the gaze), arguing that the subject (Lol) can only be grasped at the zero-point of desire in the discourse of the other, where she is structured by a perpetual division between the desire of the Other and the o-object that drives the fantasy.

     In the measure that our unique knowledge is established in a desire, a desire itself caught up in the net of a phantasy, that this knowledge is never fixed, always relative, possibility, one story among others.

112. #112

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis lacks genuine theoretical comprehension of its own experience (transference, identification, symptom), and locates the foundational discovery of the unconscious in Freud's analysis of the Signorelli forgetting — where what disappears is not a repressed content but phonemes, establishing that the unconscious operates at the level of signifying material rather than meaning.

     He believes he knows because he has traced out its paths. But if there is something that ought to remind him of his experience, it is precisely this share of illusion which threatens every knowledge which is too sure of itself

113. #113

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Subject Supposed to Know functions as a structural necessity for analytic engagement, yet the very foundations of psychoanalysis—grounded in the lack of a signifier—preclude any closed, totalizing knowledge; the subject is constituted not as the support of a harmonious signifying system but precisely through the gap where a signifier is missing, and this is illustrated through the contrast between Newtonian "absolute knowledge" (where the subject vanishes into God) and the Freudian discovery that grounds subjectivity in lack.

     it is in the subject in so far as he still lacks knowledge that there resides for us the nerve, the activity of the existence of a subject

114. #114

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **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 difference between a sign, a dullness for example, which allows us to know that there is hepatitis in a lobe, and a symptom in the sense that we ought to understand it as an analysable symptom... is that there is always in the symptom the indication that there is a question of knowledge.

115. #115

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage locates the analyst's position not as a bearer of knowledge but as the very marker of knowledge's impossibility — a "fetishism" that installs the analyst as the boundary-point where knowledge fails to sustain itself, thereby defining the Real as the field of the impossible.

     not at all the fatalism of knowledge but fetishism, that the analyst would be something like the boundary mark or the joist of a knowledge that is impossible to sustain.

116. #116

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses game theory (Pascal, Von Neumann) as a structural analogy to articulate the analytic relationship: the divided subject stakes himself as objet petit a in the game of analysis, desire is the appearance of this stake in the interval between lack and knowledge, and the analytic dyad functions not as opposing players but as a convergent structure aimed at a Pascal-style "distribution of bets" — the cure.

     what is really at stake in the affair… the relationship of a subject to a knowledge… the subject who is supposed to know constitutes the conjunction of this pole of the subject to the pole of knowledge

117. #117

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's position is defined by a logic of desire structured around lack and the singular (not the universal), and that the formula "the signifier represents a subject for another signifier" grounds the analyst's function as Subject Supposed to Know—demonstrated concretely through the symptom-as-signifier in Freud's case of Dora.

     What he has to know is not a classificatory knowledge, is not knowledge of the general, is not the knowledge of a zoologist.

118. #118

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst is structurally excluded from the real — particularly the real of sex — and that this exclusion is not a deficiency but constitutive of the analytic position; furthermore, logic's historical progression toward Frege's reduction of reference to truth-value is read as a symptom of what is lacking for the designation of the real, pointing toward the triadic organisation of knowledge, subject, and sex as the proper scaffolding for analytic theory.

     One might happily construct, therefore, a correspondence, a superimposition of three terms: knowledge, subject, and sex.

119. #119

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.

     it is only at the point where there is taken to the maximum what makes knowledge be constituted as the guard, but understand it in the sense of serving, that this refusal of sexual reality

120. #120

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.294

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his year-long triadic schema (Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit) to argue that the Freudian discovery of Spaltung/Entzweiung gives a new philosophical status to truth, and that psychoanalysis is constitutively the practice of truth-as-means, distinguishing it from all other sciences and grounding its therapeutic effects in a reduplicated sense of truth proper to the subject.

     the accent that we have put with our commentary on Descartes on the fundamental relationships of the subject - in the modern sense of the term - and knowledge

121. #121

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the problem of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (fantasma), Lacan argues that the gap (écart) constitutive of the simulacrum is also constitutive of the subject, and that the Sophist—precisely as the one who lacks a sure reference and operates through this gap—figures the analyst himself, who likewise occupies a place of non-knowledge in relation to the analysand.

     The Sophist, for his part, pretends that to know and not to know comes back to the same thing because there is no truth in the simulacrum

122. #122

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 15 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic 'scientific' presentations systematically falsify their object by conspiring against the patient, and uses this critique to advance a methodological point: that perversion must be theorised from Freud's foundational claim that perversion is normal, so the clinical problem becomes explaining why abnormal perverts exist - a historical-structural question he aligns with Foucault's archaeological method.

     strict scientific thinking, which is the one that one would restrict oneself to if what were in question were real scientific meetings.

123. #123

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **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.

     there is a perfect decantation between the being of knowledge and the being of truth

124. #124

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **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.

     This unknown object which divides us between knowledge and truth, how can we not hope that the second will give us a view of the first

125. #125

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a topological witness that anticipates the psychoanalytic function of the objet petit a (as the gaze/look), arguing that the medieval opposition of knowledge and truth (doctrine of the double truth) prefigures the split that modern science inherits, and that the poet—through his projection of cosmological knowledge into the field of "final ends"—inadvertently maps the edge-topology that links the word-in-the-Other to the emergence of the o-object, concretely illustrated by the conjunction of the liar and the counterfeiter in Hell.

     for centuries knowledge is pursued as a defence against the truth

126. #126

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a condensed summary of his previous seminar's work to argue that the being of the subject is constituted through a suture of lack—grounded in Frege's arithmetic, the Cartesian cogito's torsion, and the signifier's relation to negativity—and that only psychoanalysis, by engaging the symptom as a being of truth rather than bandaging the wound of the subject's split, can genuinely confront what science, philosophy, and social critique merely suture over.

     what it costs the being of knowledge, by recognising the fortunate forms of what he, for his part, only engages with under the sign of unhappiness… this being of knowledge - that of the psychoanalyst - must reduce himself to being only the complement of the symptom

127. #127

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses his travelogue of the US and Mexico to articulate a theoretical distinction between two modes of the past: a "past without repetition" (the inert, settled American suburban milieu) versus a past structured by repetition (the properly psychoanalytic dimension), and closes by positioning his own linguistic/structuralist programme as needing rigorous clarification against the dilution of "structuralism" as a fashionable rubric.

     this effort that I also made to recall the conditions of the birth and the evolution of science in terms of how decisive it may be for us, for us to conceive ourselves as determined by it.

128. #128

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

     E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the objet petit a as the cause of desire by articulating its double register: it marks both the lack in the Other and the loss inscribed in the process of meaning, while its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to mis-identify with knowledge in order to cover over that constitutive loss.

     the subject thus identifies himself to knowledge, coming to the locus and the place of the loss which stimulates its promotion, covering over this loss to the extent of forgetting its existence

129. #129

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     F - The (o), product of work

     Theoretical move: The passage repositions the objet petit a from a mere support of the partial object to the index of truth and pathway of inscription (the letter), arguing that the channel of Demand structures the itinerary toward truth, while Knowledge arises in place of truth after the loss of the object — and raises outstanding questions about the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, affect, and Freudian types of representation that Lacan has not fully resolved.

     If knowledge is what comes in the place of truth, after the loss of the object, would it not be appropriate to link one to the other by the traces of this loss

130. #130

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's subjectivity is constitutively split, and that the institutional stabilisation of the "knower's" status (whether teacher, doctor, or analyst) tends to occlude this division through specular misrecognition; the analyst must maintain the divided position as a living practice rather than merely as theoretical knowledge, and perspective geometry is invoked to illustrate how the scopic drive and the objet petit a structure this irreducible split.

     As regards knowledge (savoir), it is difficult not to take into account the existence of the knower (savant), knower taken here only as the support, the hypothesis of knowledge in general

131. #131

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the objet petit a—hidden in the 'suture of the subject' within modern logic—is what classical and modern logic fails to articulate when it reduces truth to bivalent truth-value; the Möbius strip and projective plane topology are introduced as the structural alternative to the spherical cosmology underpinning both idealism and naïve realism in theories of knowledge.

     It is at the level of the o-object qua object that there falls the apprehension of knowledge, that we are, as men of science, rejoined by the question of the truth.

132. #132

     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.

     Or you have, not knowledge but science and this intersection-object which is the o-object escapes you. That is where the hole is. You have this amputated knowledge.

133. #133

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological and mathematical structures he introduces (the circle/disc, the cut, the Klein bottle, torus, etc.) are not merely illustrative but are themselves signifiers that constitute the subject through lack—the historical "obstacles" in mathematics (negative numbers, imaginaries) are not failures of intuition but structural moments of the subject's constitutive lack as produced by the signifier.

     To save the truth, and in order to do this not to want to know anything about it, is the fundamental position of science and that is why it is science, namely, a knowledge in the middle of which there is displayed the following hole.

134. #134

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian-Aristotelian reduction of body to homogeneous three-dimensional extension is a fundamental epistemological deception, and proposes that the topological structure of two-dimensional surfaces (sphere, cylinder, torus) with holes—rather than metric spherical space—can provide a non-punctual, non-specular account of the divided subject and its relation to the real.

     the conception of knowledge as adequatio of this mysterious central point which is the subject to this periphery of the object, is once and for all established as an immense deception about the sense of the problem.

135. #135

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.4

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

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

     there is knowledge which may be a way of getting round it... the difference between Wirklichkeit... and Realität which is beyond

136. #136

     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.

     a certain equilibrium between truth and knowledge. It is properly what has been called, knowing what he was doing, le gai savoir.

137. #137

     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.

     the relationships of knowledge and truth, the fact is that what Freud contributed to us is the designation of the locus of incidence of a particular desire which is… the desire to know.

138. #138

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the objet petit a as a "waste object" of the Real that is constitutively invisible within the specular/imaginary order, and retroactively shows that his notation i(o) at the Mirror Stage already encoded this object at the heart of identificatory alienation — making the o-object the central thread running from the Mirror Stage through topology, and abolishing a naive epistemology grounded in perception-consciousness.

     the most radical function of the structure of the subject, as it emerges from analysis and abolishes for ever a certain conception of knowledge.

139. #139

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's implication in the symptom is not a relativist epistemological problem solvable by expanding the subject's knowledge; instead, a radical topological recasting is required—one that replaces the sphere-topology of classical knowledge (Plato's cave/sun) with an encounter with what language produces as a real, corporeal effect (the o-object), irreducible to any imaginary mirage or metalanguage.

     it is the identity of the being of the real and of the being of knowledge … the topology of the sphere, capable of reduplicating itself as identical from simply what is called in topology, mapping

140. #140

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a functions as the cause of desire precisely through its status as objective lack: it operates in a double register — revealing the lack of the Other and the loss internal to signification — and its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to misidentify with knowledge in order to cover over the irreducible remainder left by castration.

     the subject thus identifies himself to knowledge, coming to the locus and the place of the loss which stimulates its promotion, covering over this loss to the extent of forgetting its existence

141. #141

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that truth cannot be sutured by mere logical truth-value (alethes) or empirical reference, and that the o-object (objet petit a) — hidden in the suture of the subject within modern logic — is precisely what reveals the true secret of the connection between truth and knowledge; the projective plane and Möbius strip are then introduced as topological figures adequate to this subject-object structure, against the inadequate spherical cosmology that underlies both idealism and false realism.

     It is here that what is pursued as a work, as an embrace, as a weaving together, on this point that I called the connecting point between truth and knowledge, becomes fascinating.

142. #142

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

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

     the renunciation of knowing, and at the same time of being, is it not in the measure that what is involved is to construct, in the form of scientific instruments, what in the course of this goal of rejoining the real

143. #143

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     F - The (o), product of work

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the Objet petit a as an "index of truth" and traces of lost-object work, reframing it not as a partial-object support but as the pathway of inscription—the letter—thereby linking demand, knowledge, truth, and the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz within an itinerary that moves from miscognition toward historical truth.

     If knowledge is what comes in the place of truth, after the loss of the object, would it not be appropriate to link one to the other by the traces of this loss

144. #144

     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.

     concerning the relationships of knowledge and truth… this point is called: the desire to know.

145. #145

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a, as a "waste object" of the Real, is the hidden structural core of both identification (the ego as i(o)) and analytic practice, and that its invisibility is constitutive — tied to the illusory sovereignty of the visual/perceptual world — while topology (the cross-cap, torus) is introduced not as analogy but as the proper structure of reality itself.

     what ensures that analysis opens up a new path to the progress of knowledge... it is not experience that makes knowledge progress. It is the impasses in which the subject is put because of being determined by the jaws of the signifier.

146. #146

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     **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.

     Pascal's doubt is still in this passage of a balancing operation... It is around a testing of knowledge with respect to the truth, of what is involved or what is not involved in true knowledge.

147. #147

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's implication in the symptom is not a relativist problem resolvable by expanding the subject's perspective, but requires a radical topological recasting; moreover, the psychoanalytic novelty lies in language producing real, corporeal effects that precede and exceed conscious apprehension, with the objet petit a re-introduced through a self-referential puzzle about writing to show that the o-object is a structural effect of language, not an imaginary mirage.

     his being of knowledge is inflected, is implicated in this confrontation, that Oedipus, whatever he does gives his hand, at least for a while, to the Sphinx

148. #148

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     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.

     the stitching of the being of knowledge to the being of truth

149. #149

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structural analysis of Velázquez's *Las Meninas* — particularly the irreducible gap between the painter and the canvas — to articulate the formula of the scopic drive and the constitutive frame of unconscious fantasy, insisting that fantasy is not an object one can simply see but a triadic structure (two subjects + objet a) held together by a frame that is not metaphorical.

     Velasquez whose (49) knowledge, what he tells us there is the essential point.

150. #150

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.4

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

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

     there is no way of remedying this but there is knowledge which may be a way of getting round it

151. #151

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **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.

     there is a perfect decantation between the being of knowledge and the being of truth

152. #152

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a privileged site to show how the o-object (the gaze) emerges at the intersection of knowledge and truth within the pre-scientific philosophical tradition, arguing that the medieval doctrine of the double truth anticipates the topological distinction between open and closed sets, and that Dante, qua poet, unconsciously articulates the structure of the o-object—particularly through the mirror of Narcissus—at the very limit between knowledge and truth.

     Our starting point this year was to render coherent what we have to affirm about the function of the o-object in the position of psychoanalysis, in so far as it originates from science and from science in its very particular relationship to truth

153. #153

     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.

     a certain configuration is established there which allows a certain equilibrium between truth and knowledge. It is properly what has been called, knowing what he was doing, le gai savoir.

154. #154

     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.

     Knowledge as jouissance with the opacity that it brings with it in the scientific approach to the object, this is the other term of the antinomy.

155. #155

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topological figures (Klein bottle, projective plane, torus) and the function of the cut/writing are not mere intuitive aids but index the constitutive structural lack of the subject produced by the signifier — a lack whose diverse historical forms (negative number, imaginary number) are not reducible to intuitive impurity but to the signifier's constitution of the subject.

     To save the truth, and in order to do this not to want to know anything about it, is the fundamental position of science and that is why it is science, namely, a knowledge in the middle of which there is displayed the following hole

156. #156

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the analyst's subjective division (the split between 'I think' and 'I am') is not merely a piece of knowledge but a structural position that must be inhabited in practice, and that the scopic perspective construction—particularly the horizon line and the dual vanishing points—serves as a geometric illustration of how the objet petit a functions within the divided subject's visual relationship to the world.

     As regards knowledge (savoir), it is difficult not to take into account the existence of the knower (savant), knower taken here only as the support, the hypothesis of knowledge in general

157. #157

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager as a structural staging of the subject's relation to the Real, arguing that the "nothing" wagered (the life at stake) is not mere nullity but the Objet petit a as cause of desire — that fleeting, ungraspable object — and that chance (*hasard*) must be understood as the Real qua impossible-to-question, radically distinct from modern probability theory.

     God can in no way be known in his being. He even highlights properly speaking that one is not able through the power of reason to know that he exists.

158. #158

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads a condensed summary of Seminar XIII, arguing that the being of the subject is constituted as the suture of a lack grounded in the Fregean one/zero relation and the cogito's torsion, and that psychoanalysis alone—unlike philosophy or social critique—can genuinely confront the wound of this lack, precisely because the analyst's being is implicated in it as a being of knowledge encountering the symptom as a being of truth.

     the difficulty of the being of the analyst comes from the fact that he encounters, as being of the subject, namely the symptom, that the symptom is a being of truth... this being of knowledge - that of the psychoanalyst - must reduce himself to being only the complement of the symptom

159. #159

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as a structural foreclosure of being—a "rejection" (Verwerfung) that installs the Other in the place of Being—and uses this to ground the psychoanalytic Id not as a "bad ego" or first-person subject but as the grammatical remainder of discourse once "I" is subtracted, thereby articulating alienation as the rejection of the Other rather than capture by it.

     the ego [ergo?] sum is only a refusal of the hard path from thinking to being and of the knowledge (savoir) which ought to take this path.

160. #160

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 30 November 1966.**

     Theoretical move: This passage is largely a framing/administrative seminar introduction in which Lacan contextualizes the publication of his Écrits, defends the seminar format, distances himself from structuralism as a fashion, and briefly gestures toward the theoretical stakes of the year's work—notably the repetition of the unary stroke as grounding the division of the subject, and a passing remark on transference as a concept illuminated by the Eliza machine analogy.

     this index, the numbers in italics mark the essential passages, the straight or roman numbers, mark the passages where the concept is involved more in passing

161. #161

     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.

     What the unconscious designates for us are the paths of a knowledge. To follow them, one must not want to know before having taken them.

162. #162

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.110

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic knowledge "passes into the real" via the same mechanism as Verwerfung (foreclosure): what is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real. He then grounds this in a rigorous reading of Freudian repetition (Wiederholungszwang), demonstrating that repetition is irreducible to the pleasure principle, necessarily entails a lost object, and constitutes the subject through a retroactive, non-reflexive logical structure rather than a simple return to sameness.

     I have to advance and demonstrate in movement what the nature of analytic knowledge is; very exactly how this knowledge comes to pass into the real.

163. #163

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: By reading the Biblical myth of circumcision, Lilith, Eve, and the apple through a psychoanalytic lens, Lacan argues that the castration complex is the necessary condition for the fiction of an autonomous complementary object, and that the various forms of the objet petit a (concentrated in the figure of the apple as oral object) are what psychoanalysis has located within the dimension of knowledge opened by that originary cut.

     starting from there, he enters for the first time into the dimension of knowledge … this dimension of knowledge, the effect of psychoanalysis is the following: that we have located in it at least in two or three of its major forms

164. #164

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 6: 21 December 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a digressive, semi-autobiographical register to position his own discourse against misappropriation and institutional misreading, deploying the cogito circuit, Cantor's fate, and the Platonic figures of Poros and Penia to frame the stakes of transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge — arguing that the discourse's justification lies not in institutional recognition but in the resonance it produces in its audience's number.

     trying to demonstrate to me that I do not know how to read Freud, after the thirty years that I have spent doing nothing but that!

165. #165

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation is the pivotal operation through which the Freudian unconscious must be understood: by situating the Other as the locus of the word (and hence as barred, S(O)), he reframes the cogito's subject as inherently split and repressing, displacing both Cartesian self-transparency and object-relational nostalgia for primitive unity in favour of a logical articulation of the subject's constitutive dependence on the symbolic order.

     the recourse to the Other, is, in every effect of thinking, absolutely determining … Mr Bertrand Russell … would go so far as to dare to designate in these terms: that we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying has the slightest truth.

166. #166

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     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.

     this broken, fragmentary, bitty fashion which constitutes it properly speaking as intrusion into knowledge.

167. #167

     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.

     the symptom without its sense, deprived of its truth, but on the contrary always more responsible for what it contains in terms of knowledge.

168. #168

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165

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

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

     science presents to common consciousness of positing itself as a knowledge which refuses to depend on language

169. #169

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     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.

     there is to be respected here the enigmatic character that a certain knowledge should properly preserve, which is the one that concerns the span that I here mark by the hole

170. #170

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     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.

     what he accedes to after that... is undoubtedly a jouissance. The moment that he enters it, he is already in the trap. I mean that this jouissance is what marks him, already and in advance, with the sign of guilt.

171. #171

     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.

     Knowledge is thus necessary at the establishment of the sexual act. And this is what the Oedipus myth says.

