Lalangue

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (126)

1. #01

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.131

   Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Ten Commandments as the Laws of Speech > The Letters of the Law

   Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Ten Commandments—especially the prohibitions on idolatry and the Sabbath—enact a Lacanian logic of the signifier: the second commandment demands the elimination of the Imaginary in favour of the Symbolic, while the Sabbath opens the productive gap/void in which pure signifiance supersedes mere signification, and the whole Decalogue thus founds a culture of irreducible interpretive contestation.

   insofar as I share its language [langue] with other subjects, that is, insofar as this language [langue] exists— to use it to signify something altogether different from what it says.

2. #02

   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.

   Lacan coins the term lalangue (from the definite article la and the noun langue) to refer to these non-communicative aspects of language which, by playing on ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a kind of jouissance (S20, 126).

3. #03

   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_110"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0128"></span>**linguistics**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with linguistics is neither a straightforward application nor a faithful borrowing: he selectively imports Saussurean and Jakobsonian concepts (signifier, metaphor/metonymy, enunciation/statement) and deliberately modifies them for psychoanalytic ends—coining 'linguistérie' to mark this irreducible difference between linguistics and psychoanalysis.

   It was this that led Lacan to coin the neologism linguistérie (from the words linguistique and hystérie) to refer to his psychoanalytic use of linguistic concepts

4. #04

   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.

   the tension between the scientific formalism of the MATHEME and the semantic profusion of lalangue constitutes one of the most interesting features of Lacan's later work

5. #05

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.92

   **vn**

   Theoretical move: Using Melanie Klein's case of Dick, Lacan argues that the subject's entry into the human world is not a matter of ego development but of symbolic integration: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, and it is the analyst's grafting of the Oedipal symbolisation onto the child's imaginary inertia that constitutes the therapeutic act—demonstrating that genuine speech, not language as such, is what coordinates the symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

   The virtue of speech, in so far as the act of speech is a mode of functioning coordinated to a symbolic system that is already established, typical and significant.

6. #06

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.39

   THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

   Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Freudian unconscious from all prior and contemporary forms (romantic, Jungian, Hartmannian) by insisting it is structured like a signifying system — something that "speaks" at the level of the subject with the same elaboration as consciousness — thereby grounding psychoanalysis in the primacy of the signifier rather than any obscure primordial will.

   open the Lalande dictionary. Or read the delightful list provided by Dwelshauvers

7. #07

   Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.2

   http://www.lacaninireland.com

   Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," Lacan argues that grammaticality and signification must be rigorously distinguished: any grammatical chain generates meaning when placed in a context/dialogue, which means meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on a referent and the function of sense — and crucially, the unconscious cannot be located through metaphorical meaning-hunting in grammatical structures.

   this positive tongue that the English tongue is, I mean the tongue as it is spoken

8. #08

   Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

   **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

   Theoretical move: Mannoni's extended anecdote about the proper name argues that the signifier's attachment to the signified is irreducible and escapes the subject's mastery of nomination — the proper name, constructed from pure phonemic sequence, acquires a quasi-autonomous identity that resists substitution, illuminating Leclaire's earlier claim about the irreducibility of the proper name in the fundamental phantasy.

   For him with his arrival in France every word has changed with all the possibility of bilingual puns. But there was one which stuck much more than the others which was as one could say rooted.

9. #09

   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 concrete reality of every existing tongue... the ambiguities in the tongue about the function of gender

10. #10

    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.

    the consonantal battery of the made-up sentence... the moving value of these two lines, is essentially in the repercussion first of all of these four sibilant s's... this is of a nature to force us, to draw us intimately closer to the function of the signifier.

11. #11

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that topology—specifically two-dimensional surface theory—provides the structural model for the subject's constitution through the fall of the objet petit a, where the cut on a surface (not a metaphorical void in the real) is what determines the division of the subject; Bejahung/Verneinung, the phallus as attribute, and Stoic *ptosis* are marshalled to show that the subject is the effect of a structural cut, not merely a hole in the real.

    To write and to publish is not the same thing. That I write even when I speak is not in doubt.

12. #12

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76

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

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of the subject's division by mapping the Id (as grammatical/thinking structure) against the Unconscious (as non-existence, the 'I am not'), showing how these two fields do not overlap but rather eclipse each other—and that their intersection is mediated by the objet petit a, which emerges as the operator of alienation, while castration is recast as the failure of any Bedeutung to cover sexual difference.

    The laughter in question is produced at the level of this I am not. Take up any example to it and, to take up the first one which is offered on opening the book, that of famillionnairely

13. #13

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.126

    **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 uses a linguistic analysis of French and English negation ('pas tout' / 'anything') to motivate a transition from Aristotelian syllogistic (subalternation from universal to particular) to the logic of quantifiers, arguing that the latter—by expressing the universal affirmative through double negation ('there is no man who is not wise')—better captures the structural relationship between universal and particular that psychoanalytic theory of the subject requires.

    referring myself to this specificity of the French tongue. I only want to take the support of this something that must indeed also happen elsewhere, if it happens in our tongue.

14. #14

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.134

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the neologism *lituraterre/litturaterrir* to theorise writing as furrowing (not metaphor), arguing that the Japanese writing system — where a character can be read in two distinct pronunciations — exemplifies how the letter, distinct from the sign, supports the signifier and divides the subject between writing-register and speech-register; this division exposes that there is no sexual relationship, only an "impossible 'it is written.'"

    Japanese, is the perpetual translation of the events of language.

15. #15

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.46

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is irreducibly metaphorical—the referent is always "real" precisely because it is ungraspable—and uses this to ground both surplus-jouissance (whose support is metonymy) and psychoanalysis's relationship to linguistics: psychoanalysis does not borrow from linguistics but rather moves within the same constitutive metaphoricity, with surplus-jouissance functioning as the sliding metonymic object that keeps discourse in motion.

    for there to be a tongue all the same in which the following, this is read wei and it functions both in the formula wu wei which means inaction, so then it means to act, and then you see wei used as like

16. #16

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    **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.

    It is not for nothing that when you learn a foreign tongue, you put the first consonant of what you hear second, and the second first.

17. #17

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.92

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the lapsus is always fundamentally a written phenomenon (lapsus calami even when linguae), and uses this to establish that there is no metalanguage because one only ever speaks *about* language by starting from writing—culminating in the claim that his seminar on the Purloined Letter is ultimately an extended discourse on the phallus.

    when you have tinkered a little with a tongue like the one that I am in the process of learning here... the Japanese tongue, well then, you will notice then the degree to which a writing can work upon a tongue.

18. #18

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.101

    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.

    Yad'lun

19. #19

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.150

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two modes of the One — the One of attribute (defining a class) and the One of pure difference (defining a set element) — and uses this distinction to ground the sexuation formula: the existence of an exception (∃x.Φ̄x) is what counts the One "in addition," grounding the masculine "all" (tout homme), while the question of what constitutes an "all" is deferred to the logic of the y'a d'lun.

    The question of all (tous), what is an all, is to be completely restated starting from the function that Y'ad'lun articulates.

20. #20

    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.

    You see that lalangue, that I write as a single word, lalangue which is nevertheless a good girl, resists here. She gives a pout (elle fait la grosse joue).

21. #21

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.11

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus is the signified of sexual discourse (not the signifier), that transsexualism and the common error both mistake the signifier for the organ, and that the non-existence of the sexual relationship requires a new logic built on the 'not-all', existence/quantification, and modality rather than naturalist or Aristotelian categories.

    the hommoinzune, wrongly, gives consistency to the naturalness… of what I might call the premature vocation that each one experiences for his sex

22. #22

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972 > Seminar 11: Wednesday 14 June 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologistic concepts of 'unian' (unien) and 'unier' as modal/existential pivots connecting a universal assertive statement ("That one says") to the question of what remains forgotten behind utterance, linking the logic of enunciation to a grounding (fondé/fondu) that structures the relation between what is said and what is understood.

    That one says - as a fact remains forgotten behind what is said, in what is understood.

23. #23

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972 > Seminar 7: Wednesday IS March 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism "Yad'lun" (there is One / il y a de l'Un) as a foundational ontological proposition, distinguishing the One as a structural feature of analytic discourse from both the Platonic dyadic Eros and the Freudian death-drive pairing, while showing that analytic experience turns on the analysand's encounter with division within the One rather than a fusion of two.

    Yad'Iun written like that highlights something auspicious in the French tongue, and I do not think one can take the same advantage of there is or from es gibt.