172. #172

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.54

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "One too many" signifier—structurally outside the signifying chain yet immanent to it—enables interpretation to function not as a mere meaning-effect (metaphor) but as a truth-effect; he then complicates the Cartesian cogito through material implication and the middle voice (diathesis) to show that the subject is constituted through the act of language rather than through the intuition of self-thinking.

     what does he *want* in seeking this certainty on this terrain of progressive evacuation, of cleaning up, of sweeping away everything that is within his reach concerning the function of knowledge

173. #173

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biblical myths of circumcision, Lilith, and the apple to argue that the castration complex is the necessary precondition for the subject's relation to an 'object complement' that is fundamentally fictional, and that psychoanalysis has located this object — ultimately the phallic object — as the key to understanding what is at stake in the sexual act and in the dimension of knowledge.

     we are told that starting from there, he enters for the first time into the dimension of knowledge.

174. #174

     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.

     Knowledge is thus necessary at the establishment of the sexual act. And this is what the Oedipus myth says.

175. #175

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.110

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian Wiederholungszwang constitutes the logical foundation of the subject, irreducible to the pleasure principle, by demonstrating that repetition produces a lost object retroactively—the originating situation is lost as origin by the very fact of being repeated—and that this structure, grounded in the unary trait, is what allows analytic knowledge to pass into the real via Verwerfung.

     I have to advance and demonstrate in movement what the nature of analytic knowledge is; very exactly how this knowledge comes to pass into the real.

176. #176

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that a genuinely new discipline of thinking — such as that inaugurated by structural linguistics and psychoanalysis — dissolves the very category of the "disciple," because the logical subject it produces cannot stand in a relation of discipleship to a master; the word discipline must be distinguished from the word disciple.

     whether he thinks also, for his part, that this teaching is of a nature to require a radical change of position at the level of what constitutes, let us say, the subject

177. #177

     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.

     It is starting from there that there were constructed, even before the advent of what we are calling here the status of pure subjectivity, all the illusions of knowledge.

178. #178

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the subject as an empty set through the evasion of Being, and that this Verwerfung (foreclosure) of Being—reappearing in the Real—is the structural basis of alienation; the resultant "I am not" opens onto Freud's Id (Es), which Lacan re-articulates not as a person but as everything in the logical-grammatical structure of discourse that is not-I, grounding the drive's fantasy in that impersonal remainder.

     the ego [ergo?] sum is only a refusal of the hard path from thinking to being and of the knowledge (savoir) which ought to take this path

179. #179

     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.

     What the unconscious designates for us are the paths of a knowledge. To follow them, one must not want to know before having taken them.

180. #180

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.61

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 6: 21 December 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a new logical operation (omega) that is irreducible to standard logical connectives—one where the conjunction of two truths yields the false—and identifies this operation with alienation, deploying it to articulate the distinctive logical structure of the unconscious as the relation between 'I do not think' and 'I am not', which allows a rigorous distinction between resistance and defence.

     this new conjunction between being and knowledge. This distinct approach of the term truth, makes of Freud's discovery something which can in no way be reduced and criticised by means of a reduction to any ideology whatsoever.

181. #181

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.165

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

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

     science presents to common consciousness of positing itself as a knowledge which refuses to depend on language

182. #182

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · 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 by the gap between the field of the One and the field of the Other (the unconscious), such that the subject is always a structural degree below its body; this topological account displaces both Eros-as-unity fantasies and Cartesian soul/body dualism, and repositions objet petit a (small o) as the incommensurable origin from which all questions of measure arise.

     always more responsible for what it contains in terms of knowledge. What cuts them off from one another, is very precisely what constitutes the subject.

183. #183

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 6: 21 December 1966**

     Theoretical move: In this largely autobiographical and polemical passage, Lacan defends the integrity of his discourse against misappropriation by colleagues, uses the Cartesian cogito's non-closing circuit as a figure for the subject's essential step, and positions his seminar's public transmission—justified by the size and quality of his audience—as the primary vehicle for a discourse that resists both institutional capture and vulgar popularisation.

     trying to demonstrate to me that I do not know how to read Freud, after the thirty years that I have spent doing nothing but that!

184. #184

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.54

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates how the "signifier too many" (the barred signifier outside the chain) operates as the structural condition for interpretation, whose effect is properly a "truth-effect" rather than a mere meaning-effect; he then uses the Cartesian cogito and Benveniste's active/middle voice distinction to argue that the subject is constituted not through intuition of being-who-thinks but through the very structure of language and the act of speaking.

     what does he want in seeking this certainty on this terrain of progressive evacuation, of cleaning up, of sweeping away everything that is within his reach concerning the function of knowledge

185. #185

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **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.

     To say that there is an unconscious means that there is a knowledge without a subject... it is the subject here of whom it must be said whether it is knowledge.

186. #186

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: At the culmination of a training analysis ("the pass"), the analysand discovers that the subject supposed to know has been reduced to the objet petit a (the analyst as residue/rubbish), and that the subject of every act is constitutively absent from the act itself — a subject without essence, mirroring the o-object's lack of essence, which is the structural truth that the unconscious shares with the end of analysis.

     this knowledge, whether it is that of the transfinite number of Cantor or of the desire of the analyst, where was it before it was known?

187. #187

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152

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

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act produces the divided subject ($) as its truth-effect, with the analyst serving as support for the objet petit a that causes this division; Lacan then pivots to argue that the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is itself grounded in — and displaced from — the objet petit a, making undecidability (Gödel-style incompleteness) a structural consequence of the subject's relation to the not-all, rather than a technical curiosity.

     Something remains irreducibly limited in this knowledge... the impotence of knowledge.

188. #188

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **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.

     putting the In-I into a mass by getting a grip on the knowledge that crushes not so much by its excess as by the auditing of its logic that makes of the subject a pure cleavage

189. #189

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the triad "I read / I write / I lose" to differentiate three levels of knowing and to position the psychoanalytic act as structured around failure and parapraxis, arguing that the analyst's act is irreducible to teaching (thesis) or doing (faire), and that the passage from analysand to analyst marks the critical, untheorised limit at which the act encounters its own obstacle.

     These three exchanges designate then this proper mode of knowing apprehension which is that of analysis and which begins with 'I lose'.

190. #190

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.192

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "events" of May '68 as occasion to articulate the structural relation between the Other as locus of knowledge, truth as what is refused from the symbolic and returns in the real as symptom, and the subject's secondary determination by knowledge — positioning psychoanalysis as a radical modification of the subject-Other relation that goes beyond mere discovery.

     All knowledge comes to us from the Other - I am not talking about God I am talking about the Other. There is always an Other where there is a tradition, an accumulation, a reservoir.

191. #191

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: By re-reading the founding scene of transference (the hysteric throwing her arms around Freud's neck after hypnosis), Lacan argues that the subject supposed to know is the indispensable structural hinge of transference, and that the psychoanalytic act consists precisely in putting that presupposition in question — thereby distinguishing transference from mere love and revealing the objet petit a as the object at the heart of love's apparatus.

     the style of exercising the question, the formulation of a logic which makes something manageable starting from the necessary revision at the level of this preliminary step, of this pre-supposition, of this pre-establishment of a subject supposed know

192. #192

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.151

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

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as the site where the subject-effect — constitutively divided — can 'return' as act; this requires the psychoanalyst to support the function of the objet petit a, and the psychoanalysand to accomplish, by an act, the realisation of castration and the forced alienating choice. The passage then situates this act-theory against the broader *bivium* of modern thought: the Cartesian cogito, which founds science by evacuating the subject, versus thinking that touches the subject-effect and thereby participates in the act (revolution as the paradigm case).

     it gives no explicit reason for doing anything. It only presents itself as a temptation to do (de faire), an irresistible temptation ... But it is in no way said that any act will measure up to it.

193. #193

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **MEETING of 15 May 1968**

     Theoretical move: Against the backdrop of the May 1968 uprising, Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic failure to articulate the relation between desire and knowledge — and between the sexes — has left a structural vacuum filled by demonstrably false Reichian energetics, and that the Objet petit a (figured here as the paving-stone vs. the tear-gas grenade) names exactly the structural dynamic at stake in the student revolt.

     the relationships between desire and knowledge are put in question… evoked by these relationships which are relationships of the transmission of knowledge.

194. #194

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · 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: 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 this point, where there is completed a suspension of all possible knowledge. That this is what assures the 'I am': is it to be 'thought' by the cogito or is it from the rejection of knowledge?

195. #195

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.101

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Aristotelian logical category of the subject—understood as that which slips away beneath predication, represented by the empty box in Peirce's schema—is precisely captured by his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier," thereby grounding the analytic situation in a logic of the subject as non-being, and linking the history of logical debate to the concealed question of desire.

     the interest of psychoanalysis is that it ties together, as has never been able to be done up to the present, these problems of logic, by contributing to them what, in short, was at the source of all the ambiguities that developed in the history of logic

196. #196

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act has a two-stage language-effect structure culminating in the analyst's self-institution as the rejected object (objet petit a), and that the leap from analysand to analyst (la passe) is systematically concealed by the institutional organisation of psychoanalysis, which preserves an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know in place of genuine interrogation.

     far from psychoanalysis being able to be established as has been done up to now from the statements of a science, I mean, this moment at which what has been acquired from a science passes over to the state of being teachable, in other words professorial.

197. #197

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that his formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" is not a claim to knowledge but a structural claim: the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates psychoanalytic discourse, with the Subject Supposed to Know standing in as a placeholder for the unknowable, and the logic of fantasy grounded in a cogito-like logical asceticism that resists any domestication as mere "new negation."

     there is no knowledge except through language... science itself cannot be sustained except by putting in reserve a knowledge made up purely of language.

198. #198

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logic's defining function is precisely to resorb (conjure away) the problem of the subject supposed to know, and it is this structural feature that makes modern logic a privileged reference point for psychoanalysis — allowing it to pose the question of the analyst's existence in terms of quantification where the subject supposed to know is reduced to nothing.

     what grounds and legitimates the existence of logic, is this minute point. Very precisely, when the field is defined in which the subject supposed to know is nothing.

199. #199

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.36

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Platonic dialogue *Meno* — specifically its theory of reminiscence and the figure of the slave who 'rediscovers' knowledge — to isolate the function he calls the "subject supposed to know" as a structural presupposition of every question about knowledge, linking this to the problem of the analytic act and the unthought end of the training analysis.

     what would result once the perspective of the act is accepted as regards the assessment the analyst may make of what he for his part picks up, subsequent to the analysis, in the order properly speaking of knowledge

200. #200

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around the analyst's refusal to act, which makes transference possible, and that the Objet petit a is the horizon-terminus toward which every act tends — a claim illustrated via the asymmetry Clausewitz introduces into war-discourse as a structural analogue to the analytic situation.

     if we do not set up this logical structure, with the parts that are alive in the operation, and then those that are left for dead, we cannot find our bearings in the analytic operation.

201. #201

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the irreducibility of the language-effect as its object and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust — thereby distinguishing it from psychotherapy and from Hegelian absolute knowing — and grounds this in the structural difference between hysteria and obsession as two modes of the subject's relation to the repressed signifier.

     That knowledge is incarnated without the subject who is holding his discourse being conscious of it, in the sense that here, being conscious of his knowledge, is to be co-dimensional with what the knowledge includes

202. #202

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

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

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

     What might be the means for there to be collected what, through this process triggered by the analytic act, is recordable in terms of knowledge, this is what poses the question of what is involved in analytic teaching.

203. #203

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · 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 reframes the May 1968 student insurrection not as mere unruliness but as a structural phenomenon in which the relations between desire and knowledge are at stake, and argues that psychoanalysts bear a specific responsibility to these events precisely because psychoanalysis grounds the transmission of knowledge on lack and inadequacy—a responsibility they systematically evade.

     the relations between desire and knowledge are put in question. These relations, which are those of the transmission of knowledge, psychoanalysis establishes on the level of lack, of inadequacy.

204. #204

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     **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 defends the asymmetry of "the unconscious is structured like a language" against its inversion, grounding the formula in a logic of consequence that ties signifying articulation to the analysable field, while distinguishing the Subject Supposed to Know from the teaching position of the analyst.

     when I say that I can implicate in this dimension, in this approach of my teaching, this whole part of my position that is not knowledge, it is a correction, it is more than a correction.

205. #205

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Pavlov's experimental apparatus, far from being a materialist reduction of the speaking being, inadvertently reproduces the fundamental structure of language (the subject receiving its own message in inverted form), thereby making Pavlov an unwitting structuralist whose 'leaky' edifice conceals ideological presuppositions about what is 'already there' in the brain — a critique that pivots toward the question of the psychoanalytic act and what any founder of an experience does not know about its structural presuppositions.

     a knowledge (savoir) titrated in such a way that in no case does it have in fact any kind of consequence.

206. #206

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.157

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the not-all logic of the unconscious prevents any totalisation of psychoanalytic knowledge, and that the psychoanalyst's proper position is defined not by mastery-knowledge but by occupying the place of the objet petit a — cause of desire and object of demand — a position exemplified through the Gaze as the most occluded partial drive in clinical practice.

     every practitioner supposes a certain knowledge if we want to advance into what is involved in episteme. To know everything about carpentry is what for us will define the carpenter.

207. #207

     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.

     one never has knowledge of the other sex

208. #208

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "psychoanalytic act" as a pivot to argue that the structural subversion of the subject it enacts cannot be confined to analysts alone—it concerns everyone—while simultaneously critiquing behaviourist/Pavlovian reductions of the signifier-chain as a fundamental misrecognition that forecloses the properly structuralist (and thus analytic) dimension of the act.

     a conversion in the position which results for the subject as regards what is involved in his relation to knowledge

209. #209

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188

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

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

     this particular knot... these terms: knowledge, truth, subject and the relation to the Other, there you are, there is no word to put all four of them together.

210. #210

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **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.

     Knowledge (le savoir) is not knowing (la connaissance). And to touch the minds that are least prepared to suspect this difference I have only to make an allusion to savoir-vivre, or to savoir-faire

211. #211

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.144

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's Begriffschrift to ground the logical function of "the all" (universal quantification) in the structure of the subject constituted by the lost object and repetition, arguing that the psychoanalytic myth of primal fusion with the mother (via Rank's birth trauma) is a symptomatic misrecognition of the subject's constitutive relation to the all, which is itself an effect of the o-object mediating between the original repressed signifier and its substitutive repetition.

     it is the bias, the slope, the trap into which analytic thinking falls when, for want of being able to grasp itself in its essentially divisive operation... it establishes as primary, the idea of an ideal fusion

212. #212

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.31

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Ego Psychology's normative ideal (Fenichel's "genital character") and Winnicott's object-relations framework to establish that the psychoanalytic act — constitutively tied to the manipulation of transference — is precisely what analysts have most systematically evaded theorising, and that there is no analytic act outside this transference dimension.

     a word like self, he says, here I am going to have to use English: 'naturally knows more than we do'

213. #213

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     **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.

     As for Knowledge, it is an imaginary function, an incontestable idealisation

214. #214

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     **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.

     From the moment that there is knowledge, there is a subject, and there must be some shift, some split, some shaking, some moment of I in this knowledge, for one to notice all of a sudden, for there to be thus renewed this knowledge that he knew before.

215. #215

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.188

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

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

     these terms: knowledge, truth, subject and the relation to the Other, there you are, there is no word to put all four of them together

216. #216

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     **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 defends the asymmetry of "the unconscious is structured like a language" against its inversion, grounding analytic experience in signifying consequence and logical articulation rather than dynamic causality, while insisting that analytic teaching proceeds without positing a subject supposed to know who already holds the truth.

     this is obviously to pose the whole question of the knowledge of the analyst, or of the knowledge through which, or from the angle of which, by means of logical articulation

217. #217

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.144

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's Begriffsschrift to formalize the logical function of "all" (the universal affirmative) and then pivots to argue that the lost object (objet petit a) occupies the structural position of Frege's "argument," grounding the subject's illusion of totality—while exposing the Rankian myth of primal fusion with the mother as a symptomatic misrecognition of this originary loss.

     what gives it its status and also its mirage, is that it can think of itself as subject of knowledge. Namely, as an eventual support, just by itself, for something which is all.

218. #218

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.196

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation works not through dialogue or mediation but through the asymmetrical relation between the Subject Supposed to Know and a newly posited 'subject supposed demand,' mediated by the objet petit a as lack and distance — and that truth reaches the analysand from the analyst's own fantasy, through the gap (Möbius strip) that constitutes the Other.

     this knowledge of which he is the plaything... the subject does not know what he is demanding. Which allows him subsequently not to demand what he knows.

219. #219

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.157

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

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

     every human practice...every practitioner supposes a certain knowledge if we want to advance into what is involved in episteme. To know everything about carpentry is what for us will define the carpenter.

220. #220

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that at the conclusion of a training analysis, the analyst is reduced to the objet petit a (a residue without essence), and the subject supposed to know is simultaneously subverted — a moment Lacan calls "the pass" — such that the analysand-becoming-analyst installs the o-object at the place of the subject supposed to know, discovering that the subject of every act is a subject not-present-in-the-act, and that all o-objects are without essence.

     this knowledge, whether it is that of the transfinite number of Cantor or of the desire of the analyst, where was it before it was known?

221. #221

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as a double language-effect in which the analysand's completion of analysis and the analyst's self-institution as psychoanalyst (the "pass") are structurally inseparable; the act's strangest consequence is that the subject who takes the analyst's position recognises himself as caused—in his division—by the rejected object (objet a), and the uninterrogated leap of this consecration is systematically concealed by analytic institutions that preserve an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know.

     far from psychoanalysis being able to be established as has been done up to now from the statements of a science... this moment at which what has been acquired from a science passes over to the state of being teachable

222. #222

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     **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.

     As for Knowledge, it is an imaginary function, an incontestable idealisation, this is what renders delicate the position of the analyst who is in the middle, where there is the void, the hole, the place of desire.

223. #223

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **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.

     Knowledge (le savoir) is not knowing (la connaissance). And to touch the minds that are least prepared to suspect this difference I have only to make an allusion to savoir-vivre, or to savoir-faire

224. #224

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.31

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fenichel/Winnicott discussion to distinguish a normative, ego-psychological discourse about psychoanalysis from the analytical act proper, arguing that transference cannot be legitimised by an appeal to the analyst's objectivity but is itself constitutive of analytic practice—and that the analytic act has been systematically eluded, even by Freud's own treatment of parapraxis.

     a word like self... 'naturally knows more than we do'... It is a word which he says, 'uses us and commands us'

225. #225

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Pavlovian experimentation to demonstrate that its presupposed materialism is structurally equivalent to the speaking being's relation to language (receiving one's message in inverted form), and this structural miscognition is symptomatic of a broader ideological occlusion—serving as the ground from which to approach the question of the psychoanalytic act and the presuppositions unknown to its subject.

     everything that is served up to us by the Universitas Litterarum… is a knowledge (savoir) titrated in such a way that in no case does it have in fact any kind of consequence.

226. #226

     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.

     What the man discovers on his side is nothing other than his own impotence to aim at anything other than what? A knowledge, of course.

227. #227

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes three levels of "mathesis" (I read / I write / I lose) to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure and loss, and that teaching (thesis/antithesis) is not itself an act — but the act's topology, in which failure is primary, is what analysis uniquely inaugurates and what analysts themselves resist recognising.

     The bringing out of signifying incidence as such, signifies our progress in this grasp of what knowledge is.

228. #228

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

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

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

     What might be the means for there to be collected what, through this process triggered by the analytic act, is recordable in terms of knowledge, this is what poses the question of what is involved in analytic teaching.

229. #229

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" is not a claim to knowledge but rather a structural claim: his discourse *organises* the unconscious, and the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates Freud—not meaning/sense alone. This grounds the logic of fantasy on a logical asceticism (the cogito's cleavage) and warns against domesticating the radical gap at stake by labelling it a "new negation."

     there is no knowledge except through language… there is a whole level where knowledge is about language.

230. #230

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates his seminar on the psychoanalytic act by arguing that 'act' cannot be reduced to motor activity or energetic discharge (as in ego-psychology and physiologising theories); rather, the act is constituted by its correlative inscription in the Symbolic order, thereby implicating the subject—and specifically the unconscious—in a way that distinguishes it categorically from mere action or behaviour.

     We are certainly not going to contest that the unconscious made its effects felt before the act of the birth of psychoanalysis. But all the same if we pay very careful attention, we can see that the question of who knew it, is perhaps not without import here.

231. #231

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **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.