24. #24

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    Seminar 5: Wednesday 9 February 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of speech is irreducibly ternary (addresser–addressee–message constituting a demand), not binary, and that grammar itself forms part of the code; this grounds his claim that *lalangue* and the signifier are not merely arbitrary, which he develops through wordplay, parapraxis, and the serial principle (0 to 1) as the model of serious analytic work.

    it is not just today that the tongue, lalangue, is on the agenda.

25. #25

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's appeal to Copernican and Darwinian "revolutions" to explain resistance to psychoanalysis actually masks the true subversion psychoanalysis introduces: not a revolution in cosmological or biological knowledge, but a transformation in the very structure and function of knowledge itself — specifically, the discovery that the unconscious is a knowledge unknown to itself, structured like a language, and inextricably bound to jouissance and the body's descent toward death.

    if I say that I am talking about language, it is because what is at stake are common features that can be encountered in lalangue.

26. #26

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.97

    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.

    L'amur, what I designated here as such, reverberates it differently by the means of what are called precisely called the edge, the means of the edge (bord), of this bord-homme.

27. #27

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.147

    The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the necessity of the paternal exception (the One who is not castrated) as the logical precondition for all thought about human relations, then maps the modal square (necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility) onto the sexuation formulas, arguing that the Real occupies the place of the impossible and that the 'Not-all' expresses contingency—reordering Aristotle's modal logic through the lens of the analytic discourse.

    there are things that can only be expressed in the French tongue, this is precisely why there is an unconscious. Because they are equivocations that fondent in the two senses of the word.

28. #28

    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 nodal point was *Mangue* and in the field of *lalangue,* the operation of speech

29. #29

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.23

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mathematical incomprehension is not a flight from truth but an over-sensitivity to it, and uses this to pivot toward the claim that there is no sexual relationship for speaking beings — because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) can only be approached through lalangue and castration, never directly articulated, requiring the mathème as its proper formalization.

    the field is constituted by what I called the other day in a slip: lalangue. This field considered in this way making of it the key to incomprehension as such is precisely what allows us to exclude from it any psychology.

30. #30

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    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.

    Lalangue, as I write it now...write lalangue in one word: that is how I will write it from now on...lalangue has nothing to do with the dictionary, whatever it may be.

31. #31

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what specifies the human animal is its anomalous, 'limping and amputated' relationship to enjoyment—a structural disjunction between copulation and jouissance—and that this very disjunction, rather than any biological reduction, is what grounds the possibility of mathemes and science, with lalangue as the medium through which this deficit-conditioned appearance leads to knowledge.

    one would better explain how things, an appearance so conditioned by a deficit that lalangue can lead you straight there.

32. #32

    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.

    Llanguage serves purposes that are altogether different from that of communication. That is what the experience of the unconscious has shown us, insofar as it is made of llanguage, which, as you know, I write with two Fs to designate what each of us deals with, our so-called mother tongue

33. #33

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.45

    **II** > **The function of the written¹**

    Theoretical move: The letter is constituted as a radical effect of discourse — it precedes the signifier historically and functionally — and analytic discourse is distinguished by its capacity to produce a different reading of signifiers than what they signify, a capacity instantiated most purely in Joyce's work where the signifier stuffs the signified.

    Courcourant involves a doubling of the first syllable of courant… Cou cou is a sound birds (or birdbrains?) make in French… language that runs (drivels?) on and on.

34. #34

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the signifier topologically by insisting on the bar between signifier and meaning-effect, introduces 'signifierness' (signifiance) as the excess of the signifier over signification, and pivots from asking about 'a signifier' to the signifier 'One' (Un), arguing that the unconscious structured like a language displaces the Cartesian cogito by making the subject the one who utters stupidities rather than the one who thinks.

    extraction from language of something that is caught up in it, and about which we have, at the point at which I have arrived in my exposé, only a faint idea

35. #35

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    **VII** > 92 Complement

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the distinction between the infinite and the finite to recast the logic of the not-all (pas-toute): in the finite, not-all implies a particular exception, but in the infinite the not-all produces only an indeterminate existence that cannot be constructed—grounding his claim that Woman cannot be written (barred) and that feminine jouissance exceeds the phallic function.

    What I put forward, by writing lalangue [llanguage] as one word, is that by which I distinguish myself from structuralism, insofar as the latter would like to integrate language into semiology

36. #36

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    **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.

    that's a subtlety of llanguage

37. #37

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.128

    **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.

    I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know.

38. #38

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.142

    **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string > Answers 119

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology founded on the Borromean knot and rings of string — rather than on dimensional cuts — provides a more fundamental approach to space, ultimately identifying the "inner eight" produced by reducing the Borromean knot as the symbol of the subject, and the simple ring as object a, thus grounding the cause of desire in topological structure rather than intuitive spatial intuition.

    That is permitted only by the l'anguage that I speak - but it is not such that I need deprive myself of it inasmuch as I speak.

39. #39

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan defines the signifier as both the cause of jouissance (its material and efficient cause, enabling access to a part of the Other's body) and simultaneously what brings jouissance to a halt (its final cause), thereby grounding the signifier not in Aristotelian physics or Cartesian extended substance but in a new ontological category: 'enjoying substance' (la substance jouissante).

    After those who embrace (s'enlacent) - if you'll allow me - alas (hélas)! And after those who are weary (las), hold on there (holà)! The other pole of the signifier, its stopping action (coup d'arrêt)

40. #40

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.93

    **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)*

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.

    It is here that llanguage, llanguage in French must help me out - not, as it sometimes does, by offering me a homonym... but simply by allowing me to say that one 'souloves' (âme).

41. #41

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.152

    **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.

    It is because there is the unconscious - namely, llanguage, insofar as it is on the basis of the cohabitation with llanguage that a being known as speaking being is defined - that the signifier can be called upon to constitute a sign.

42. #42

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    **II** > Love and the signifier

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse breaks with the cosmological presupposition of a unified world-substance by privileging the letter and writing over lived meaning-effects; love is posited as what "makes up for" the non-existent sexual relationship, and the unconscious is clarified as structured *like* (not *by*) a language—specifically like the assemblages of set theory, which are constituted (not merely designated) by letters.

    Our recourse, in llanguage (lalangue), is to that which shatters it (la brise). Hence nothing seems to better constitute the horizon of analytic discourse than the use made of the letter by mathematics.

43. #43

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.217

    J.Lacan-... of this?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'not-all' logic governing Woman cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity (which would imply an exceptional existence), but only through the infinite—where no determinate exception can be constructed—grounding Lacan's claim that Woman is properly half-said, and that her enjoyment is of the order of the infinite rather than the phallic universal.

    what I tried to bring out for you last year in writing lalangue in a single word, this is what I put forward in terms of a coupling between these two words, it is indeed by means of this that I am distinguishing myself

44. #44

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.67

    What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier cannot be collectivised through semantic or lexical predication alone, and that its proper "substance" is Jouissance — the body enjoys itself only by corporalising itself in a signifying way, making enjoyment-substance the third term beyond thinking substance and extended substance, and reframing the subject of the unconscious as the one who speaks stupidities rather than thinks.

    that of the unconscious as structured by a language... this something that is caught up in it. And of which we, at the point that I am at in my presentation, have only a distant idea.

45. #45

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    (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.

    how if, up to a certain point, it is simply from the knots of the One that there is supported what remains of any language when it is written?

46. #46

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.241

    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.

    I employ in presenting it the tongue I use... No formalisation of the tongue is transmissible without the use of the tongue itself.

47. #47

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.106

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that analytic discourse, grounded in the letter rather than in lived experience or phenomenal appearance, compels an abandonment of the ontological "world" in favour of *par-être* (being-to-one-side), and that mathematics—specifically set theory's use of the letter—provides the orientation point for reading the effects of language precisely where the sexual relationship is absent.

    There is something all the same which is another effect of this language, which is precisely the written.

48. #48

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.269

    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.

    I reduce the hypothesis according to the very formula that substantifies it, to the fact that the hypothesis is necessary for the functioning of lalangue.

49. #49

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance (enjoyment) constitutes the substance of thinking and is irreducibly linked to the inertia of language, such that the sexual relationship remains inexistent and unthinkable — a gap named the Other — and all cultural, religious, and philosophical formations (including Christianity's baroque obscenity and Aristotle's active intellect) are so many failed attempts to make enjoyment adequate to the sexual relationship, with castration as the only price of any apparent satisfaction.

    every word is this energy not yet taken up into an energetics... we are forced to take it at the level of language itself

50. #50

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    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.

    language is the effort made to account for something that has nothing to do with communication and which is what I call lalangue. Lalangue is used for completely different things than communication.