     To say that there is an unconscious means that there is a knowledge without a subject... this knowledge never proves to be anything but legible.

232. #232

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that modern logic is defined by its function of dissolving the problem of the Subject Supposed to Know, and that psychoanalysis can leverage logical quantification precisely because logic operates in a field where that subject is reduced to nothing — enabling analytical progress where institutional qualification has failed.

     what grounds and legitimates the existence of logic, is this minute point. Very precisely, when the field is defined in which the subject supposed to know is nothing.

233. #233

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.147

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the breast, as partial object, functions as a logical variable (in the Fregean sense) that grounds the universal constant of demand, and that the analytic privileging of the mother-child relation is a mammalian-biological contingency rather than an essential truth — the 'residue of the division of the subject' (the wandering soul of metempsychosis) offers a more logically coherent figure for subjective emergence than the fantasy of uterine origin.

     this constructed knowledge, which moreover becomes perverting for the whole operational dialectic of analysis, that we make turn around birth

234. #234

     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.

     putting the In-I into a mass by getting a grip on the knowledge that crushes not so much by its excess as by the auditing of its logic that makes of the subject a pure cleavage

235. #235

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act—understood as a structural subversion of the subject's relation to knowledge—concerns not only analysts but everyone, and uses the foil of behaviourist/Pavlovian reductionism to mark precisely what the act is not: it cannot be grounded in conditioned-reflex models because the signifier-to-signifier link is already presupposed in the experimental setup itself.

     there results from the position that must be held, if one is skilled in exercising it…a conversion in the position which results for the subject as regards what is involved in his relation to knowledge

236. #236

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **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.

     the relationships between desire and knowledge are put in question… evoked by these relationships which are relationships of the transmission of knowledge.

237. #237

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.36

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

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Meno* alongside the analytic act, Lacan argues that the theory of reminiscence — knowledge already in the soul, recoverable through questioning — is the archaic, mythical form of the function he calls the 'subject supposed to know,' which underpins every question about knowledge and is inseparable from the structure of transference and the unformulated end of the training analysis.

     from what would result once the perspective of the act is accepted as regards the assessment the analyst may make of what he for his part picks up, subsequent to the analysis, in the order properly speaking of knowledge.

238. #238

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constituted by the analyst's refusal to act, which structurally opens the space for transference and the Subject Supposed to Know; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the necessity of signifying sequence for any 'consequence' to be conceivable, and maps the objet petit a as the horizon-end of every act, not just the analytic one.

     he knows in principle what is to become in analysis of the subject supposed to know

239. #239

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.152

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

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act constitutes the subject as divided ($) through the transference-function of objet petit a, and this structural division is analogous to the tragic schize between spectator/chorus and hero; furthermore, the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is grounded not in totality but in the cause effected by objet petit a, making undecidability an intrinsic feature of any subject-indexed logic.

     Something remains irreducibly limited in this knowledge... the function of $, namely, the impotence of knowledge.

240. #240

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper concept of transference is only fully illuminated once the 'subject supposed to know' is introduced and its fracture in the analytic act is understood; the originary scene of Freud's patient embracing him out of hypnosis reveals that what the hysteric seizes is the objet petit a—not love as sentiment—thereby grounding the entire structure of the analytic operation in the subject's relation to this object rather than in narcissistic identification.

     what is at stake is to know how we can handle knowledge, there, at a precise point of the field where what is at stake is not knowledge but something which, for us, is called truth.

241. #241

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.139

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is defined not by a criterion external to it but by the psychoanalyst as instrument, and that the psychoanalytic act brings the subject to an awareness of its constitutive, irreducible division as a language-effect — a division that definitively refutes the Hegelian project of exhaustive self-knowledge (gnothi seauton / pour-soi) and is exemplified in the contrasting logical structures of hysteria and obsession.

     That there is knowledge, knowledge in so far as here is what the typical language-effect constitutes. That knowledge is incarnated without the subject who is holding his discourse being conscious of it.

242. #242

     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 relations between desire and knowledge are put in question. These relations, which are those of the transmission of knowledge, psychoanalysis establishes on the level of lack, of inadequacy.

243. #243

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language such that truth is produced at the precise point where the subject refuses to know—what is rejected from the Symbolic reappears in the Real as symptom—and that psychoanalysis contributes a radical new dimension to the subject-Other relation by showing that knowledge is only constituted through recognition by the Other, while scientific knowledge, purified of this relation, functions as a complement to (rather than identity with) the Real.

     this knowledge that interests us analysts is properly speaking only what is said. If I say that the unconscious is structured like a language, it is because this unconscious that interests us is what can say itself

244. #244

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **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.

     this conjunction, this knot that grounds what knowledge is

245. #245

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     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.

     this subversion of the function of knowledge... this mode of relationship to oneself that is called knowledge.

246. #246

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.351

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally linked to the field of the big Other as the locus of knowledge, and that the objet petit a — as cause of desire and division of the subject — is what psychoanalysis reveals within that field; he further advances that there is no sexual relationship (logically definable), only the sexual act, which alone produces what would otherwise be an impossible relation.

     with respect to this field of the truth, knowledge is elsewhere. That indeed is why, once the dimension of Revelation is introduced, there is introduced at the same time the dimension... of what is improperly called the double truth. That means the distinction between truth and knowledge.

247. #247

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes his seminar as a form of productive work whose meaning escapes most observers, using the university crisis of May '68 and the rise of capitalism/science as the context to argue that genuine subversion lies not in political agitation but in the function of knowledge at its most subversive mode — a function that power (whether capitalist or revolutionary) cannot master.

     a full stop put at present, concerning the function of knowledge in its most subversive mode. Because it is obviously not at the level of agitation and hue and cry that there can be refined, treated, produced

248. #248

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.328

     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.

     The decisive step taken by Freud about the relation of sexual curiosity to the whole order of knowledge, is the essential point of the psychoanalytic discovery.

249. #249

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.372

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the structural necessity of the "additional one" (un-en-plus) and the empty set within the field of the Other, demonstrating through set theory that the inclusion of a first signifier into the Other necessarily generates a second term (the empty set/S(Ø)) and that subjectivity only appears at the level of S2, reorienting the field from intersubjectivity to intra-subjective structure.

     Already, by their articulation, they constitute a knowledge.

250. #250

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.298

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lack—as the precondition of anxiety's "not without an object"—only arises within a symbolic order capable of counting, and uses this logic to theorize the objet petit a as the effect of symbolic counting on the imaginary field, while simultaneously framing the modern disjunction between knowledge and power as the broader historical context in which this structural analysis gains its urgency.

     it is a matter of defining how this disjunction operates and to name it as such... the disjunction between knowledge and power.

251. #251

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.343

     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 neurotic puts in question what is involved in the truth of knowledge. And very precisely in the fact that he/it is attached to enjoyment.

252. #252

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions phobia not as a discrete clinical entity but as a structural "turntable" that illuminates the relations between hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion, and from which the disjunction between knowledge and power can be re-examined.

     the disjunction between knowledge and power

253. #253

     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.

     something that rejoins truth and knowledge from behind is conceivable. Thinking is precisely this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz

254. #254

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.192

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's dream of the burning child as a pivot to argue that the proper analytic question is not "what does the dream mean?" but "where is the flaw (desire) in what is said?"—and then formalizes the relationship between Knowledge and Truth via the golden-ratio proportion (o/1-o = 1/o), establishing the objet petit a as the structural hinge that articulates desire, knowledge, and truth in the unconscious.

     At the place of o, write knowledge... the truth in so far as it does not know itself... knowledge about the unconscious, namely, that there is a knowledge

255. #255

     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.

     a knowledge is always paid no doubt in accordance with its true price, but below the use value that this truth always generates for other than those who are in the truth

256. #256

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.277

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unquestioned presupposition of the Subject Supposed to Know—the assumption that knowledge is already organized somewhere—is the hidden theological core of idealism, and that psychoanalytic practice remains trapped in this idealism so long as it uncritically employs spatial metaphors (inside/outside, projection/introjection) derived from the camera-obscura model of representation.

     is it a position of realism to refer oneself to a real that as such, namely, in the fact that thinking is always dependent on it, cannot by this fact be fully apprehended

257. #257

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Pascal's wager by displacing its stakes from God's existence to the existence of the subject ("I"), and identifies the wager's true structure as hinging on the objet petit a as cause of the subject — thereby reframing the decision-theoretic form of the wager as a psychoanalytic problem about the subject's relation to the o-cause.

     is this not the sign that what dominates in a certain rise of the relationships to knowledge, is the o-cause.

258. #258

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager as a structural matrix for desire, arguing that the objet petit a (the "o-object") has neither use nor exchange value but is precisely what animates the relationship of the subject to the word and to the act — thereby displacing Hegel's fight-to-the-death for pure prestige as the paradigm of risk, and grounding this in the Name of the Father as inaugurated by Freud.

     the fruit of what is involved, after all, all the same, for knowledge is not at all to be neglected. Because people are a little bit too concerned with the truth and they are so bogged down in it that they end up by lying.

259. #259

     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... the Other as locus where that is known

260. #260

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVI by arguing that psychoanalytic theory is constitutively 'a discourse without words' — that is, grounded not in phenomenological sense but in the cause-structure of the unconscious — and uses this to distinguish psychoanalytic discourse from both philosophy and structuralism as a worldview, while announcing that the seminar will develop the function of the objet petit a through a homology with Marx's analysis of the labour market.

     This is what structuralism takes seriously. It takes seriously the feet of knowledge as cause, as cause in thinking

261. #261

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.355

     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.

     The production of knowledge qua knowledge is distinguished by being a means of production and not simply work of the truth.

262. #262

     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 is not labour. It is worth labouring at sometimes but you can get it without labour... It is clear, the price of the renunciation of enjoyment.

263. #263

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     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.

     knowledge, one can say, contrary to our experience, is what truth lacks.

264. #264

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     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.

     The revolution or the subversion if you wish of the movement of a knowledge because, for some time, it is clear that I have taken off from the functioning here which is only inaugural indeed supposed by thinking.

265. #265

     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.

     a turning point of the incidence of knowledge in History is already there that concentrated, as I might say, to offer us, to put this function within our reach

266. #266

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical structure of the field of the Other — its constitutive incompleteness and the necessary exteriority of the subject-signifier (S2) — to reground the "I" not in being but in the truth-function of speech, showing that the subject can only be represented outside the totality of signifiers, a structure that anticipates his formalization of sexuation via universal/particular quantifiers placed "outside the field."

     This signifier is properly, in the most original form, what defines the function described as knowledge.

267. #267

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     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.

     Knowledge/Truth - Knowledge = Truth/Knowledge

268. #268

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

     Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

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

     every knowledge implies a subject, as a result of which there quite gently slides in as well substance... Even the upokeimenon can be disconnected from knowledge.

269. #269

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.261

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

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

     This is the basis of a mode of apprehension described as knowledge, the one in which there is exercised a whole development that quite correctly, is inscribed in the history of thinking.

270. #270

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     **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.

     If psychoanalysis cannot state itself as a knowledge and be taught as such, it has strictly nothing to do in a place where nothing else is at stake.

271. #271

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analogy of Marx's introduction of surplus value—and the capitalist's laughter at the moment of its revelation—to argue that surplus-jouissance names a structural "gag" or elision at the heart of the unconscious, while simultaneously warning against treating this as a "theory of the unconscious" and insisting that the subject only exists as the effect of an assertion (dire), with the Real defined as the impossible limit of that assertion.

     the Other enclosed no knowledge that one can presume, let us say, will one day be absolute… this reference to the Other is the erroneous support of knowledge as already there.

272. #272

     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'.

     being able to totalise itself as a field of knowledge, what has to be known, precisely, is that by being thus totalised, it will never reach the field of sufficiency

273. #273

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **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 second subset makes present what my correspondent calls this 'coexistence', namely, in its broadest form this form of relation that one can call 'knowledge'

274. #274

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     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.

     Knowledge is this opaque term in which, as I might say, the subject loses himself, or again is extinguished if you wish and this is what the notion that I underlined by using the term fading always represents.

275. #275

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.364

     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.

     Knowledge in so far as it is produced by the truth - is this not what a certain version of the relationships between knowledge and enjoyment imagine?

276. #276

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a distinction between truth-as-cause (which speaks but does not "tell the truth") and knowledge, anchoring this in a re-reading of Pascal's wager as a structural problem about the existence of the Other and the Real, while drawing an analogy between Marxist surplus-value and surplus-jouissance to illuminate the political stakes of psychoanalytic theory.

     they should know about the connected and disconnected function that I articulated in a dialectic, as distinguishing if not opposing knowledge and truth. It is the last article that I collected; its title is very precisely Science and Truth.

277. #277

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the objet petit a (o) is not merely a remainder or lost object within the field of the Other, but the very cause of thinking itself — its shadow and ground — such that the supposed unity of the One (the field of discourse, the Other) is always already constituted by an arbitrary act of positing, and desire's lack is redefined through the mathematical structure of the Fibonacci series and the o-function rather than through the traditional ontological appeal to the infinite.

     what is involved in the relationship to knowledge. Not that of questioning the One in so far as at the start I put this lack into it... but to question this 1 because I am adding this o to it 1 + o

278. #278

     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 necessary for me to link it to what, precisely, I introduced this year under this form that designated the relation of knowledge to something, certainly more mysterious, more fundamental.

279. #279

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     Am I making myself understood?

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

     at the locus of knowledge can we say that in some way knowledge knows itself? ... however we support the function of knowledge, we are not able... to support it except by articulating it in the signifier. Does knowledge know itself or is it gaping wide in its structure?

280. #280

     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.

     Knowledge serves the master. I am coming back today to underline that knowledge is born from the slave.

281. #281

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalytic discourse from philosophical discourse by insisting that the subject is primordially constituted as an effect of language (as 'o', the bet/zero), and uses a critical reading of Bergler's account of the superego to argue that Durcharbeitung (working-through) and the superego must be rethought together—not as a theatrical agency hitting the ego but as structurally related to identification, the ego ideal, and the limit-encounter in treatment.

     it is no longer possible to play the role that is necessary for the transmission of knowledge if it does not involve the transmission of value...to grasp what can be called a formation effect.

282. #282

     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.

     it is not the same knowledge. Here, in the discourse at the far right, what place is it at? At the place that in the discourse of the Master, Hegel, the most sublime of hysterics, designates for us as being that of the truth

283. #283

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the "Copernican revolution" not as a change of centre but as the discovery that knowledge can be structured without a knowing subject, paralleling Newton's "unthinkable" formula for gravity and Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a knowledge that escapes consciousness—both pointing to the impossible as the Real; simultaneously he argues that the concept of "revolution" only acquires structural dignity from Marx's discovery of surplus value as foreclosed in the capitalist discourse, and that being itself is born only from the flaw (lack) introduced by the speaking being.

     this world, is, by this fact, total. But what had these forms got to do with the Newton's equations... Knowledge is a function of a nature, which here only knows itself from a denaturing

284. #284

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar **2:** Wednesday **10 December 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an autobiographical account of institutional resistance to his seminars to make a theoretical point: the speaker of a discourse is always an *effect* of that discourse rather than its originating subject, such that "this discourse situates me" and "this discourse situates itself" amount to the same thing.

     it was they who discovered that very curious things were happening at my seminar... these little princes of the university, who know something about the fact that there is no need to know something in order to teach it

285. #285

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **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.

     the proper field of the slave is knowledge, S2. There is no doubt about it reading the testimonies that we have of ancient life.

286. #286

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     *[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.

     what we discover in any experience of psychoanalysis is indeed precisely of the order of knowledge (savoir) and not of information (connaissance) or of representation, is very precisely something that links, in a network relation, one signifier Si to another signifier S2.

287. #287

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Discourse of the Analyst is structurally derived from—and is the inversion of—the Discourse of the Master: where the Master's discourse masks the divided subject at the place of truth, the analyst's discourse installs the objet petit a in the commanding place, thereby liberating the Splitting of the Subject and the half-said truth it conceals. This structural comparison also diagnoses the Discourse of the University as science's imperative ("Keep on knowing"), driven by the Master Signifier concealed at the place of truth.

     this tipping over by a quarter turn that I have described, which brings to the dominant place a knowledge that is denatured from its primitive localisation at the level of the slave, by having become pure knowledge of the master

288. #288

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     **ANALYTICON**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that revolution reproduces the discourse of the Master (as Freud's mass psychology demonstrates), and that genuine transformation requires clinging to the impossible-real rather than producing culture or chasing truth; the analytic discourse uniquely enables a "change of phase" in the circuit of the Master Signifier, albeit not its abolition.

     it is not on the side of what is hidden under this statutory a-cephalic... knowledge, which is the one in which there is presented... the University

289. #289

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.217

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the historical evolution of the Discourse of the Master by showing how slave-knowledge (know-how) was progressively decanted into episteme through philosophy, culminating in modern scientific discourse occupying the position of the master — a structural transmutation, not merely a historical shift.

     Philosophy played the role of constituting a master's knowledge, extracted from the slave's knowledge. It has, as I might say, been decanted.

290. #290

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     **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.

     Did I not say that it was knowledge that was king? ... The configuration of Workers and Peasants has all the same led to a form of society where it is precisely the University that is in the driving seat.

291. #291

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     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.

     things that did not exist in it in any way at the level of our perception... than through an audacious leap from an artifice... the dual polarisation, the imagined ideal unification of what knowledge is

292. #292

     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.

     there is, Horatio, in heaven and earth, more materials to make a subject than the objects that your knowledge imagines

293. #293

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     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.

     there is a big difference between knowledge, knowing what one is speaking about, what one believes one is capable of speaking about

294. #294

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     *[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.

     we know the means of enjoyment...that is even what knowledge is.

295. #295

     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.

     Everyone knows that the domestic animal is only implicated in language by a primitive knowledge and that it does not have one.

296. #296

     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.

     For the analysand who is there, the latent content is his knowledge. We are there to get him to know everything that he does not know even while knowing it.

297. #297

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     *[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.

     it would be enough to put in question whether the truth can in any way be isolated as an attribute, an attribute of anything whatsoever that can be articulated to knowledge

298. #298

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

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

     everything is to be put in question again, at the level of analysis itself, about what knowledge is necessary, in order that this knowledge can be put in question at the locus of the truth

299. #299

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     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.

     What can know is, in the Analyst's discourse, requested to function in the register of truth.

300. #300

     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.

     If knowledge is a means of enjoyment, labour is something different, even if it is accomplished by those who have knowledge. What it generates can certainly be truth, but no labour has ever generated knowledge.

301. #301

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan, through a detailed philological dialogue with Caquot, uses Sellin's textual manipulations of Hosea as a case study in how a pre-existing interpretive thesis (the murder of Moses) distorts exegetical method, implicitly staging the problem of the subject's desire overdetermining the reading of the Other's text.

     it was usual, at his time, to allow oneself such liberties with the text. And what happened, given the authority of Sellin, is that it was taken seriously by people who were not quite of his profession.

302. #302

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     *[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.

     knowledge is, at a certain level, dominated, articulated by purely formal necessities, necessities of writing... this type of knowledge, is the very one that is at stake when it is a matter of measuring in the analytic clinic the incidence of repetition.

303. #303

     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.

     This knowledge is a means of enjoyment. And I repeat, when it works, what it produces is entropy.

304. #304

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **ANALYTICON** > **X:** You mean a relative deafness.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Vincennes "Analyticon" confrontation to demonstrate in vivo how the Four Discourses operate: the University discourse produces students as surplus-value/Objet petit a, the Hysteric's discourse enabled the Marxian discovery of historical symptoms, and the gap/incompleteness structurally irreducible to each discourse refutes any totality ("nothing is all").

     psychoanalysis was not a knowledge. In any case it is not supposed to be knowledge... knowledge occupies a place on the board, on the top left

305. #305

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     *[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.

     the discourse of the Hysteric knowledge goes to the place of enjoyment... She does not surrender her knowledge.

306. #306

     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.

     The proletarian is not simply exploited, he is also the one who has been stripped of his function of knowledge.

307. #307

     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.

     Thanks to a series of dialectical mutations, to the ballet, to the minuet... the whole development of culture. Anyway, history rewards us with this knowledge that is not described as complete - there are many reasons for that - but absolute, incontestable.

308. #308

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     *[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.

     Knowledge - I think that I have insisted enough already on this for it to get into your head - knowledge is something which is said, that speaks itself.

309. #309

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

     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.

     Knowledge falls to the rank of symptom, seen from another angle. And that is when truth arrives.