51. #51

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    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.

    here is where French ought to bring me some help... The soul, in French, at the point that I am at, I can only make use of it to say that it is what one souls (qu'on âme): j'âme, tu âmes, il âme

52. #52

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that linguistics is in a state of epistemic crisis because its foundational model of the symmetrical locutor/interlocutor subject (shared from Saussure through Chomsky) is being dissolved by linguistics' own positive syntactical exploration, which encounters phenomena (heterogeneous subjects, power relations) it cannot account for — ultimately forcing linguistics toward psychoanalysis, and opening onto Lacan's logic of the not-all and feminine jouissance.

    the day is coming when linguistics, and it is already present in Ducros, begins or will begin to see itself as contemporaneous with psychoanalysis

53. #53

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.182

    **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.

    Nothing other than the language that this species inhabits. Nothing other than this language and that from this language it found itself having, in what was involved in everyday life, further support for reason than there might appear.

54. #54

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.92

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Letter is an effect of discourse and that analytic discourse is defined by the supposition that the subject of the unconscious can read (and learn to read) — a supposition illustrated through Joyce's technique of signifier-telescoping, which Lacan aligns structurally with the slip, and through the contrast between a bee's behaviour and the human act of reading an omen.

    Things should be taken of course at the level of the history of each tongue.

55. #55

    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.

    I think of you (Je pense à vous). That does not mean that I think you… I love of you (J'aime à vous). This indeed is how it models itself better than any other on the indirect character of that reaching out called love.

56. #56

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.138

    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.

    If the unconscious is indeed what I say by being structured like a language, it is at the level of the tongue that we must examine this One.

57. #57

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    **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.

    a *parlètre*, from what is only a speaking being, because if he did not speak, he would not have the word being

58. #58

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 3: Tuesday 14 January 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Borromean knot topology as the minimal structure of existence (ek-sistence), arguing that Freud's Oedipus complex functions as a fourth term (psychical reality) needed to knot the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real because Freud lacked the three-ring Borromean solution; analysis itself operates by making the Real surmount the Symbolic at two crossing points, rendering the fourth term (Oedipus complex / Name-of-the-Father) superfluous.

    if there were not the language that number already conveys, what meaning would have to count?

59. #59

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.68

    **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.

    Lalangue, I think it is the English lalangue that creates an obstacle. That is not very promising, because the English lalangue is in the process of becoming universal

60. #60

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.77

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot provides the model for a "Real meaning effect" in analytic interpretation: by homogenising the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) as equally consistent and showing their non-chain knotting, he repositions the analytic saying (*dire*) as what makes a knot—not mere word-use—while introducing "ek-sistence" as the Real correlate of the knotted Imaginary.

    there is already saying (*du dire*), if we specify the saying as being what makes a knot

61. #61

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.35

    **Introduction** > *Anxiety*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety, symptom, and inhibition are as heterogeneous to each other as Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are to each other; using Little Hans as a case study, he demonstrates that anxiety is the bodily ek-sistence of jouissance, and that the phallus is an irreducible burden upon the male speaking being (parlêtre), not a natural genital drive but a symbolic imposition.

    beings who do not speak simply to be, but which are so by being [parlêtres]

62. #62

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 3: Tuesday 14 January 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Borromean knot as a material figure of "consistency" — a real, non-linguistic holding-together that underlies the knotting of the three registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) — and uses this to argue that topology, not geometry, is the proper medium for grasping what psychoanalysis works on, while also implicating number (via Peano's successor axiom) and the dimension of the spoken being (dit-mansion) in the same problematic.

    this equivocation on dit-mansion, that I write, as you know because I have dinned it into you, that I write as d-i-t hyphen mansion, a stage set [?] of the said.

63. #63

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.108

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 7: Tuesday 11 March 1975**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the Real is defined by its ek-sistence *outside* meaning—as the impossible, the expelled, the anti-meaning—and that the Borromean knot of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary is the structural form of the Name-of-the-Father, with feminine ek-sistence (as symptom) arising where the Symbolic circles an inviolable hole and the not-all resists phallic universality.

    the Real, is what ek-sists with regard to meaning, in so far as I define it by the effect of lalangue on the idea

64. #64

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.122

    Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976

    Theoretical move: The sinthome is theorized topologically as a fourth ring that repairs an error in the Borromean knot—where the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real come undone—and is deployed to explain both Joyce's artistic practice (as compensation for paternal lack) and the clinical phenomenon of imposed words in psychosis, thereby linking the topology of knotting to the structure of symptom formation and paternal function.

    there is no longer any phonological identity... by the polyphony of the word.

65. #65

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.175

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > QUESTIONS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot/chain must be written (not merely thought) to function as a support for thinking, and that this written topology transforms the very meaning of writing by granting it an autonomy irreducible to the signifier's precipitation—the latter being Derrida's domain—while the knot's own logic operates through the 'dit-mension' (dimension of the said), which structurally implies that what is said is not necessarily true.

    This way of writing has an advantage. It is that this permits mension to be extended into mensionge and that this indicates that what is said is not at all obligatorily true.

66. #66

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.3

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

    Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar XXIII by introducing the *sinthome* as a new spelling/concept that bridges symptom, sin, and the Joycean art of lalangue-injection, arguing that Joyce's literary practice offers a privileged case for understanding how the sinthome functions as a logical-phallic supplement that can reach the Real — and that this case illuminates the structural necessity of castration, the not-all, and the inexistence of the Woman.

    an epoch that happens to be that of the injection into French, into what I call lalangue, my langue, the injection of Greek.

67. #67

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.99

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

    Theoretical move: The passage poses a foundational question about the threshold at which significance (as written) distinguishes itself from the effects of phonation, locating the proper name as the privileged site where the signifier's function and phonation intersect — and framing the Borromean knot as only emerging beyond a triple relation.

    it is phonation that transmits this proper function of the name and it is from the proper name that we will start again

68. #68

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.163

    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.

    the tongue, the tongue, the lalangue that I called lalanglaise has, has all kinds of resources: 'I have to say.'

69. #69

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.93

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

    Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention traces Joyce's deployment of legitimacy, certitude, and the voice-effects of the signifier across his work, while Lacan closes by grounding these in the Borromean knot and its irreducible topological ambiguity (the indistinguishability of its rings without colouring), arguing that right/left orientation cannot be expressed in the Symbolic.

    between Moly and Molly, a difference which is of the order of phonation... the ditongue is transformed into a simple vowel, there is a consonatic redoubling, a redoubling of consonance

70. #70

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.30

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot—understood as the concrete support of any relation between things—constitutes the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as interdependent, and that the parlêtre's bodily status depends entirely on this knot; Joyce's art is then positioned as uniquely aimed at substantialising the fourth term (the sinthome) that completes and holds this knot.

    as real, no more diverse than anybody that can be signalled as parlêtre

71. #71

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.11

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot must be understood as a tetradic (four-ring) structure in which the sinthome serves as the fourth element linking the otherwise separate Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; the Oedipus complex is recast as a symptom/sinthome, and the father's name is itself a sinthome, with Joyce's art exemplifying how artifice can work upon and through the symptom via equivocation in the signifier.

    drives are the echo in the body of the fact that there is a saying

72. #72

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.58

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is the proper topological support for "first truths" about the Real, which is founded precisely by excluding meaning; and that the speaking being's (parlêtre's) only consistency is bodily/imaginary, while the knot — not the cord — is what properly ex-sists, grounding both truth and the analyst's responsibility in know-how (savoir-faire) rather than in any Other of the Other.

    There is no fact except by the fact that the speaking being says it. There are no other facts than those that the speaking being recognises as such by saying them.

73. #73

    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.

    he writes English with these special refinements which means that he disarticulates the tongue, the English one on this occasion... he has a way of, of mangling sentences, particularly in Ulysses.

74. #74

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.170

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > QUESTIONS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the sinthome from psychoanalysis proper, arguing that it is the *psychoanalyst* (not psychoanalysis) who functions as a sinthome — a "help against" in the biblical sense — and that the Real, as lawless and devoid of meaning, may itself be illuminated as sinthome; simultaneously, the Borromean knot is defended as a topology that can hold Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real together as separable rings without a common point.

    I do not set any special store on blessed equivocations. I believe that it seems to me that I demystify them. Yadlun.

75. #75

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.141

    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.

    it is the totality of women who engender what I have called lalangue... what characterises lalangue among all others, are the equivocations that are possible in it.

76. #76

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.55

    So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 18 January 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Borromean knot—approached through plaiting (tresse/quatresse), tetrahedra, and the torus—to argue that all nodal knotting is fundamentally toric, and then maps the four-element quatresse onto the registers of Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Symptom, concluding that the Real is specially suspended on the body and that language (the signifier as symptom) supplies for the absence of a sexual relationship.

    It is a fact that blah-de-blah furnishes, furnishes what is distinguished by the fact that there is no relationship.