310. #310

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     **ANALYTICON**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the four discourses (Master, Hysteric, University, Analyst) and argues that psychoanalytic knowledge cannot be transmitted like ordinary university knowledge, because the being of the psychoanalyst—what is produced when a psychoanalysand commits to becoming an analyst—is the real question, a point left open in his seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

     Psychoanalysis is not transmitted like any other knowledge... He does not thereby transmit a knowledge.

311. #311

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

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

     No meaning can henceforth be held to be self-evident... The sign presupposes the someone to whom it gives a sigh of something. It is this someone whose shadow concealed the way into linguistics.

312. #312

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **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.

     Last year I described knowledge as 'the enjoyment of the Other'. A funny business. It is a formulation which, to be honest, had never yet been put forward.

313. #313

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.274

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that "dying of shame" is the only affect that registers the Real as such — shame is the genealogically certain sign of a failed signifier, and this logic is used to diagnose University discourse as a perverted Master's discourse that evades the Real. The passage then deploys the Subject Supposed to Know as the mechanism by which the psychoanalysand constructs transference, explicitly warning that identifying the analyst with knowledge of truth would be fatal to that transference.

     In what respect are knowledge and truth — everyone knows that I have tried to show how these are stitched together, these two virtues — incompatible?

314. #314

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces and distinguishes the Four Discourses (Master, Hysteric, Analyst, University) by identifying the structural "dominant" place each discourse organizes around — locating the objet petit a as what occupies the dominant place in the Discourse of the Analyst — while simultaneously critiquing how University discourse systematically reverses his formula ("language is the condition of the unconscious") and thus distorts analytic discourse.

     one of them compared it to a sort of monopoly, a monopoly of knowledge this prohibition was purely and simply observed.

315. #315

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.240

     **ANALYTICON**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that within the University discourse, students are not subjects but Objet petit a — irreducible residual objects, tolerated as credits/surplus-value — and that the Discourse of the Master persists not through force but through the structural power of the Master Signifier, which has progressively absorbed the apparatus of knowledge (science), thereby sustaining capitalist surplus-value extraction.

     knowledge is here represented by this S2 which has the meaning of specifying that the only knowledge is an articulated one. Even intuitive knowledge needs to be such to have the consistency of knowledge, to be able to be verified.

316. #316

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     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.

     This is at the source of all knowledge, even though initially it could only be approached as know-how (savoir-faire). We find the trace of the primary presence of this knowledge even where it is already distant, because of having been adulterated for a long time in what is called the philosophical tradition.

317. #317

     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.

     Between what can be produced, in whatever form, as master-signifier, and the field that knowledge has at its disposition in so far as it posits itself as truth.

318. #318

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     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.

     an enquiry that limits itself- it is its very definition - to the collection of a knowledge, will find itself being fed by our own type of knowledge

319. #319

     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.

     This headless knowledge (savoir sans tête), as I might call it, is indeed a political fact whose structure can be defined.

320. #320

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the tortuous transmission history of *Le neveu de Rameau* (Diderot→Schiller→Goethe→Hegel) to argue that structurally rigorous discourse has impact regardless of institutional framing or authorial prestige, and by extension that the Ecrits' paradoxical value lies in being a "worst-seller" — institutional recognition (the thesis, psychology, proper attribution) is an obstacle rather than a guarantee of truth.

     if something could come out of a serious calling into question of the knowledge that is lavished and propagated in the established framework of the university

321. #321

     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.

     The function of episteme in so far as it specified as transmissible knowledge - consult Plato's dialogues - is still entirely borrowed from the techniques of the craftsman, that is to say, of serfs.

322. #322

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     *[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.

     trying to articulate what in knowledge as such - knowledge being constituted on a foundation of proposition - can in all rigour function as truth

323. #323

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **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.

     the effect of retrogression by which I have tried to define the junction between truth and knowledge

324. #324

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     **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 distinction between truth and knowledge, the opposition between episteme and the true doxa... What I highlighted, is precisely the contrary, it is their junction.

325. #325

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Chinese concepts of *hsing* (nature) and *ming* (heavenly decree) from Meng-Tzu as theoretical coordinates to triangulate the elusive status of surplus-jouissance, arguing that neither 'nature' nor decree adequately locates what psychoanalysis (via Freud's discovery of the symptom) must grasp, and that linguistics—understood as a deliberately fabricated metaphor—can model for us how to sustain a metaphor without neutralizing its action.

     the only element of interest that still had some relationship with this thing that people had previously dreamt about and which was called knowledge

326. #326

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan designates the unnamed "top-left" place in the Four Discourses as the place of the *semblance*, establishing that the semblance is not the contrary of truth but its strictly correlative dimension (*demansion*), and that scientific discourse reaches the real only through the algebraic articulation of semblance—where the real appears as the impossible hole in that semblance.

     The question, once knowledge is no longer at stake, once we no longer believes that it is along the path of perception, from which we are supposed to extract some quintessence or other, that we know something, but by means of an apparatus which is discourse

327. #327

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends his use of linguistics against charges of mere metaphor by grounding it in the structural necessity that the unconscious is structured like a language, while simultaneously arguing that no discourse — including the University discourse from which linguistics polices its borders — can claim to know what it is saying, since the introduction of the Freudian unconscious forecloses any such self-transparent mapping of knowledge.

     I know what I should keep to (Je sais à quoi m'en tenir)... I do not know what I am saying. I know that what I am saying, in other words, is what I cannot say.

328. #328

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews his early work on "The Purloined Letter" as a foundational articulation of the phallus within discourse, arguing that it already contained the key signifier-based articulations he continues to develop — including the impossibility of the sexual relation — while pivoting toward the function of writing (the Letter) and its relationship to logical/mathematical reasoning as distinct from spatial intuition.

     it is not the same thing to say 'the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber', that this element of knowing who knows, namely, by having imposed a certain phantasy of oneself

329. #329

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     **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.

     Between enjoyment and knowledge, the letter might be the littoral. All of this does not prevent that what I said about the unconscious remaining there

330. #330

     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.

331. #331

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of a Mencian formula on language and nature to argue that what emerges from the effects of discourse is nothing other than the function of cause insofar as it is surplus-jouissance (li/profit), while also positioning writing as the indirect but constitutive reference for language, against logical-positivist demands for graspable meaning.

     this procedure forbids us in a way any articulation whose meaning is not graspable... we can no longer make use of mathematical discourse, which, on the admission of the most qualified logicians, is characterised by the fact that it may be that at one or other of its points, we can no longer give it any meaning

332. #332

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     **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.

     This knowledge is the knowledge of the master. This knowledge has supposed... the existence over against the master of another knowledge

333. #333

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     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.

     We are no longer talking of course about knowledge (connaisance) because the relationship of man to a world of his own...has never been anything but an affectation at the service of the discourse of the master.

334. #334

     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.

     the knowledge that the truth is guaranteed by? It is nothing but what comes from the notation that results from the fact of positing it starting from the signifier.

335. #335

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972 > Seminar 7: Wednesday IS March 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan traces the problem of the One through Parmenides, Plato, Hegel, Frege, and Aristotle to argue that the One is not univocal and cannot be deduced from logic alone—its emergence from the empty set (zero) inaugurates both the arithmetic series and the question of existence, which always rests on a foundation of inexistence; this re-reading of the Platonic Parmenides positions Plato as proto-Lacanian insofar as the Real is approached through the gap in what can be said.

     as regards the Master, if there were no S2, the knowledge of the slave, what would he make of it?

336. #336

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     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.

     knowledge, in this business, this knowledge may be taught, but what is transmitted, is the formula. It is precisely because one of the terms becomes the locus in which the relation is inscribed that it can no longer be relation

337. #337

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     accommodate yourselves.

     Theoretical move: Through Recanati's intervention on Peirce, the passage argues that the universal quantifier cannot stand alone but requires a prior inscription of inexistence (negation as function), and that the repetition of inscribed inexistence—not bare inexistence—grounds logical and mathematical structures; this move aligns Peirce's logic of the continuous with Lacan's concerns about the Not-all and the grounding of the universal.

     They wanted to know a little better how to pretend to know. That is what guides them.

338. #338

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the formula *Yad'lun* ("there is One") to disarticulate the One of mathematical existence from the One of individuality or class-attribute, arguing that set theory's separation of element-membership from universal predication is precisely what can ground the analyst's practice beyond the "witticism" level at which all discourse about the sexual relationship otherwise remains.

     I recommend to those who want to hold the position of the analyst with what that involves in terms of knowledge not to run away from it

339. #339

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     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.

     it is the knowledge that is supposed and no one has ever been deceived by that

340. #340

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship as the anchor for a theory of the Real, the Matheme, and the function of language, arguing that what cannot be written (the sexual non-rapport) is precisely what drives both logic/mathematics and the floundering of metaphysics (exemplified by Aristotle's confusion of the One and Being), while positioning the matheme as the only genuine mode of transmission.

     What was involved in nous, in the power of knowing, was placed on the positive side, oh the active side, of what I shall question today by asking what its relationship is to the One.

341. #341

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan substitutes Peirce's schema with his own articulation of analytic discourse, identifying the *objet petit a* as the sole representamen in analysis — the analyst embodies this object as semblance/waste-product so that the analysand can be born to interpreting speech; the passage closes by reframing the analytic relation as fraternal brotherhood rooted in shared subjection to discourse, while warning that bodily fraternity without symbolic mediation gives rise to racism.

     To support himself with this knowledge which can, by being at the place of the truth, question itself as such about what has always been involved in the structure of knowledge, from know-how up to the knowledge of science.

342. #342

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     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 a matter of knowing what I am doing here... those whom in fact I convoked to something that was called 'The knowledge of the psychoanalyst'

343. #343

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     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.

     what psychoanalysis reveals is that it is a knowledge that is unknown to itself

344. #344

     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.

     the discourse whose effects have produced the subject. Every traumatic parent is in short in the same position as the psychoanalyst.

345. #345

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "incomprehension of Lacan" is not a symptom, using this occasion to distinguish the symptom-as-truth-value (a one-directional equivalence introduced by Marxist thinking and refined by psychoanalysis) from mere misunderstanding or resistance, while also clarifying the structure of the Subject Supposed to Know as the ground of transference independently of any certainty about the analyst's actual knowledge.

     Truth value, to translate the symptom into a truth value, we ought here to put our finger, once more, on the kind of knowledge that is presupposed in the analyst by the fact that it is necessary that he should be aware of what he interprets.

346. #346

     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 discourse of knowledge is a sexual metaphor and see what follows from that, namely, that since there is no sexual relationship, there is no knowledge

347. #347

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Klein bottle topology and a playful six-verse poem to demonstrate that the relation between man and woman passes through love, then substitutes the world for the sexual partner, and terminates at a wall that is not a cut but the locus of castration — the point where truth and knowledge are held apart. This topological demonstration grounds the claim that the discourse of capitalism forecloses castration, and that it is only the analytic discourse (emerging from logic, the four discourses, and language) that re-introduces castration as the hinge between truth and knowledge.

     the junction between truth and knowledge...it is simply the locus of castration. Which means that knowledge leaves intact the field of truth, and reciprocally moreover.

348. #348

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's knowledge is constitutively bound to ignorance (not as deficit but as passion), and polemically distinguishes his own claim — that the unconscious is structured like a language (grammar and repetition, hence logic) — from misreadings that conflate this with lalangue-as-dictionary or that opportunistically promote "non-knowledge" as a flag, thereby obscuring that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a matter of knowledge.

     there is a risk of loss in this absolutely improvised and ethical promotion...the one that is propelled from non-knowledge. Is there any need to demonstrate that there is in psychoanalysis firstly and fundamentally knowledge.

349. #349

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     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.

     Knowledge for its part is of the order of enjoyment. We absolutely cannot see why it would change its bed.

350. #350

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys set theory and the logic of the 'yad'l'un' (there is One) to ground the four formulas of sexuation, arguing that existence is constituted through a "saying not" (the exception that founds the universal), and that psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which blackguardism (corruption of desire) necessarily produces stupidity—making the mathème the privileged vehicle for approaching knowledge about truth.

     for the question of a knowledge such that it takes truth as a simple function, and which is far from being satisfied with it.

351. #351

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     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.

     it is not a matter of the truth about knowledge, but of the knowledge about truth, and that this, the knowledge about truth, is articulated from the high point of what I am putting forward this year about the 'ya d'l'un'.

352. #352

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.50

     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.

     I am going to continue then a little on the theme of the knowledge of the psychoanalyst...What is at stake in effect is not any old knowledge, but the knowledge of the psychoanalyst.

353. #353

     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.

     It is a knowledge itself which is then always to be put in question... there is a knowledge that is drawn from the subject himself; in the pole place of enjoyment, the analytic discourse puts $.

354. #354

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     II > M. RIGUET: I agree.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic invention retroactively generates its own past (illustrated by the discovery of √2 and analytic truth), and that all constituted knowledge contains an intrinsic error: the forgetting of truth's creative, nascent function—a forgetting that the analyst, uniquely, cannot afford.

     In all knowledge once constituted there is a dimension of error, which is the forgetting of the creative function of truth in its nascent form.

355. #355

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     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.

     Bewusstsein in Hegel is far closer to knowledge than to consciousness. However... one of the questions which I would have asked would have been - what is the function of non-knowledge in Hegel?

356. #356

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's methodological text "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" to argue that psychoanalytic conceptualisation is not empiricist in any naive sense but proceeds through iterative, convention-like abstractions that are progressively refined through their relation to observed material — thereby positioning Freud as a rigorous philosopher of science despite common dismissals.

     The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions.

357. #357

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     II

     Theoretical move: By reading the Meno episode of the slave's geometry lesson, Lacan establishes a structural distinction between the Imaginary (intuitive, reminiscent, formal) and the Symbolic (irreducible, forcing, non-homogeneous with intuition), arguing that the Symbolic cannot be derived from the Imaginary and that this cleavage is the founding move for understanding the ego in Freudian — rather than general psychological — terms.

     the epistime, knowledge bounded by a formal coherence, does not cover the whole of the field of human experience

358. #358

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego psychology represents a regression to pre-analytical, substantialist notions of the ego, betraying Freud's Copernican decentring of the subject; the Freudian discovery's radical move — that "I is an other," that the subject cannot be equated with the ego — is grounded in the gap between consciousness, the I, and the unconscious.

     the knowledge to which truth comes to be knotted must actually be endowed with its own inertia, which makes it lose something of the virtue which initiated its deposition as such, since it exhibits an obvious propensity to misrecognise its own meaning

359. #359

     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.

     knowledge is an enigma. That enigma is presented to us by the unconscious, as it is revealed by analytic discourse. That enigma is enunciated as follows: for the speaking being, knowledge is that which is articulated.

360. #360

     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.

     analysis presumes that knowledge about truth can be constituted on the basis of its experience... If analysis rests on a presumption, it is that knowledge about truth can be constituted on the basis of its experience.

361. #361

     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.

     A dream does not introduce us into any kind of unfathomable experience or mystery - it is read in what is said about it... That is where Saussure was awaiting Freud. And it is where the question of knowledge is raised afresh.

362. #362

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **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.

     All of that, I insist, is precisely what was covered over (collabé) during the whole of philosophical antiquity by the idea of knowledge.

363. #363

     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.

     S2, knowledge … agent … other

364. #364

     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.

     there's no such thing as a desire to know, that famous Wissentrieb Freud points to somewhere. Freud contradicts himself there.

365. #365

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     **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.

     There is some relationship of being that cannot be known. It is that relationship whose structure I investigate in my teaching, insofar as that knowledge - which, as I just said, is impossible - is prohibited thereby.

366. #366

     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.

     A woman can, as I said, love in a man only the way in which he faces the knowledge thanks to which he souloves.

367. #367

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     **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.

     If the unconscious has taught us anything, it is first of all that somewhere in the Other it knows (ça sait). It knows because it is based precisely on those signifiers with which the subject constitutes himself.

368. #368

     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.

     knowledge, which structures the being who speaks on the basis of a specific cohabitation, is closely related to love. All love is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges.

369. #369

     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.

     there is a subversion of knowledge (connaissance). Prior to that, no knowledge was conceived that did not participate in the fantasy of an inscription of the sexual link.

370. #370

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     **II** > **The function of the written¹**

     Theoretical move: There is no prediscursive reality — every reality is founded by discourse — and the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the negative foundation on which all writing (and analytic discourse specifically) rests; the bar in the Saussurean formula is the graphic index of this impossibility, marking that the written is precisely what cannot be understood, while man and woman exist only as signifiers articulated through the phallic and not-all positions respectively.

     How is one to return, if not on the basis of a peculiar (spécial) discourse, to a prediscursive reality? That is the dream - the dream behind every conception (idée) of knowledge. But it is also what must be considered mythical.

371. #371

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     **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.

     this knowledge that was fomented throughout the centuries disappoints us and means that we must renovate the function of knowledge...hatred has never been put in its place in it

372. #372

     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.

     a real which precisely escapes, which has nothing to do with what traditional knowledge has supported

373. #373

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     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 is some relationship of being that cannot know itself... this knowledge, which I have just said is impossible, is thereby prohibited (interdit).

374. #374

     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.

     this knowledge that structures by a specific cohabitation what is involved in the being that speaks, this knowledge has the closest relationship with love

375. #375

     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.

     knowledge is a riddle (une énigme). It is a riddle made present to us by the unconscious as it was revealed by analytic discourse.

376. #376

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     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.

     the subversion of knowledge is indicated by the fact that up to then, nothing about knowledge... was conceived of without every little bit of what was written about this knowledge participating... in the phantasy of an inscription of the sexual bond

377. #377

     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.

     If the unconscious has taught us so many things, it is first of all the fact that somewhere, in the Other, it (ça) knows. It knows because it is supported precisely by these signifiers with which the subject constitutes himself.

378. #378

     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.

     The status of knowledge implies as such that there is already knowledge - in the Other. That it is to be taken (à prendre), in two words, that is why it is designed to be learned (d'apprendre), in just one.

379. #379

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     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.

     today we are going to try to talk about knowledge. About this knowledge that, in the inscription of the discourses… I put, I wrote S2 to symbolise this knowledge… it is more than a secondarity, that it is a fundamental disarticulation.

380. #380

     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.

     that there is no desire to know, that there is nothing of this famous Wissentrieb that Freud highlights somewhere. Here Freud is contradicting himself.

381. #381

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     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.

     what this point is aimed at, or more exactly appears to the authors to sustain, is precisely a de-supposition of my knowledge. And why not?

382. #382

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

     Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a distinction between knowledge of the Other's actions and love, arguing that correctly predicting what one's partner will do is not evidence of love — thereby separating the epistemic register (knowledge) from the affective register (love).

     to know what the partner is going to do, is not a proof of love.

383. #383

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ontology is a product of the accentuation of the copula "to be" within philosophical/master discourse, that there is no pre-discursive reality (all reality is grounded in discourse), and that the sexual relationship cannot be written — a claim sustained by the bar in the Saussurean algorithm and the letter as a radical effect of discourse.

     How return, if not by a special discourse, to what I could put forward in terms of a pre-discursive reality? This is of course the dream, the foundational dream of every idea of knowledge

384. #384

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 15 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot provides the only adequate structural account of desire, the Symbolic, and the Name-of-the-Father: the Symbolic consists precisely in the hole it makes, the prohibition of incest is not historical but structural (identical with that hole), and the Name-of-the-Father is the Father-as-naming that knotted through that hole – a logic that admits an indefinite plurality of Names-of-the-Father, each resting on one hole that communicates consistency to all the others.

     Only the unconscious allows it to be seen how there is a knowledge, not in the Real, [but as a support of the Symbolic].

385. #385

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     **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.

     Is there, one, some knowledge in the Real? It is quite clear that the supposition from all time… is that to all appearances there was, since the Real worked, it operated properly.

386. #386

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **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.

     What is this knowledge? What interest has it? How is it explicatory to transport it into a behaviour which is like the one that we see in the human being

387. #387

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXII by arguing that the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary only acquire a "common measure" — i.e., can be said to be genuinely three — through the Borromean knot, which provides the minimal topological structure (requiring three as its minimum) that holds them together; this displaces Freud's spatial-geometrical (sack) topology in favour of a knot-based topology, and identifies the Imaginary as grounded in the body, the Symbolic in equivocation/writing, and the Real as strictly unthinkable.

     This knowledge of God, it is certain that it ek-sists. We have given ourselves enough trouble in spelling it out, it ek-sists, but only in the sense that I am writing this term ek-sistence, by writing it differently than is usually done.

388. #388

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an anecdotal tour through Nice, Strasbourg, London, and his reading of Strachey's *Queen Victoria* to advance the theoretical claim that the sexual non-relationship is confirmed by historical-biographical evidence, while elaborating the resistance of different *lalangues* to the unconscious and reiterating that "The woman does not exist" but that women (as not-all) have a privileged, unmeasured relation to liberty and to the unconscious.

     people are very, very fascinated by notions, categories like that, power, knowledge, all that. They are silly notions in fact, silly notions which leave the whole place to women

389. #389

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 7: Tuesday 11 March 1975**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallic Real constitutes man's fundamental affliction — "aphligé" by a phallus that bars him from genuine access to the body of the Other — such that all discourse, especially the Discourse of the Master, is grounded on a semblance that phallus-as-signifier-index-1 installs; the Name-of-the-Father is reread as a merely tribal supplement to the Borromean knot, and unconscious signifier-copulation (savoir) is what gives rise to the subject as pathème divided by the One.

     Thanks to which he sees that there is unconscious knowledge, namely, unconscious copulation.

390. #390

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     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.

     Is it impossible for truth to become a product of know-how (savoir-faire)? No. But then it will only be half-said, incarnated in the signifier S1

391. #391

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that his invention of the Borromean knot as a writing of the Real constitutes a 'forcing'—a traumatic inscription of a new symbolic form—that both responds symptomatically to Freud's energetics and exposes the absence of any Other of the Other, while also identifying the Real as his own sinthome rather than a spontaneous idea.

     what Freud supports as the Unconscious always supposes a knowledge, and a spoken knowledge, as such... It is entirely reducible to a knowledge.

392. #392

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     **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.

     it was precisely a know-how linked by a practice of the signifier.

393. #393

     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.

     The knot between the Imaginary and unconscious knowledge, that we make here, somewhere, a splice

394. #394

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     **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.

     Knowledge then, from the start, shows itself for what it is: deceptive. This indeed is why everything should be taken up again from the start.

395. #395

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames his difficulty with Joyce as a matter of linguistic inexperience, while foregrounding Joyce's deliberate disarticulation of the English tongue as a technical 'know-how' — a move that positions Joyce's practice as the exemplary instance of what Lacan will theorise as the Sinthome.

     This forms part of his know-how and, on this, I already quoted Soller's article.

396. #396

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot's essential property is the "false hole" produced when two circles conjoin, and that it is the Phallus—as the verifier of this false hole—that constitutes the Real; he then extends this topological claim to the sinthome (specifically Joyce's), lalangue, and the relation between the sexes, positioning the phallus as the sole signifier that creates every signified and thereby verifies the Real.

     Joyce, to end, did not know that he was making the sinthome... it is by this fact that he is a pure artificer, that he is a man of know-how.

397. #397

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     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.

     To say what is true about knowledge, is not necessarily to ascribe knowledge to the psychoanalyst.

398. #398

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.61

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

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

     Alain Didier Weill is going to speak to you about something which has a relationship to Knowledge, namely, 'I know' or 'he knows'. It is on this relationship between 'I know' and 'he knows' that he is going to play.

399. #399

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 21 December 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that a double cut of a torus produces a double Möbius strip, and that this topological object has the key property that front and back (inside and outside) are indifferent from any fixed point of view — a structural indeterminacy he links to the possibility of the *une-bévue* (misreading/error), which can only be resolved by finding a dominant way of distinguishing the two cases.

     This leads us to something which, I am encouraging you to it, is of the order of know-how, a know-how which is demonstrative in this sense that it does not happen without the possibility of an une-bévue.

400. #400

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.87

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads "The Purloined Letter" through the figure of Bozef (introduced by Alain Didier Weill) as an incarnation of Absolute Knowledge — knowledge that is in the Real but does not speak — to argue that the Borromean topology of RSI, the structure of the Passe, and the objectification of the unconscious all hinge on the same redoubling of knowledge ("I know that he knows that I know that he knows"), while distinguishing the silent, real truth from the lying Symbolic and the false-but-consistent Imaginary (consciousness).

     Knowing how to deal with it, is not the same thing as a knowledge, as the Absolute Knowledge of which I spoke earlier.

401. #401

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.72

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

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

     is not the subject, the analyst in question, in a position that corresponds psychoanalytically to flat denial, namely, is it possible on the one hand to say yes to knowledge and on the other hand to say no to the locus from which this knowledge is emitted

402. #402

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

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

     He places himself in it in this way, namely, a Knowledge… S1, is only the beginning of knowledge; but a knowledge which is content to always commence, as they say, ends up at nothing.

403. #403

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the structure of man (and the living body) is toric rather than spheroidal, and uses this topology to reframe the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious as a double Möbius strip cut from a torus — displacing any notion of psychic "progress" and redefining the une-bévue (mis-hearing/blunder) as the structural condition of the signifier's exchange value.

     manifestly there is no knowing (*connaissance*). There is only some kind of knowledge (*savoir*) in the sense that I said at the outset, namely, that we make mistakes

404. #404

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     What is the way of distinguishing these two cases?

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

     the une-bévue is something which substitutes for what is founded as knowledge that one knows, the principle of knowledge that one knows without knowing it (sans le savoir)

405. #405

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 18 January 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan refuses the framing of art (painting, music) as "preverbal" and instead insists it is "hyper-verbal" — saturated by the symbol and the signifier — while simultaneously distinguishing art as a form of know-how (savoir-faire) that goes beyond symbolism and carries more truth than discursive elaboration. The theoretical pivot is that the Real/Imaginary continuity invoked by the interlocutor does not bypass the Symbolic but is, in Lacan's formulation, "verbal to the power of two."

     Art is a know-how and the Symbolic is a principle of doing.

406. #406

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological operation of turning the Symbolic torus inside-out—analogous to what psychoanalysis performs on the unconscious—produces a fundamentally different arrangement than the Borromean knot: the Symbolic comes to totally envelop the Real and Imaginary, raising a structural problem about what a completed analysis actually does to the subject's organization of the three registers.

     the function of the knowledge of the *une-bévue* by which I translated the unconscious

407. #407

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.67

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

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

     Knowledge at R3 can also open up perspectives, if you want to reflect, on what might be involved in racist or segregationist knowledge, but this would be a position of knowledge in which I would see the subject incarnate this S2 in the Real.

408. #408

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Two lines of numbers**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topology of the Real grounded in writing, arguing that (1) the Real is only accessible through writing as artifice, (2) the torus—unlike the sphere—introduces a structural asymmetry and equivocation between inside/outside and hole/rod that models the living body and sexuality, and (3) the Borromean knot's necessary alternation formalizes the non-relation, with zero as hole and one as consistency providing an arithmetic analogue for chain-topology.

     The readable - that is what knowledge consists of. And in short, it is limited.

409. #409

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.

     Knowledge is what guides us. It is what means that people were able to translate the knowledge in question by the word 'instinct'.

410. #410

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's neurosis/psychosis distinction to sharpen the concept of Verwerfung (foreclosure): whereas in neurosis a repressed element returns symbolically within the subject's psychical reality, in psychosis what has been excluded from the symbolic order entirely returns from without in the Real — a structural difference that cannot be reduced to projection. A clinical vignette (the butcher's remark) then demonstrates that the signifier can carry meaning erotically/allusively without being identical to the message received in inverted form.

     The difficulty for some was their failure to grasp that what is involved is of the order of knowledge [un savoir].

411. #411

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human intelligence is not a brute capacity but is constituted by the prior introduction of signifying formulations; the signifying chain, as the principle of combination and locus of metonymy, is what makes metaphorical substitution possible and what transforms mere discourse into knowledge.

     if one can even speak about a story culminating in knowledge of some kind, it is inasmuch as discourse has brought about an essential transformation.

412. #412

     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.

     what distinguishes Hamlet from Oedipus is that Hamlet knows. Led to this critical point, we are now in a position to explain what I have called superficial features, such as Hamlet's madness.

413. #413

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

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

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

     the point is not so much to understand what I am doing as to know what I are doing. They are not always the same thing.

414. #414

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.395

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject encounters itself only as gap or cut in the unconscious chain, and that objet petit a is constituted structurally as a cut: the pregenital objects (oral, anal), the phallus (castration complex), and delusion are three forms of a that share the formal property of coupure, functioning as signifying props that screen the hole in the unconscious chain for a barred subject who fundamentally misrecognises itself there.

     a subject's real must not be conceptualized as correlated with some sort of knowledge... something in the subject is articulated that is beyond any possible knowledge he may have.

415. #415

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.379

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a) provides desire's minimal supporting structure by articulating, synchronically rather than diachronically, how the subject must pay the price of castration—giving up a real element (objet a) to serve as a signifier—precisely because the subject cannot designate itself within the Other's discourse (the unconscious). This move directly opposes ego-psychology's conflation of object-maturation with drive-maturation, exposing it as a confusion between the object of knowledge and the object of desire.

     We have reason to distinguish, on the contrary, between the object that satisfies the desire for knowledge - the philosophical notion of which has been the fruit of centuries of elaboration - and the object of a desire.

416. #416

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.393

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the logical genesis of the subject through successive stages of demand and the Other, arriving at the formula for fantasy ($◇a) as the structural prop that arrests the subject's fading at the point where no signifier in the Other can authenticate the subject's being — fantasy is thus the "perpetual confrontation between barred S and little a" that sustains desire where unconscious desire was (Wo Es war).

     our era, which has witnessed the invention of psychoanalysis, is also an era in which something has been forced on us, despite our ever-so-great resistance to it: a crisis in the theory of knowledge, or a crisis of knowledge itself.

417. #417

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

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

     We need not for the time being link these two terms, knowledge and death, for the reason that we have not yet gone far enough in formulating what will be targeted by repression.

418. #418

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **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.

     as analysts we believe that there is no knowledge which doesn't emerge against a background of ignorance … we accept as such the idea of other forms of knowledge than the kind that is founded scientifically.

419. #419

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.344

     **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.

     knowledge, theory of, 60-61, 171

420. #420

     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.

     knowing from which period discourse they were borrowed is never futile... the sublimations of the systems of knowledge, including - why not? - that of analytical knowledge itself.

421. #421

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.333

     **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.

     the desire of man...has quite simply taken refuge or been repressed in that most subtle and blindest of passions, as the story of Oedipus shows, the passion for knowledge.

422. #422

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **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).

     Diotima first introduces love as... of the nature of daemons... she supplies nothing less than a comparison with what... lies midway between epistéme, science in the Socratic sense, and amathia, ignorance — namely, doxa, true opinion.

423. #423

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.430

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVI - Psyche and the Castration Complex**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XVI, providing textual variants, source identifications, and cross-references; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     Instances du savoir (knowledge's entreaties) could be alternatively understood as 'agencies (or authorities) of knowledge.' Lacan might have been thinking here of Freud's Wissentrieb (the child's drive for knowledge of sexual matters).

424. #424

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **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 uses Plato's *Symposium* — specifically the limit of Socratic *epistémè* and its necessary handing over to myth (Diotima) — to argue that the Freudian unconscious marks precisely what exceeds the law of the signifier: something sustains itself *by excluding* knowledge, thereby constituting the irreducible split of the subject that Socratic dialectic cannot reach.

     this knowledge the only certain knowledge, as Socrates tells us in the Phaedo - can be asserted on the sole basis of the coherence of discourse that involves dialogue and that revolves around apprehension of the necessity of the law of the signifier.

425. #425

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates — his *atopia*, his daemon, his relation to truth and death — to theorize a pre-subjective, discourse-grounded dimension of truth and the Real, drawing a genealogy from pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato's *Symposium* in order to illuminate what is demanded of the analyst: a situatedness-nowhere analogous to Socrates' own unsituable position.

     It is Socrates who comes up with the new and essential idea that one must first guarantee knowledge. To show everyone that they know nothing is a path that is in itself revealing.

426. #426

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.192

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, and uses this to reread Socrates' role in the Symposium as an unwitting analyst who redirects Alcibiades' transference love toward his true desire — thereby grounding the analytic situation in the structural relation between two desires rather than in object-relations theory.

     we will never know what Socrates knew about what he was doing... To the extent to which Socrates does not know what he himself desires

427. #427

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structural features of the Symposium's narrative transmission—its layered oral "brain recording," the repeated scholarly evasion of the Alcibiades scene, and Socrates' self-claimed expertise solely in love—to position the dialogue as an analogue of psychoanalytic sessions, thereby establishing that the relationship between love and transference is the real theoretical stake of his seminar.

     Socrates says almost nothing in his own name... it is around this almost-nothing that the scene really revolves... What is the purpose of being knowledgeable about love? And we know that Socrates claims to be knowledgeable about nothing else.

428. #428

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.399

     **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 articulates the structural function of objet petit a as the remainder that animates desire: the partial object is constituted by the elision of the phallus from the narcissistic image, such that libidinal cathexis (Besetzung) circulates around a central blank, and the object of desire is precisely what is 'saved from the waves' of narcissistic love — establishing the dialectic between being and having through the oral, anal, and phallic stages of demand.

     Naturally, the ambiguity of the word 'knowledge' [savoir] comes in here... The meaning the word 'knowledge' has for him is much closer to what I am aiming at when I try to articulate for you what the analyst's position is

429. #429

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     **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.

     All of this knowledge is already and has forever been there in the soul, and it suffices to pose the right questions to re-evoke and reveal it. This attests to the preexistence of knowledge.

430. #430

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **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: By reading Diotima's myth of Love's parentage (Poros/Aporia) through the formula "love is giving what you don't have," Lacan argues that Love belongs to the intermediate domain of doxa rather than episteme, and that the demonic/daemonic order is the precursor to the symbolic register of the unconscious—what was once attributed to gods is now reclaimed as the subject's own messages authenticated through the symbolic.

     there are discourses, behaviors, or opinions... that are true without the subject being able to know it. Doxa might well be true, but it is not episteme.

431. #431

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **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.

     The lover, as Léon Robin translates it... shows that he is able to contribute something whose object is intelligence, φρόνησις (phronesis), and the whole of the field of merit or excellence, άρετή (aretè). The beloved needs to gain in education, and generally in knowledge, παιδεία (paideia) and σοφία (sophia).

432. #432

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.82

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Eryximachus' medical speech in the Symposium to argue that transference reformulates the Platonic search for 'a good' (ktésis) into the emergence of desire as such — and that medicine's self-conception as scientific rests on an unexamined notion of harmony (harmonia) that exposes the irreducible gap at the heart of any normative ideal of health.

     Medicine has always considered itself scientific... it has always referred to the science of its era, whether good or bad.

433. #433

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     **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 reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.

     inscientia is non-knowledge constituted as such, as empty [vide], as the attraction exercised by the void or vacuum [vide] at the center of knowledge

434. #434

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.58

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of Phaedrus' speech in the Symposium to argue that the succession of eulogies traces a fundamental topology of love's impossibility, and introduces a theological framework (the gods belong to the Real) to situate Eros within the tripartite RSI schema, while the myth of Orpheus anchors the distinction between the fantasmatic object and the Other's being.

     Socrates demanded that we not be content with that to which we have this innocent relation known as δόξα (dôxa) [opinion]...but rather that we ask why, that we be satisfied only by the assured truth which he calls επιστήμη (epistème): science, knowledge that provides its reasons.

435. #435

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     **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: The passage argues that love's discourse is structurally conditioned by a founding "he did not know" (the position of the erastés before the erômenon), and that Alcibiades' entrance into the Symposium introduces the objet petit a (the agalma) as the object of unique covetousness that disrupts the harmonious ascent toward beauty and reveals love's fundamentally non-harmonious, scandalous dimension.

     Socrates can only locate himself in his knowledge here by showing that there can be no discourse on love but from the point at which he did not know.

436. #436

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     **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.

     everything in Socrates' behaviour indicates that his refusal to enter into the game of love is closely related to the fact, posited at the outset as the point of departure, that he knows. He knows the score in matters of love... I will propose that it is because Socrates knows that he does not love.

437. #437

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entire philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes's cogito rests on a single structural prejudice — the Subject Supposed to Know — and that psychoanalysis radically subverts this prejudice by demonstrating that the Other (as locus, not subject) is merely the depository of the supposition of knowledge, which returns to the subject as the unconscious.

     Knowledge is intersubjective, which does not mean that it is the knowledge of all, nor that it is the knowledge of the Other - with a capital O.

438. #438

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: By interrogating the Cartesian cogito through the logical paradox of the liar ("I am lying"), Lacan argues that "I think" cannot ground "I am" because it confuses the planes of enunciation and statement (énoncé/énonciation), thereby opening the question of the split subject and the impossibility of self-grounding identity in psychoanalysis.

     It is therefore here, in Aristotle, something which we can interpret as some sort of attempt precisely to exorcise a transference which he believed to be an obstacle to the development of knowledge.

439. #439

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the critique of Kantian "pure intuition" (grounded in Euclidean geometry and refuted by non-Euclidean geometry, Gödelian incompleteness, and Fregean arithmetic) as a lever to argue that the combinatory/logical function of number and reason is independent of sensible intuition, and that this has direct consequences for how psychoanalysis must situate the subject's body, drive, and fantasy beyond any spatio-temporal naturalism.

     it is by way of formal demonstration that this certainty can be acquired and, when I say formal, I mean by the most expressly formalist procedures of logicising combination

440. #440

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

     at the end of what the centuries have been able to dream up about the function of knowledge, that is all we have in our hand

441. #441

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 23*: *Wednesday 6 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychoanalytic search for the primordial status of the object—irreducibly the object of desire—from parallel but distinct enterprises in Heidegger (utensil/Zuhandenheit) and Lévi-Strauss (bricolage), then deploys the topology of the cross-cap (projective plane) as the structural support for the fundamental fantasy, arguing that the non-eliminable singular point on this surface captures something intrinsic to the subject-object relation of desire that cannot be dissolved into three-dimensional representational conventions.

     the status, as one might say, of knowledge in so far as it can be established in an approach which to establish itself claims to make its way from the interrogation about what he calls 'being there'

442. #442

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.24

     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.

     to those who believe, it is certainly a kind of knowledge [un savoir] that is at stake in it.

443. #443

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     VII. Not Phtlosophizing

     Theoretical move: Lacan distances his concept of the Real from both ontological metaphysics and Kantian epistemology, insisting instead that the Real is irreducibly non-whole, non-transcendent, and open to future formalization — a methodological wager that refuses premature systematization while holding open the possibility of an evolving law of the real.

     thanks again to calculations... we will one day have a notion of the evolution of laws.

444. #444

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.68

     II. The Anxiety of Scientists

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Real as that which "doesn't work" — what escapes the smooth functioning of the world — and uses scientists' anxiety attacks over dangerous biology as a foil to argue that analysts, who deal exclusively with the Real, face an even more impossible profession than science, governance, or education.

     Since science hasn't the foggiest idea what it is doing, apart from having a little anxiety attack, it will go on for a while.

445. #445

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1781

     Theoretical move: Kant's preface establishes that pure reason necessarily generates antinomies and contradictions when it oversteps the limits of experience, and proposes a "tribunal" of critical self-examination—the Critique of Pure Reason itself—as the only legitimate method to determine reason's extent, limits, and validity a priori, against both dogmatism and skepticism.

     a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason, with reference to the cognitions to which it strives to attain without the aid of experience; in other words, the solution of the question regarding the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics

446. #446

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant's Preface to the Second Edition performs a foundational epistemological reversal — the 'Copernican Revolution' — arguing that cognition must be reoriented so that objects conform to our faculties of knowing rather than vice versa, thereby establishing the conditions for a priori synthetic knowledge and setting metaphysics on the sure path of science.

     It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption.

447. #447

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Copernican revolution in metaphysics—making objects conform to our faculties of cognition rather than vice versa—simultaneously limits speculative reason to phenomena while opening a practical domain for freedom, morality, and belief; the critique's "negative" restriction of knowledge is thus positively enabling for practical reason and ethics.

     I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief.

448. #448

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Critique of Pure Reason serves reason by replacing dogmatic metaphysics with a critical method that demarcates the limits of speculative reason, thereby protecting morality and religion from both dogmatism and scepticism, while preserving the public's rational convictions on their own proper, non-scholastic grounds.

     it becomes the manifest duty of the schools to enter upon a thorough investigation of the rights of speculative reason

449. #449

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that while all knowledge begins with experience, not all knowledge derives from experience, establishing the distinction between a priori and empirical (a posteriori) knowledge; he further defends the objective reality of external intuition against idealism by grounding consciousness of external existence in the necessary condition for internal experience in time.

     it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself

450. #450

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes the distinction between analytical and synthetical judgements, argues that synthetic a priori judgements are both possible and necessary as the foundation of all theoretical sciences (including mathematics), and poses the critical question of how pure reason can legitimately extend knowledge beyond experience without collapsing into groundless speculation.

     Philosophy stands in need of a Science which shall Determine the Possibility, Principles, and Extent of Human Knowledge 'a priori'

451. #451

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the central problem of pure reason is "How are synthetical judgements a priori possible?"—establishing that mathematics, physics, and metaphysics all rest on such judgements, and that critique (rather than dogmatic or skeptical procedure) is the only path to grounding them securely.

     pure mathematics, the very conception of which implies that it consists of knowledge altogether non-empirical and a priori

452. #452

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant defines the Critique of Pure Reason as a propaedeutic — a negative, corrective science of the sources and limits of pure reason — that falls short of full transcendental philosophy but constitutes its complete architectural plan, grounded in the distinction between a priori and empirical cognition and between sense (by which objects are given) and understanding (by which they are thought).

     pure reason is the faculty which contains the principles of cognizing anything absolutely a priori

453. #453

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > I. TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes the foundational structure of Transcendental Aesthetic by distinguishing sensibility (receptivity to objects via intuition) from understanding (thought/conception), and arguing that space and time are pure a priori forms of intuition underlying all phenomenal experience - a move that grounds the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge through the isolation of pure form from empirical matter.

     There are two pure forms of sensuous intuition, as principles of knowledge a priori, namely, space and time.

454. #454

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > I. TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS. > SECTION I. Of Space.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes space as a pure a priori intuition (not a concept derived from experience) that constitutes the subjective form of outer sensibility, grounding his doctrine of the empirical reality and transcendental ideality of space, which underpins the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition in geometry.

     By a transcendental exposition, I mean the explanation of a conception, as a principle, whence can be discerned the possibility of other synthetical a priori cognitions.

455. #455

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECTION II. Of Time.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes that space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition—not properties of things in themselves—thereby grounding the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition while strictly delimiting the sphere of valid knowledge to phenomena; this transcendental idealism is contrasted against both the Newtonian (substantivist) and Leibnizian (empiricist-relational) positions, both of which fail to secure the apodeictic certainty of mathematics.

     Supposing that we should carry our empirical intuition even to the very highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby advance one step nearer to a knowledge of the constitution of objects as things in themselves.

456. #456

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECTION II. Of Time.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that space and time are not properties of things in themselves but are subjective forms of sensuous intuition, which is the necessary condition for synthetic a priori propositions; phenomena are genuinely given objects in relation to a subject, not mere illusions, but we can never know the thing in itself.

     Now by means of mere relations, a thing cannot be known in itself; and it may therefore be fairly concluded, that, as through the external sense nothing but mere representations of relations are given us, the said external sense in its representation can contain only the relation of the object to the subject, but not the essential nature of the object as a thing in itself.

457. #457

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECOND PART. TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC.

     Theoretical move: Kant's introduction to Transcendental Logic establishes the necessity of a science of pure understanding that goes beyond general (formal) logic by attending to the a priori origin and objective validity of cognitions, thereby distinguishing transcendental from empirical conditions of knowledge and exposing the limits of formal logical criteria for truth.

     Intuition and conceptions constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither conceptions without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without conceptions, can afford us a cognition.

458. #458

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECOND PART. TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC.

     Theoretical move: Kant draws a foundational distinction between Transcendental Analytic (the logic of truth governing the legitimate empirical use of pure understanding) and Transcendental Dialectic (a critique of the illusion produced when understanding overreaches empirical bounds), establishing that general logic misused as an organon necessarily generates dialectical illusion rather than genuine knowledge.

     invalidate their claims to the discovery and enlargement of our cognitions merely by means of transcendental principles

459. #459

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant's Transcendental Analytic establishes a systematic, exhaustive decomposition of pure a priori understanding into elementary concepts (categories) and principles, arguing that only a complete, idea-governed system — not empirical accumulation — can guarantee the correctness and genuineness of pure cognition.

     Transcendental analytic is the dissection of the whole of our a priori knowledge into the elements of the pure cognition of the understanding.

460. #460

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the understanding, as a purely discursive (non-intuitive) faculty, operates exclusively through judgements, and that by systematically cataloguing the logical functions of unity in judgements (quantity, quality, relation, modality), one can derive a complete and principled table of the pure conceptions of the understanding—establishing a transcendental logic that goes beyond formal logic by attending to the content/worth of cognition, not merely its form.

     Transcendental philosophy has the advantage, and moreover the duty, of searching for its conceptions according to a principle; because these conceptions spring pure and unmixed out of the understanding as an absolute unity

461. #461

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes that pure a priori conceptions of the understanding (categories) require a transcendental—not empirical—deduction to demonstrate their objective validity, arguing that the only two conditions of cognition (intuition and conception) together necessitate that categories function as a priori conditions for experience to be possible at all.

     an examination of the manner in which conceptions can apply a priori to objects, the transcendental deduction of conceptions

462. #462

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant's transcendental deduction establishes that the pure categories of the understanding are a priori conditions of possible experience—not derived from it—and that their ultimate ground lies in the originally synthetical unity of apperception ("I think"), which is the highest principle of all cognition insofar as it makes any conjunction of the manifold possible.

     The whole aim of the transcendental deduction of all a priori conceptions is to show that these conceptions are a priori conditions of the possibility of all experience.

463. #463

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

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

     to think an object and to cognize an object are by no means the same thing. In cognition there are two elements: firstly, the conception... and, secondly, the intuition, whereby the object is given.

464. #464

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 19.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the pure categories of understanding acquire objective reality only through their application to sensuous intuition via the transcendental synthesis of imagination (figurative synthesis), which mediates between intellectual spontaneity and sensible receptivity, and that this same structure explains why the subject cognizes itself only as it appears to itself (as phenomenon) rather than as it is in itself.

     they are then mere empty conceptions of objects, as to the possibility or impossibility of the existence of which they furnish us with no means of discovery. They are mere forms of thought, without objective reality

465. #465

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 21.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the categories of pure understanding are the a priori conditions of possibility of all experience, not derived from nature but prescribing laws to it; and that self-consciousness ('I think') is not self-knowledge because determining one's own existence requires sensuous inner intuition (time), revealing the subject only as it appears to itself, never as it is in itself.

     The consciousness of self is thus very far from a knowledge of self

466. #466

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 21.

     Theoretical move: Kant refutes a "preformation-system" middle-ground account of the categories by showing it collapses into Humean skepticism: if the categories are merely subjective aptitudes rather than a priori principles grounding objective necessity, all cognitive judgements lose their claim to objective validity and knowledge dissolves into illusion. The positive summary then anchors the categories as conditions of the possibility of experience through the synthetic unity of apperception.

     all our knowledge, depending on the supposed objective validity of our judgement, is nothing but mere illusion

467. #467

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II.

     Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes the faculty of judgement as an irreducible, unteachable talent for subsumption under rules, and argues that transcendental logic—unlike general logic—can provide a priori guidance to this faculty by specifying both the rule and the conditions under which it applies, thereby grounding the "Analytic of Principles."

     transcendental logic, limited as it is to a determinate content, that of pure a priori cognitions

468. #468

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > CHAPTER II. System of all Principles of the Pure Understanding.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes that the categories of the pure understanding provide the systematic guide for deriving all transcendental principles of a priori cognition, and argues that even foundational principles require a subjective proof (from conditions of possible experience) to avoid the charge of mere assertion, while distinguishing synthetic a priori principles from both analytic judgements and mathematical principles drawn from intuition.

     our table of the categories will certainly afford us the natural and safe guidance. For it is precisely the categories whose application to possible experience must constitute all pure a priori cognition of the understanding

469. #469

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > SECTION II. Of the Supreme Principle of all Synthetical Judgements.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes that synthetic a priori judgements are possible only because experience itself depends on the synthetic unity of intuitions — the conditions of possible experience are simultaneously the conditions of the possibility of objects of experience, grounding objective validity in the necessary unity of apperception rather than in mere logical identity or contradiction.

     experience never could become knowledge, but would be merely a rhapsody of perceptions, never fitting together into any connected text, according to rules of a thoroughly united (possible) consciousness

470. #470

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > SECTION III. Systematic Representation of all Synthetical Principles of the Pure Understanding.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes that the pure understanding is the source of synthetic a priori principles governing all possible objects of experience, and demonstrates through the Axioms of Intuition that all phenomena are extensive quantities—thereby grounding the applicability of mathematics (especially geometry) to empirical objects via the necessary conditions of space and time as pure intuitions.

     without such rules we never could attain to cognition of an object

471. #471

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > B. SECOND ANALOGY. > PROOF.

     Theoretical move: Kant's Second Analogy argues that the causal principle ("everything that happens has a cause") is not derived empirically from observed regularities but is rather an a priori condition of the possibility of experience itself: only by subjecting the succession of phenomena to the law of causality can we distinguish objective temporal sequence from the merely subjective succession of apprehensions, thereby constituting phenomenal objects and empirical cognition at all.

     it is only because we subject the sequence of phenomena, and consequently all change, to the law of causality, that experience itself, that is, empirical cognition of phenomena, becomes possible

472. #472

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > 4. THE POSTULATES OF EMPIRICAL THOUGHT.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the categories of modality (possibility, reality, necessity) do not determine objects but express their relation to cognition, and that their legitimate use is strictly tied to possible experience and its synthetic unity — the postulates of empirical thought thus function as restrictions confining the categories to empirical use alone, barring transcendental or speculative employment.

     Our knowledge of the existence of things reaches as far as our perceptions, and what may be inferred from them according to empirical laws, extend.

473. #473

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > THEOREM. > PROOF

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the principles of modality (possibility, reality, necessity) are legitimately called "postulates" not because they are self-evident axioms requiring no proof, but because, like mathematical postulates, they describe the procedure of the cognitive faculty itself rather than augmenting the objective content of a concept — they are subjectively (not objectively) synthetical, indicating how a conception relates to the faculty of cognition.

     they have a reflective power, and apply to the conception of a thing, of which, in other respects, they affirm nothing, the faculty of cognition in which the conception originates and has its seat

474. #474

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental object (noumenon) marks only the limit of sensuous intuition — a structurally empty space that neither experience nor pure understanding can fill — and that misapplying the understanding beyond its proper field (making objects conform to concepts rather than concepts to intuitions) is the root error of transcendental illusion; the passage closes by systematically dividing the concept of 'nothing' according to the categories.

     The critique of the pure understanding, accordingly, does not permit us to create for ourselves a new field of objects beyond those which are presented to us as phenomena

475. #475

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > CHAPTER III Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the pure concepts of the understanding (categories) have no legitimate transcendental use—they can only be applied empirically, i.e., to objects of possible sensuous experience—thereby dismantling ontology's pretension to deliver synthetic a priori cognition of things-in-themselves and reducing it to a mere analytic of the understanding conditioned by sensible intuition.

     the understanding draws from itself, without borrowing from experience, it nevertheless possesses only for the behoof and use of experience

476. #476

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that philosophy, unlike mathematics, cannot proceed axiomatically or demonstratively because philosophical cognition operates through discursive concepts alone and not through the construction of concepts in intuition; consequently, dogmatical methods—including any attempt to import mathematical evidence into pure reason—are illegitimate and must be replaced by a critical, systematic method that grounds principles indirectly through their relation to possible experience.

     philosophy is a cognition of reason by the aid of conceptions alone, there is to be found in it no principle which deserves to be called an axiom

477. #477

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure reason, when operating in the transcendental sphere beyond empirical or intuitive constraints, requires a negative discipline—not to add positive knowledge but to systematically expose and restrain its inherent tendency to overstep the limits of possible experience, producing a "negative code of mental legislation" as the proper method of the Critique.

     a complete system of illusions and fallacies, closely connected with each other and depending upon grand general principles, there seems to be required a peculiar and negative code of mental legislation

478. #478

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that metaphysics requires a principled architectonic division grounded in the kind and origin of pure a priori cognition—not merely in degree of generality—and that this systematic unity constitutes philosophy's highest office: the critical regulation of speculative reason to prevent dialectical excess in morals and religion.

     All pure a priori cognition forms, therefore, in view of the peculiar faculty which originates it, a peculiar and distinct unity; and metaphysic is the term applied to the philosophy which attempts to represent that cognition in this systematic unity.

479. #479

     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.

     the merit of having connected with our highest interest a cognition, of which mere speculation was able only to form a conjecture, but the validity of which it was unable to establish

480. #480

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that transcendental ideas of pure reason, while incapable of constitutive use (as conceptions of actual objects), have a legitimate regulative employment as "focus imaginarius" guiding the understanding toward systematic unity; this regulative/constitutive distinction is grounded in the difference between reason's logical (hypothetical) and transcendental (apodeictic) deployments.

     This idea, accordingly, demands complete unity in the cognition of the understanding—not the unity of a contingent aggregate, but that of a system connected according to necessary laws.

481. #481

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes the Transcendental Ideal (ens realissimum) as the necessary but purely regulative idea of reason—the sum-total of all reality functioning as the a priori condition for the complete determination of every possible thing—while warning that hypostatizing this ideal into an actually existing Supreme Being constitutes an illegitimate dialectical illusion.

     To attain to a complete knowledge of a thing, it is necessary to possess a knowledge of everything that is possible, and to determine it thereby in a positive or negative manner.

482. #482

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > BOOK II.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes the three canonical forms of dialectical illusion in pure reason — the Paralogism, the Antinomy, and the Ideal — arguing that transcendental ideas necessarily produce sophisms that cannot be dispelled, only guarded against, because they arise from reason's own immanent structure rather than from contingent error.

     we can have no knowledge of an object, which perfectly corresponds to an idea, although we may possess a problematical conception thereof

483. #483

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Polemics.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that dogmatism and scepticism are both insufficient stages in the development of reason, and that only the critical method—which examines reason's own powers and determines the necessary (not merely empirical) limits of cognition—can resolve the disputes raised by pure reason and establish secure grounds for a priori synthetic knowledge.

     we determine not merely the empirical and ever-shifting bounds of our knowledge, but its necessary and eternal limits

484. #484

     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.

     these intuitions can never raise me above the sphere of experience. I should be justified, however, in applying these conceptions, in regard to their practical use

485. #485

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION VI. Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the Solution of Pure Cosmological Dialectic.

     Theoretical move: Kant deploys Transcendental Idealism as the resolution of cosmological antinomies by establishing that phenomena are mere representations whose reality is exhausted within the bounds of possible experience, such that the "transcendental object" functions only as an unknowable non-sensuous correlate of sensibility—not as a thing in itself accessible independently of experience.

     The non-sensuous cause of these representations is completely unknown to us and hence cannot be intuited as an object.

486. #486

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION V. Of the Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God.

     Theoretical move: Kant demonstrates that the cosmological proof of God's existence secretly presupposes the ontological argument it claims to avoid: by grounding necessary existence in the concept of the ens realissimum, it smuggles in an a priori inference from pure conception, revealing the cosmological argument to be a disguised repetition of the ontological one and thus equally illusory.

     for the cognition of that which is absolutely necessary must itself possess that character

487. #487

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION III. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Hypothesis.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that transcendental hypotheses—where ideas of pure reason are used to explain natural phenomena—are inadmissible in speculative/dogmatic use but permissible as defensive weapons in polemic, because speculative reason is dialectical by nature and its internal contradictions must be actively cultivated and resolved rather than suppressed.

     where we cannot know with certainty, we are at liberty to make guesses and to form suppositions

488. #488

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant surveys the history of pure reason by mapping its major revolutions along three axes—object (sensualism vs. intellectualism), origin (empiricism vs. rationalism), and method (naturalism vs. dogmatism vs. skepticism)—in order to position the critical path as the sole remaining viable route to satisfying reason's demand for systematic knowledge.

     the neglect of all scientific means is paraded as a peculiar method of extending our cognition

489. #489

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION III. Of Opinion, Knowledge, and Belief.

     Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes conviction (objectively valid, communicable) from persuasion (merely subjective, incommunicable), then grades subjective validity into opinion, belief, and knowledge, and argues that within the limits of pure speculative reason neither opinion nor knowledge is possible regarding God and the future life, but a practical/doctrinal/moral belief is both possible and necessary—making moral certainty the highest epistemic achievement available to reason beyond experience.

     Knowledge is both subjectively and objectively sufficient. Subjective sufficiency is termed conviction (for myself); objective sufficiency is termed certainty (for all).

490. #490

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that mathematical and philosophical reason differ fundamentally in procedure: mathematics constructs conceptions a priori in pure intuition (yielding genuine definitions), while philosophy can only analyze given conceptions (yielding mere expositions), making the mathematical method inapplicable and even dangerous when imported into philosophical/transcendental inquiry.

     The essential business of philosophy, indeed, is to mark out the limits of the science

491. #491

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that reason demands systematic unity ('architectonic') as the condition of genuine science, distinguishing technical (empirical) from architectonical (a priori) unity, and within this framework differentiates historical from rational cognition, philosophy from mathematics, and the scholastic from the cosmical conception of philosophy—culminating in the claim that moral philosophy occupies the apex of the legislative system of pure reason.

     If I make complete abstraction of the content of cognition, objectively considered, all cognition is, from a subjective point of view, either historical or rational.

492. #492

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Polemics.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure reason has no legitimate "polemic" sphere because all speculative assertions transcend possible experience and thus lack any criterion of truth; only the Critique itself, functioning as a supreme tribunal, can adjudicate these disputes by determining the rights and limits of reason—replacing the state-of-nature war of dogmatisms with a legal order of criticism, and positioning scepticism as a transitional provocation rather than a final resting place.

     the determination of the bounds of reason can be made only on a priori grounds; while the empirical limitation of reason, which is merely an indeterminate cognition of an ignorance that can never be completely removed, can take place only a posteriori.

493. #493

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IV. Of the necessity imposed upon Pure Reason of presenting a Solution of its Transcendental Problems.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that transcendental philosophy is uniquely self-obligating: because its cosmological questions are generated entirely from within reason's own ideas (not from empirical objects), reason cannot plead ignorance—it must produce a critical (not dogmatical) solution by interrogating the basis of its own cognition rather than seeking an external object.

     the answer must be received from the same sources whence the question arose

494. #494

     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.

     If, then, the actual cognition of these three cardinal propositions is perfectly useless, while Reason uses her utmost endeavours to induce us to admit them, it is plain that their real value and importance relate to our practical, and not to our speculative interest.

495. #495

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION VII. Critique of all Theology based upon Speculative Principles of Reason.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that all speculative/theoretical attempts to establish theology through pure reason are fruitless, because the principles of the understanding (including causality) are valid only immanently within experience and cannot be extended transcendentally to a Supreme Being; yet transcendental theology retains a negative utility in purifying and regulating the concept of a necessary being, with its positive establishment reserved for moral (practical) theology.

     It may be sufficient in this place to define theoretical knowledge or cognition as knowledge of that which is, and practical knowledge as knowledge of that which ought to be.

496. #496

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant announces the Transcendental Doctrine of Method as the formal complement to the Doctrine of Elements: having assessed the materials of pure reason and found them insufficient for metaphysical overreach, the task now is to design a proportionate architectonic — discipline, canon, architectonic, history — that secures what reason can legitimately build.

     the determination of the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason

497. #497

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION IV. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Relation to Proofs.

     Theoretical move: Kant disciplines pure reason's use in proof by establishing three methodological rules: transcendental proofs must ground objective validity in possible experience (not subjective association), must rest on a single proof (because only one ground determines the object), and must be ostensive/direct rather than apagogic/indirect—thereby limiting reason to its legitimate sphere and exposing dialectical illusions as structurally unavoidable when reason oversteps.

     a proof in the sphere of transcendental cognition does not show that the given conception (that of an event, for example) leads directly to another conception (that of a cause)—for this would be a saltus which nothing can justify; but it shows that experience itself, and consequently the object of experience, is impossible without the connection indicated by these conceptions.

498. #498

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that speculative reason, despite its a priori sources in intuition, conception, and ideas, cannot legitimately extend beyond possible experience; critical examination reveals transcendent claims as illusory, and the proper task of reason is to unify cognition within experience rather than soar beyond it — making the analysis of dialectical illusions both a psychological study and a philosophical duty.

     they are null and valueless, because they relate to a kind of knowledge to which no man can by any possibility attain

499. #499

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

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

     of which we can accordingly have no knowledge (neither intuition nor conception), in this merely negative sense noumena must be admitted

500. #500

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Ideas of pure reason (psychological, cosmological, theological) function solely as regulative principles—schemas for systematic unity of experience—and not as constitutive principles that extend cognition to real objects; to mistake them for the latter is the dialectical error of pure reason turning back on itself.

     By admitting these ideal beings, we do not really extend our cognitions beyond the objects of possible experience; we extend merely the empirical unity of our experience, by the aid of systematic unity

501. #501

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

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

     above predicates could not give us any knowledge of the soul as it is in itself, even if we regarded them as valid in respect of it, inasmuch as they constitute a mere idea, which cannot be represented in concreto

502. #502

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > CHAPTER III Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the pure categories of the understanding have no legitimate transcendental use beyond possible experience: without a corresponding sensuous intuition, the categories are empty forms of thought incapable of determining any object, and the concept of the noumenon must therefore be understood only in a negative, limitative sense—as a boundary-marker for sensible cognition rather than a positive domain of intelligible objects.

     our conceptions of the understanding, as mere forms of thought for our sensuous intuition, do not extend to these. What, therefore, we call noumenon must be understood by us as such in a negative sense.

503. #503

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes the essential difference between philosophical (discursive, via concepts) and mathematical (constructive, via a priori intuition) cognition to argue that transcendental philosophy cannot employ mathematical method: transcendental propositions are synthetic a priori but must proceed through pure concepts alone, without any corresponding a priori intuition, and can only yield rules for the synthesis of empirical intuitions.

     All our knowledge relates, finally, to possible intuitions, for it is these alone that present objects to the mind.

504. #504

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that rational psychology collapses into a paralogism by mistaking the mere formal unity of consciousness (the "I think") for an intuition of a substantial subject, thereby illegitimately applying the category of substance to what is only a logical unity; this critique demolishes speculative proofs of the soul's immortality while clearing space for a practical (moral) grounding of belief in a future life.

     There does not then exist any rational psychology as a doctrine furnishing any addition to our knowledge of ourselves. It is nothing more than a discipline, which sets impassable limits to speculative reason in this region of thought

505. #505

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION III. Of the Interest of Reason in these Self-contradictions.

     Theoretical move: Kant stages the antinomy of pure reason as an irreducible conflict between Dogmatism (thesis) and Empiricism (antithesis) in the determination of cosmological ideas, arguing that neither side can be settled by theoretical reason alone and that the tension itself points toward the need to locate the source of the conflict in reason's own structure rather than in the objects it investigates.

     it must boasts of its insight and its knowledge, just where all insight and knowledge cease to exist

506. #506

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental ideas of pure reason (psychological, cosmological, theological) cannot be constitutive principles extending cognition beyond experience, but function legitimately as regulative/heuristic principles that guide the understanding toward systematic unity—their "transcendental deduction" consists precisely in demonstrating this regulative role rather than any ostensive reference to objects.

     they possess, notwithstanding, as a priori synthetical propositions, objective though undetermined validity, and are available as rules for possible experience

507. #507

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.159

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

     the effect that psychoanalysis is after is not that of aesthetic fascination, but that of knowledge

508. #508

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.120

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego > Viva voce

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as the constitutive internal exterior of logos across key Ideological State Apparatuses (church, court, university, elections), showing that written law, sacred scripture, institutional knowledge, and democratic will can only be enacted and made performative when assumed by a living voice—a structural topology that is not archaic residue but the very mechanism by which symbolic/legal acts acquire their force.

     The teacher is the transmitter of Knowledge by his voice: Knowledge is all stored in books, but it can become effective only when relegated to the voice.

509. #509

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.148

     A month later:

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

     Knowledge, le savoir, and what Lacan called l'enseignement, teaching, are at the opposite end of fantasy; it is a matter of construction, and ultimately of matheme

510. #510

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.28

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory effected a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into a panoptic structure of total visibility, thereby reducing the subject to a fully determined, knowable position and eliminating the radical Lacanian insight that signifying systems never produce determinate identity—a move that makes resistance theoretically impossible.

     These categories of visibility are categories of knowledge. The perfection of vision and knowledge can only be procured at the expense of invisibility and nonknowledge.

511. #511

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.16

     Read My Desire

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's reduction of society to immanent relations of power and knowledge constitutes a historicism that undermines his own best insights about a 'surplus existence' that escapes predication—an insight whose Lacanian inflection (the non-existence of 'The' woman, the 'il y a') Copjec identifies and defends against Foucault's own anti-linguistic turn.

     his reduction of society to these relations is problematic... we are calling historicist the reduction of society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge.

512. #512

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

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "gap" internal to the symbolic—the absence of a final signifier—is what makes interpretation (which Lacan identifies with desire) both necessary and quasi-transcendental: the detective's desire is not a subjective bias but the structural principle that bridges irreducible evidence to its reading, and this same missing signifier (the signifier for woman) structurally forbids the sexual relation within detective fiction.

     the detective is the upholder of a particular law, the law of the limit, specifically, the limit of knowledge.

513. #513

     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.

     He is the place to which all our questions are addressed, the place of knowledge; he is therefore often imagined under the traits of the educator.

514. #514

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.171

     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.

     power is disjoined from knowledge, that the force which produces the subject is blind

515. #515

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.179

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Actuarial Origins of Detective Fiction

     Theoretical move: By tracing detective fiction's origins to the nineteenth-century "avalanche of numbers" and actuarial statistics, Copjec argues that the genre's narrative contract rests on a mathematical expectation of calculable risk — and then complicates this Foucauldian genealogy by showing how the panoptic-statistical apparatus that "makes up people" simultaneously forecloses the very possibility of transgression it purports to police, thereby exposing a structural paradox at the heart of modern surveillance and the liberal subject.

     In this way, the knowledge in which he is held is concealed from the subject. Secrecy is here conceived as a necessary ruse of modern power.

516. #516

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological move that displaces propositional truth (orthodoxy) in favour of transformative, relational truth (orthopraxis), arguing that the encounter with God occurs in and through the body of the neighbour—a claim enacted liturgically through parable, Sufi poetry, and Holocaust testimony, all of which converge on the Lacanian-resonant dissolution of a self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter.

     To have the truth as spoken of by Christ does not mean that we can somehow know God in an epistemological way, but rather that we are in relationship with God.

517. #517

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Dis-courses*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an a/theological "dis-course" — language that perpetually sends us off-course from God — is the only honest mode of religious speech, because revelation structurally contains concealment within it, requiring a fractured, deconstructive discourse that maintains a constitutive gap between human understanding and the divine.

     true knowledge is always knowledge plus – that is, knowledge that understands that it is always penetrated by unknowing.

518. #518

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *God as subject, not object*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that God cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge but must be understood as the absolute Subject before whom the human being becomes the object — a reversal grounded in the distinction between objective data and transformative, intimate encounter.

     the term 'knowing' in the Hebrew tradition (in contrast to the Greek tradition) is about engaging in an intimate encounter rather than describing some objective fact: religious truth is thus that which transforms reality rather than that which describes it.

519. #519

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the commonsense opposition between revelation and concealment is not timeless but historically constructed by Enlightenment rationalism, which theologians unwittingly internalized even while opposing secularization — thereby grounding a theological epistemology in the very presuppositions it nominally resisted.

     it was believed that, by employing pure reason (reason untouched by prejudice) one could decipher the singular meaning of what was being studied

520. #520

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *A revolution of the ‘how’*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "emerging conversation" in theology enacts a second-order revolution: rather than substituting new doctrinal content for old, it transforms the *manner* of holding beliefs — a shift in the 'how' rather than the 'what', such that nothing changes in content yet everything is altered in kind.

     this revolution is not one which merely adds to or subtracts from the world of our understanding, but rather one which provides the necessary tools for us to be able to look at that world in a completely different manner

521. #521

     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.

     John equates the existence of religious knowledge with the act of love. Knowledge of God (the Truth) as a set of propositions is utterly absent

522. #522

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that orthodoxy must be reconceived from 'right belief' (Greek-influenced, propositional) to 'believing in the right way' (Hebraic-mystical, praxis-oriented), thereby transcending the binary between absolutism and relativism by grounding theological knowing in love rather than correct doctrinal affirmation.

     love must be the first word on our lips and also the last … not as something which stands opposed to knowledge of God, or even as simply more important than knowledge of God, but, more radically still, as knowledge of God

523. #523

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes the dominant theological position that revelation is transparent self-disclosure — the opposite of concealment — which places God within the realm of reason, setting up this orthodoxy as the target for subsequent critique via apophatic or negative-theological moves.

     Christianity, as that which is brought into being and maintained by revelation, has a privileged access to the mind of God.

524. #524

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *From knowledge to love: reading from right to left*

     Theoretical move: The passage redefines 'orthodoxy' by etymologically inverting its traditional reading—from 'right belief' to 'believing in the right way' (i.e., in the way of love)—thereby dissolving the binary opposition between orthodoxy and heresy, and arguing that genuine religious knowledge is inseparable from loving praxis rather than propositional correctness.

     the only religious knowledge worth anything is love.

525. #525

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.65

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > From Fortune to Providence

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

     I know what I know (namely that I do not know), that (2) I experience something I did not foresee (because I could not)

526. #526

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

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Luther's doctrine of predestination as a structural analogue to the Freudian unconscious—a knowledge we do not know we have—in order to argue that embracing radical fatalism (the impossibility of self-grounded action or salvation) is the only authentic emancipatory position, one that negates human-reason's Aristotelian teleology and the ideological 'capitalization' of faith.

     Only through despair and the salubrity of faith do we acquire a belief in the existence of this knowledge.

527. #527

     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.

     His theology thus affirms a knowledge that we do not know that we have as the basis of faith, namely the knowledge about our excremental status.

528. #528

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.131

     Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > <span id="unp-ruda-0016.xhtml_p127" class="page"></span>Absolute Knowing, Absolute Fatalism

     Theoretical move: Absolute knowing is recast as "absolute fatalism" and "absolute comedy": it is the impossible-yet-necessary self-assumption of what makes knowledge impossible, a sacrificial move in which reason surrenders itself to its own constitutive limit, thereby distinguishing truth from knowledge and collapsing the distinction between knowing and unknowing.

     Absolute knowing is therefore unknowing... It does know that it has a knowledge that it does not know it has because it cannot assume it.

529. #529

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

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desiring Fortune

     Theoretical move: By routing Descartes's critique of fortune through Hegel's critique of eudemonistic ethics, the passage argues that Aristotelianism illegitimately universalizes natural causality into the realm of freedom, and that the fatalist corrective consists in recognizing the *absolute impossibility* of luck—thereby dissolving hope and its constitutive error of treating unknowable outcomes as merely contingently possible.

     we act as if we did not know what we know, which is the origin of hope (and fear)

530. #530

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.35

     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.

     This knowledge is true knowledge because this is what Scripture makes clear... It is knowledge of the impossibility of (attaining) salvation (by one's efforts). This knowledge thus produces salutary despair.

531. #531

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.50

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desire (Differently)!

     Theoretical move: By reading Descartes's *Passions of the Soul*, the passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of passion/desire but a *different use* of desire: the subject must distinguish externally caused passions from self-caused volitions and, through adequate judgment, redirect desire rather than abolish it—thereby establishing a "different mode of desire" as the very form of freedom.

     certain, clear, and distinct knowledge may produce firm judgments, which are the will's 'proper' weapons and hence produce true actions

532. #532

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.100

     The End of All Things > The Conflict of Determinisms: Intelligible Fatalism

     Theoretical move: Ruda, reading Schmid's "intelligible fatalism," argues that the subject emerges from an unresolvable conflict between two determinisms (rational/moral freedom and phenomenal causality), such that freedom is neither a given capacity nor contingency but is constituted retroactively through the forced, impossible decision to act morally—yielding a split subject and a transcendental antagonism as the only ground of ethics.

     We are determined to never know what will (here and now) result from the persisting conflict, since it exceeds the grasp of our capacity and reason.

533. #533

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.99

     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.

     since a situation is composed by the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation

534. #534

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.218

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Whose Multiculturalism?*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's and Žižek's universalist critiques of identity politics and multiculturalism are themselves enactments of institutionalized marginalization, enabled by a Foucauldian power/knowledge system that suppresses entire fields of inquiry, and that sophisticated multiculturalism—building coalitions across differences—may be the closest approximation to genuine universalism.

     there is nothing that accounts for this difference better than the continued operation of the power/knowledge system that Foucault analyzed

535. #535

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.110

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Event vs. the Simulacrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's ethic of fidelity to the truth-event is both a radicalization of Lacanian ethics (transposing "do not cede on your desire" into a persevering devotion to the event) and a point of divergence from Žižek's Lacanian critique, which holds that naming the event inevitably re-sutures its disruptiveness back into the symbolic order, whereas for Badiou naming is the very mechanism by which the impossible becomes possible.

     Truth may punch a hole in the situation's standard compilation of knowledges, but it is simultaneously, as Badiou remarks, 'the sole known source of new knowledges'

536. #536

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.96

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Badiou's theory of truth-events onto Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Badiou reconceptualises the Lacanian act and ethics of psychoanalysis by making the social/collective transformation that is only a byproduct in Lacan constitutively necessary to the event itself, thereby shifting the subject's fidelity to rupture from a 'private' experience to a premise of collective change.

     it is held together by a pool of taken-for-granted knowledge about the state of the world and the meaning of human life

537. #537

     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.

     power is disjoined from knowledge, that the force which produces the subject is blind, that the subject owes its precious singularity

538. #538

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.189

     **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.

     it is the knowledge of the listener that is in question here … the enunciator becomes all at once not unknowing (as in Bonitzer's account), but unknown, voluptuously an X

539. #539

     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."

     the noncorporealized voice of the classical documentary issues from a space other than that on the screen… thus transcending the visible, determined field, the voice maintains its absolute power over the image, its knowledge remains unimpugned.

540. #540

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.17

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory committed a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into the panoptic apparatus, thereby substituting a logic of total visibility and determinate subject-positions for Lacan's more radical thesis that signifying systems never produce determinate identities—a substitution that renders the theory structurally resistant to resistance.

     since all knowledge (or visibility) is produced by society… only knowledge (or visibility) is produced

541. #541

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.169

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Actuarial Origins of Detective Fiction**

     Theoretical move: Copjec, via Miller's reading of the panoptic, argues that modern power constitutes the subject *as* private precisely in order to conceal its own operation — there is no secret self outside power's knowledge — which in turn poses the paradox of how crime (transgression of a private boundary) is possible at all.

     the knowledge in which he is held is concealed from the subject. Secrecy is here conceived as a necessary ruse of modern power

542. #542

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec's introduction argues that Foucault's post-1968 historicism—his reduction of society to immanent relations of power—undermines his own most productive insight (the desubstantialized 'plebness' as an existence without predicate), and that Lacanian theory preserves what Foucault's genealogical turn abandons: a surplus existence that exceeds the positivity of the social.

     the truth of 'plebness' will therefore always be located outside knowledge, anyone's knowledge, including that which is possessed by what we can no longer call 'the' pleb him- or herself.

543. #543

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.290

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the limits of knowledge in love and grief are not deficiencies but constitutive dimensions of intimate bonds, and that psychoanalysis teaches not perfect transparency but a tolerant, even productive relation to irreducible unknowing — in others and in oneself.

     the highest attainment of wisdom is the capacity for something more than knowing—what the Zen masters call 'knowing of nonknowing,' muchi no chi in Japanese

544. #544

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.283

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that relinquishing the demand to know—including the unknowable reasons behind a loved one's suicide—paradoxically enables a deeper form of love and presence; the void opened by death becomes the very condition for renewed intimacy, structurally paralleling Lacanian insights about lack as constitutive of desire and the Real as that which always escapes symbolization.

     Knowing is in some important part about control. It's less about being in the moment than it is about predicting the future.

545. #545

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.12

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c02_r1.xhtml_page_8" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="8"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c02_r1.xhtml_page_9" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="9"></span>*2*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs an autobiographical-theoretical pivot: the author's grief-driven compulsion to *know* what led to his son's suicide, and his subsequent entry into analysis, set up the book's central argument that analytic work ultimately displaces the demand for knowledge with an acceptance of unknowing — a move that challenges the author's own philosophical commitments to theoretical clarity.

     The strangest thing of all is that what finally gave me some feeling of peace and a renewed sense of life was coming to accept what I didn't know, what I could not know.

546. #546

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.254

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c18_r1.xhtml_page_239" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="239"></span>*18*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a first-person phenomenological account of grief-induced unknowing, using the encounter with the suicide weapon as an occasion to raise the question of whether psychoanalysis is inherently a "tragic art" that brings the subject up against an irreducible limit of self-knowledge rather than resolution.

     The unfolding of the analysis has brought me to a much deeper knowledge of myself and of my relation to my son. And I don't doubt the correctness of much of that new insight. But all of it now also seems suspended amid agonizing uncertainties.

547. #547

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.92

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The truth of faith is handed over to the academic

     Theoretical move: When Christian truth is treated as a propositional object available for contemplation and testing, it is effectively surrendered to academic specialists (philosophers, historians, sociologists, psychologists, theologians), reducing faith to a domain of scholarly dissection rather than existential engagement.

     The truth of Christianity is thus given over to those who can dissect it, study it, and reflect upon it.

548. #548

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.156

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Beyond believe, behave, belong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for inverting the standard Christian order of belief→behavior→belonging into belonging→behavior→belief, grounding this reversal in a radically subjective, unlocalizable 'miracle' of transformation; it draws on a Hebraic model of communal ritual and interpretive wrestling to contend that authoritative, objectified belief actually undermines truth, and recruits Pascal's Wager to show that entering communal practice is the proper site for the miracle of faith rather than doctrinal assent.

     For the problem resides not in having an interpretation but rather in the place that we give to our interpretation. No matter how wonderful our interpretation is, if it occupies an authoritative place then it undermines its own status.

549. #549

     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.

     the truth that God did not reveal was that, if one ate from the tree, one would immediately gain knowledge of good and evil and become like God.

550. #550

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

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter004.html_page_78"></span>The theological naming of God

     Theoretical move: The passage traces how Augustine's identification of the Hebrew "I AM" with Greek philosophical Being, consolidated by Duns Scotus's doctrine of univocity of being, established a theological tradition in which God is rendered as an object of thought whose essence can be directly named and rationally comprehended — a move the author sets up to critique in favour of a non-objectifying, post-encounter theological language.

     Such an approach affirmed a direct correlation between our understanding of God and God's essence.

551. #551

     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 > Divorce of knowledge from practice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that treating religious truth as propositional information (on the model of scientific knowledge) severs the intrinsic link between knowledge and moral/existential practice, whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition holds that genuine knowledge of God is constitutively inseparable from one's mode of life.

     knowledge of God becomes something akin to the type of information a physicist would have concerning the nature of black holes. This type of knowledge does not require, evoke, or demand any moral practice.

552. #552

     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 > Indirectly approaching the Word

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

     the central Word of the text is never directly grasped as a source of knowledge, but rather is encountered as a life-transforming event.

553. #553

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.144

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The Event of Christianity as miracle

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that being, revelation, and event in Christian theology cannot be separated but form a Trinitarian unity exhibiting "minimal difference," and that genuine theological knowledge is a "knowing beyond knowledge" that reconciles radical doubt with absolute certainty—positioning miracle as the irreducible locus of faith rather than a cognitive or metaphysical object.

     he was referring to a type of knowledge that is foreign to the academic disciplines... the knowledge of a transformation that could never be placed into words or experience and thus could never be objectified

554. #554

     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 > Reception without conception

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that God's name in the Hebrew Bible functions not as a noun (essence) but as a verb (event/happening), instantiating a mode of divine presence that is received without being conceived — a "presence beyond presence" that resists objectification, naming, and understanding while remaining immanently operative in acts of love and liberation.

     God is made known only in action, only as blessing.

555. #555

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.110

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Pascal and the critique of Descartes’ God

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Pascal's critique of Descartes to argue that the concept of God's infinity collapses into a description of finite human limits rather than any positive content about God, positioning faith as grounded in a truth that exceeds and escapes rational-epistemic capture.

     humanity exists at sea level, held between the heavenly realm of 'certain knowledge' and eerie depths of 'absolute ignorance.'

556. #556

     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 > The contemporary church

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against a theology of God as a knowable being whose revealed side can be protected and deepened, pivoting instead toward a "radical cut" introduced by the Incarnation that ensures even the revealed side of God remains concealed — a move that reframes theological unknowing not as a limit of human cognition but as intrinsic to divine revelation itself.

     Knowingly betraying our knowledge of God (the revealed side) would amount to a willful turning from the life of faith.

557. #557

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.129

     <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.

     His wisdom did not come from somehow dissipating his ignorance, but rather from knowing his ignorance and deepening it.

558. #558

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.61

     Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots** > **The Age of Distinctions**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's distinction between the *eiron* (ironic self-aware figure who acknowledges the limits of knowledge) and the *alazon* (boastful pretender who parrots claims beyond his understanding) is deployed as the philosophical hinge between worldly social sagacity and genuine ironic instruction, positioning irony as the proper response to the outer limit of human understanding rather than speculative chatter.

     Knowledge of the world, like the life of its possessor, is always limited. And when human understanding reaches the outer limit of knowledge, beyond which only non-understanding endures

559. #559

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.56

     Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots** > **The Age of Distinctions**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Danish Hegelianism hinges on the classical alazon/eiron distinction: the chattering systematicians embody the alazon's prideful self-ignorance, while Socratic irony (eironeia) marks the eccentric wisdom of those who distinguish between what they understand and what they do not—a distinction that Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung), misapplied by parroting disciples, collapses into mere gossip.

     Socrates still is what he was, the simple wise man, because of the peculiar distinction that he expressed both in words and in life... 'For Socrates was great in that he distinguished between what he understood and what he did not understand.'

560. #560

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.202

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Modes of Concealment** > **Talking Through**

     Theoretical move: McCormick maps Heidegger's hierarchical typology of linguistic practices onto a spectrum from Truth (Aletheia) to Falsehood (Pseudos), arguing that Platonic dialectic (Durchsprechen/dialegesthai) occupies a middle position — a preparatory 'speaking-through' that cultivates seeing in one's interlocutor — which Heidegger recovers as the essential counter-move to idle talk.

     Genuine speech (echte Sprechen, logos alethes) — Disclosive knowledge (Aletheuein) — Philosopher (Heidegger)

561. #561

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.154

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **The Crisis of Learning** > **"The Book!"**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Heidegger's early (1921–22) conceptualization of *Geschwätz* (babble), *Gerede* (idle talk), and *Geschreibe* as kindred modes of deficient discourse—marked by the recursive desire for novelty, dilettantish self-assurance, and the leveling of rigorous inquiry—showing how these concepts emerge from his critique of historiography, academic *Weltanschauung*, and the broader social pathology of modern intellectual life before their mature formulation in *Being and Time*.

     idle talk about worldviews [Weltanschauungsgerede], which drags things in out of the blue and degrades phenomenology practically to the opposite of that which it genuinely is and that whereby it is— knowledge!

562. #562

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.121

     Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity** > **Epistemic Probability**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Christendom is leveraged to show how "epistemic probability" — the habit of assessing degrees of belief by historical evidence — becomes naturalized as "second nature," displacing the paradox and leap of faith with a penchant for proof, and thereby rendering authentic religious subjectivity impossible.

     when it gossips [snakker] about him [it] quite literally does not know what it is gossiping [snakker] about

563. #563

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.210

     Ancient Figures of Speech > The World Persuaded > **Lost Examples Regained**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's pre-*Being and Time* lectures develop idle talk (*Gerede*) as a structural phenomenon of academic culture, showing how the deceptive speech of the sophist and the deceived speech of the "stooge" are co-constitutive modes of *Gerede* that cover up authentic disclosure (*aletheia*) and deviate *Dasein* from itself.

     the reader— there are purported to be such readers in the sciences as well— acquires the possibility of dealing with the matters with great skill without ever having seen them.

564. #564

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

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

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

     The pivotal point in this affair is not knowledge, just as trust is not simply ignorance... those who are obsessed with avoiding all deception, and naivety, are precisely those who ultimately blindly believe that the Other knows exactly what she is doing.

565. #565

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.111

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectics for Marx**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances, via Postone's reading of Marx, the argument that dialectics is not a universally applicable method but a historically determinate critical form that arises with and is co-extensive with capitalist commodity production — meaning Marx's Capital constitutes an immanent critique of both Hegel and Ricardo rather than a synthesis or simple inversion of them, with the critique of labor in capitalism (not from the standpoint of labor) as its proper standpoint.

     we can advance by provisionally defining philosophy as a discipline of objectless knowledge, which should not be understood as an organized theoretical body of knowledge production

566. #566

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.13

     *Unexpected Reunions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the present historical conjuncture demands a specifically philosophical, inventive reading of Marx—against both orthodox Marxist teleology (capitalism as its own gravedigger) and Althusserian symptomatic/epistemological reading—because capitalism's immanent limit is not socialism but barbarism, rendering any reliance on capitalism's internal logic for emancipation untenable.

     Philosophy operates in the field of knowledge and ensures its (re)production. It exists in the field of knowledge alone, preoccupied with and thinking the effects of knowledge on its own terrain.

567. #567

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.279

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics is structurally homologous to the Lacanian concept of symbolic registration by the big Other, and further proposes a three-level ontology (quantum Real, abyssal Void, macroscopic reality) modeled on the Klein bottle, where the collapse of the wave function is not an anomaly but constitutive of quantum reality itself — with the 'snout' of the Klein bottle retroactively producing the 'mollusk' of the Real.

     when Rovelli talks about all the permutations of knowledge (what others know of us, what we know of ourselves, what others know about our knowledge), which means of the symbolic 'registration' of states of things

568. #568

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

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

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

     The title of Habermas's early masterpiece 'knowledge and human interest' is perhaps today more relevant than ever.

569. #569

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.276

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

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

     Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

570. #570

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.147

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "Absolute Knowing" names a redoubled not-knowing in which ontological incompleteness is displaced into reality itself, and that this logic—exemplified by the Lacanian "subject of the unconscious" structured as a Kierkegaardian apostle—entails rejecting the human/animal exception as the origin of sexual deadlock: the rupture of sexuality is pre-human, constitutive of nature as such, with humanity merely the site where this constitutive gap "appears as such."

     the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice; this truth is 'absolute' also in the sense of being absolved from factual truth about Jews.

571. #571

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.129

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

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

     It is the search for this 'missing link' that sustains the link between sexuality and knowledge, i.e., that makes cognitive probing an irreducible component of human sexuality.

572. #572

     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.

     knowledge [here](#corollary_1…), [here](#theorem_ii…), [here](#corollary_3…)

573. #573

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.101

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Hegel’s <span id="scholium_12_hegels_parallax.xhtml_IDX-834"></span>Parallax

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing's self-purifying immanence paradoxically inverts into free association and arbitrary decision, and that the unbridgeable gap between Hegel's *Phenomenology* and *Logic* — readable as a Möbius strip or cross-cap — is the Real/impossible at its purest, while the further reversal between dialectical skepticism and stable encyclopedic knowledge constitutes the ultimate "infinite judgment" of philosophy.

     we move from the subjective generation of truth to the objectification of this truth in the form of knowledge. We are no longer 'doing' logic but being told about logic as an object of transmittable knowledge.

574. #574

     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.

     the knowledge which we approach through psychoanalysis is impossible-real: we are on dangerous ground; in getting too close to it we observe suddenly how our consistency, our positivity, is dissolving itself

575. #575

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.169

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian subject is not one object among others but the objective embodiment of reality's inherent contradiction/impossibility, and that a genuinely materialist thinking must pass through the subject rather than eliminating it, because the Real of reality's antagonism is only accessible via the subject's irreducible excessiveness.

     a short-circuit of the epistemological and ontological levels (of knowledge and being) in the form of their joint/common negativity (lack of knowledge falls into a lack of being)

576. #576

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

     Borna Radnik > Notes > 31. To again quote Kant:

     Theoretical move: This passage from Kant establishes that understanding and sensibility must operate in combination to determine objects, and that any "transcendental" cognition beyond possible experience remains unknowable — a limit-claim that Lacanian/Hegelian readings will leverage to theorize the Real and the split subject.

     it even remains unknown whether such a transcendental (extraordinary) cognition is possible at all, at least as one that stands under our customary categories

577. #577

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.137

     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.

     The one-and-only outcome from encounters between disciplines I root for is the possible emergence of true knowledge.

578. #578

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.99

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

     Theoretical move: Lynch's *The Straight Story* is not an exception to his fantasmatic method but its purest instance: by presenting the American heartland as mythic fantasy rather than reality, Lynch demonstrates that "straight" reality is itself the product of fantasmatic distortion that fills the gaps of desire, and the film's structure mirrors this by moving the spectator from a world of desire (absence, non-knowledge, lack) into a world of fantasy (fullness, coherence, meaning).

     In this world, the spectator experiences her/himself in a state of non-knowledge, attempting to decipher the desire of the Other (that is, the film itself)... The world of fantasy, in contrast, fills these gaps and provides the spectator with a sense of knowing the whole story.

579. #579

     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.

     knowledge, misrecognition, and truth

580. #580

     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.

     Knowledge is perhaps eroticized to a greater extent in the hysteric's discourse than elsewhere... Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria.

581. #581

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.152

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-150-0"></span>**The University Discourse**

     Theoretical move: The university discourse is theorised as a historical rationalization of the master's discourse, where systematic knowledge displaces the master signifier in the commanding position while producing the alienated, divided subject as its remainder — and this structural function of mere rationalization is contrasted with genuine scientific work, which Lacan re-aligns with the hysteric's discourse.

     For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth.

582. #582

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.108

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-105-0"></span>*The Other as Object, Symbolic Relations*

     Theoretical move: By tracing the analyst's proper position through a critique of both imaginary and symbolic identifications, Fink argues that situating the analyst as the omniscient Other of demand traps the analysand at the level of demand rather than desire, and that only by relinquishing the position of subject supposed to know—redirecting knowledge-authority to the analysand's own unconscious—can analysis constitute the subject as desiring rather than demanding.

     the analyst gives what he or she has ('knowledge') instead of what he or she does not have (lack, in other words, desire).

583. #583

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.164

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Formalization and the Transmissibility of Psychoanalysis**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's mathemes are theorized as a non-quantitative, qualitative mode of formalization whose value lies not in guaranteeing perfect communication but in the transmissibility of the written trace itself across time and interpreters; the "pass" is offered as an allied institutional mechanism for establishing a scientificity peculiar to psychoanalysis.

     The process was devised in part to gather information on the analytic process independent of what the analyst him or herself provides, and to thus confirm or refine notions about what actually occurs in analysis.

584. #584

     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.

     That may take the form of writing, for example, or of the establishment of a 'body of knowledge,' knowledge that takes on 'a life of its own,' independent of its creator, as it may be added to or modified by others.

585. #585

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science

     Theoretical move: The passage challenges the naive positivist conception of Science as a monolithic, axiomatic enterprise by pointing to the actual plurality and contestation within the history and philosophy of science, thereby clearing theoretical ground for a non-dismissive appraisal of psychoanalysis's scientific status.

     Science (with a capital S) is assumed to refer to a self-evident set of 'bodies of knowledge' (as opposed to a diverse group of hotly disputed social practices)

586. #586

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.42

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **Knowledge without a Subject**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious, structured as language, operates as an autonomous, self-unfolding knowledge that is strictly subjectless—"known unbeknownst" to the person—thereby creating a theoretical tension: if the unconscious requires no subject, how can Lacan simultaneously theorize a subject of the unconscious?

     There is perfectly well articulated knowledge for which no subject is, strictly speaking, responsible.

587. #587

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.90

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Signified**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of metaphor is leveraged to distinguish between ordinary "understanding" (assimilation of signifiers into a pre-existing chain, which is imaginary) and a "true" transformative process at the border of the symbolic and the real, where new meaning is created and the subject is implicated — making "insight" irrelevant to the analytic process.

     everything is brought back to the level of the status quo, to the level of what is already known. Lacan's writing itself overflows with extravagant, preposterous, and mixed metaphors, precisely to jolt one out of the easy reductionism inherent in the very process of understanding.

588. #588

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.171

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States is reduced to a disembodied textual corpus because it lacks the clinical and institutional praxis through which the discourse is transmitted in France; genuine transmission requires subjective experience, not merely publications.

     Perhaps I would read [Aristotle] better if I assumed he had less knowledge

589. #589

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.29

     part i

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

     the precipitation of knowledge does not really solve anything: we can come to know what there is to know quite soon in this process, yet this insight of knowledge is not enough; the work of analysis is also needed

590. #590

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.97

     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.

     the noncoincidence of knowledge and truth... Real trust, as opposed to knowledge (especially knowledge based on sense-certainty), is always redoubled, it is never simply immediate.

591. #591

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.304

     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.

     the knowledge which concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position

592. #592

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.138

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads the final scene of Henry James's *The Wings of the Dove* as a demonstration of how the intersubjective status of knowledge (knowing that the Other knows) restructures libidinal economy, and how Densher's "test" enacts a deceptive formal/informal dialectic aimed at deceiving the big Other—presenting a forced choice as freedom while the object-letter functions as a proto-Hitchcockian materialization of intersubjective tension.

     The intersubjective status of knowledge, of 'cognizance being taken,' is crucial here: not simply knowledge, but knowledge about the Other's knowledge.

593. #593

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.347

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

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

     it is the humanists who stand for belief, while the fundamentalists stand for knowledge—in short, the true danger of fundamentalism lies not in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself.

594. #594

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.407

     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 passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and brief elaborations on various topics (Hegelian dialectics, Christian theology, psychoanalysis, biogenetics, digital technology), containing no sustained theoretical argument of its own but several embedded conceptual gestures including a Lacanian reference to truth vs. knowledge and a Hegelian point about historical dimension of notions.

     the real materialist task is not primarily to dissociate knowledge from meaning but, rather, to articulate the possibility of asserting a dimension of truth outside meaning

595. #595

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.141

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

     James's last novel, *The Golden Bowl,* a true counterpoint to *Wings,* focuses on this strange status of knowledge.

596. #596

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.166

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.

     it is not only knowledge about our own vanity, but also its inherent obverse, technological savoir-faire, knowledge which is power

597. #597

     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 gaze is the absent point in the spectator's knowledge, the point at which a film attests to the limits of its knowledge as well as the spectator's.

598. #598

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.237

     29 > **9. Desire and Not Showing Enough**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists primarily of footnote apparatus for two chapters, deploying the desire/drive distinction as an organizing theoretical axis for a cinema-of-desire vs. cinema-of-fantasy framework, and citing key sources (Metz, Barthes, Brooks, Bazin, Kracauer) to position desire as intrinsic to cinematic narrative movement.

     Narration comes into being when knowledge is unevenly distributed—when there is a disturbance or disruption in the field of knowledge

599. #599

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.40

     <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.

     the 'signifying chain' that structures the field of positive knowledge and belief

600. #600

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.50

     <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.

     It perpetuates itself through knowledge that poses as objective, as absolutely foreign to the 'irrational' and tautological dimension of mastery… But this is still a form of mastery ('the new tyranny of knowledge').

601. #601

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.147

     <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.

     Truth is not truth about the Real; the Real is inherent to truth as its inner limit, as what redoubles truth into knowledge and (surplus-) jouissance.

602. #602

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.125

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.

     analysis is based on a presumption 'that knowledge about truth can be constituted on the basis of its experience.'

603. #603

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.194

     <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).

     A question that thus becomes very important for Lacanian theory, and could be dated to Seminar XVII (L'Envers de la psychanalyse), is, for example, 'how is truth as knowledge possible?'

604. #604

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that truth-as-perspective (in Nietzsche) and analytic discourse (in Lacan) share a structurally homologous status: both are constituted not by a new stable position but by the irreducible gap or decentering produced in the *shift* between perspectives/discourses, figured as a "Two" of pure disjunction rather than either the One or the multiple.

     It is interesting to note that we find a very similar question in Lacan: how is knowledge as truth possible?

605. #605

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.47

     **Master/Slave Dialectic**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the dialectical logic running from Hegel's Master/Slave through the concept of Mediation to Kant's transcendental idealism, arguing that identity, recognition, and knowledge are never immediate but always the result of a mediating process — a dynamic that Lacan imports into the Imaginary as constitutive aggressivity and alienation.

     The problem of knowledge is that of bridging the gap between subject and object, of mediating. It is the problem of getting the object in-itself to be subjective or for us without its ceasing to be objective or true.

606. #606

     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.

     Freud's discovery of the unconscious implies that the subject knows what it's doing but cannot articulate this knowledge. As a result, others, from the perspective of interpretation, have more insight into the subject's designs than the subject itself.

607. #607

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.88

     **Transference** > **Unconscious**

     Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-layered theoretical account of the Unconscious by moving from Freud's topographical and economic descriptions (timelessness, exemption from contradiction, primary process) through Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as structured by and dependent on the Other/language, to contemporary arguments (McGowan, Zupančič) that the unconscious is the site of ontological negativity, genuine freedom, and desire that exceeds conscious will.

     As Lacan put it, unconscious knowledge is a knowledge that does not know itself.

608. #608

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's rapprochement between Hegel and Schelling by arguing that Hegel's opening of the Science of Logic is actually a covert refutation of Schelling's pure indeterminacy, and that Hegel's emergentist 'layer-cake' ontology is genuinely different from and superior to Schelling's pseudo-emergentist 'layer-doughnut' model, with Lacan's 'rabbit in the hat' critique being recruited to illuminate Schelling's circular presupposition of spirit within nature.

     these mindless pre/non-subjective dimensions are knowable in themselves thanks to their inherent forms and sometimes come to be really known by the subjectivities that happen to have been eventually precipitated out of evolving nature

609. #609

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.79

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real](#contents.xhtml_ch3) > Žižek’s Semi-Retroactive Theory of Science

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's ontology of retroactive positing is internally inconsistent — conceding a pre-existent physical reality while denying it — and that this inconsistency reveals a deeper "Frito-Lay" presupposition shared by all modern (Kantian and Hegelian) philosophy: that the subject–world relation exhausts the field of speculation, a presupposition the author proposes to overcome via a non-transcendental, object-oriented ontology.

     one can 'define Hegel's (idealist) premise as the claim that all knowledge can be ultimately generated from truth'

610. #610

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.312

     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.

     We are overflown by knowledge which (to refer to Lacan's formula of the university discourse) acts as the agent of today's predominant cynical discourse

611. #611

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

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

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

     first-order self-knowledge is not observational or inferential [not of an object 'already there'] but constitutive

612. #612

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.302

     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.

     Slavoj claimed that what was missing was the field known as ideology, or, rather, unconscious knowledge: (4) 'unknown knowns,' which are the things I did not know that I know

613. #613

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.315

     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.

     I think that knowledge matters, that knowing something always affects this thing, somehow changes its status. In this case, it is the very act of knowing that the game is over which effectively makes the game over

614. #614

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.172

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

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

     what Zhuang Zi learns about himself is not a matter of 'justified true belief,' i.e., a kind of certified knowledge arrived at through a logical refutation of doubt

615. #615

     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.

     the libertines persistently fail in realizing their desire, because they do not succeed in bridging the constitutive gap between knowledge and desire.

616. #616

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.117

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

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

     Foucault attempts to theorize outside the constraints of the production of truth and knowledge.

617. #617

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

     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.

     woman's jouissance is the signifier of the lack of knowledge (in the Other). It marks the point where the Other does not know.

618. #618

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.25

     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.

     unconscious knowledge is a knowledge that does not know itself… there is a particular kind of knowledge that exists only in, and as, the very form of the unconscious, its work and its formations.

619. #619

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.153

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel

     Theoretical move: Sexuality (as linked to the unconscious) constitutes a short circuit between ontology and epistemology: the lack at the heart of sex is not a contingent missing piece of knowledge but a structural incompleteness of being itself, and the unconscious names the inherent link between sexuality and knowledge in their shared fundamental negativity. The 'dream's navel' figures this gap where the lack in knowledge coincides with a lack in being.

     related not to what we can know, but to the hole in the very net of knowledge that can be laid out in the analytic interpretation.

620. #620

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.72

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology > Je te m'athème … moi non plus

     Theoretical move: The Badiou-Cassin polemic over sophistry is mobilized as a philosophical performance of the Lacanian claim that there is no sexual relation: their respective stances (truth-oriented philosophy vs. language-immersed sophistry) are themselves staged as an enactment of the masculine/feminine divide in Lacan's formulas of sexuation.

     These two studies, or readings, or ruptures, made by a woman and a man… turn around knowledge