77. #77

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real cannot constitute a universe on its own but only through its knotting with the Imaginary and Symbolic via the Borromean structure, and that the torus — not the simple ring — is the proper topological unit for this knotting; he further exploits the distinction between metaphor and structure to insist that topology here is structural (not merely analogical), while his anecdote about his grandson reframes the Unconscious as the intrusion of words one does not understand — language as parasitic.

    He created what one can call a new tongue, what could be called a metatongue, since after all, every new tongue is a metatongue, but like all new tongues, it is formed on the model of ancient ones, which is to say that it fails.

78. #78

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.47

    So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Knowledge (as unconscious signifier-effects) and Truth have no relation to one another, that the unconscious is structured as signifier-effects rather than philosophy, and that psychoanalysis is a 'scientific delusion' awaiting a science it may never produce — pivoting through the Four Discourses, the Borromean Knot, and the parlêtre to situate the irreducibility of the Real to matter.

    One speaks all alone, that one speaks all alone, because one never says anything but one and the same thing which in short is upsetting.

79. #79

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.102

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes sense (double-sens, meaning-effect rooted in the duplicity of the signifier) from meaning (a purely empty knotting of word to word), and uses torus topology to articulate the relations between Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary—arguing that anxiety is the symbolically real, the symptom is the only real thing that preserves sense, and that there is no sexual relationship except incestuous, with castration as the only truth.

    what I call linguisterie – Madame Kress-Rosen has given its destiny to this appellation – that what I called linguisterie requires psychoanalysis to be supported.

80. #80

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    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).

    how has French which must be considered as an individual, has it put this form into use? – it can happen, I would say according to it, the concrete French that is at stake

81. #81

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.2

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXIV by proposing 'une-bévue' as a superior translation of the Unbewusst, then pivots to argue that the end of analysis is not identification with the analyst or the unconscious but rather 'knowing how to deal with one's symptom' — and grounds this clinical proposition in a topological account of the torus (and its inside-out inversion) as the proper model for the relationship between inside and outside, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

    the witticism depends on what I called lalangue, you recognise yourself in the witticism, you slip into it

82. #82

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.99

    **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.

    not alone is there the parl'être, but that there is also the psarl'être, in other words that all of this would not exist if there were not the functioning of this thing which is nevertheless so grotesque and is called thought.

83. #83

    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.

    Man *parle-être* as I said which means nothing other than that he speaks signifier, with which the notion of being is confused.

84. #84

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation must abandon the register of beautiful, logical sense in favour of a poetic-equivocal resonance grounded in the witticism: it is the capacity to extinguish a symptom—not logical articulation or aesthetic beauty—that validates an interpretation as true, pointing toward a practice founded on economy rather than value.

    what is necessary, is that we should hold onto the notion, in Chinese writing, of what poetry is… a tonic counterpoint, a modulation which ensures that it is sung, for from tonality to modulation there is a slippage.

85. #85

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.123

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

    I know nothing about language except a series of incarnated tongues.

86. #86

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lalangue—the mother tongue as obscene, pre-structural substrate—is what the analytic session truly circulates around (via the analysand's kinship discourse), and that the symptom (sinthome), not truth, is what the analyst actually reads; "varité" (a portmanteau of truth and variety) names the only accessible approximation of truth, rendering psychoanalysis structurally an "autism à deux" redeemed only by lalangue's communal character.

    the learning that he has undergone of one tongue among others, which for him is lalangue that I write, as you know, in a single word, in the hope of fitting (ferrer), the tongue itself, which equivocates with faire-réel (making real).

87. #87

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.79

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

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

    one no longer hears any more the dimension of 'Freud parl'être': what one ends up with is effectively a taking possession of the theory that one can put in a moneybox

88. #88

    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

89. #89

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.118

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates the Real, the Sinthome, and the Unconscious through a meditation on undecidability, negation, and the sign: the Real is defined by what does not cease not to be written (impossibility), the Unconscious is recast as 'bévue' (the structural stumbling of language), and the sinthome is identified with the mental as such — the upshot being that psychoanalysis produces only a 'semblance' of truth, not truth itself, because S1 never fully represents the subject for S2.

    I highlighted like that, at one time, the pertinence of what the French lalangue touches on as adverb. Can one say that the Real lies (ment)?

90. #90

    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.

    I mean that it is from the moment that there is a confusion between this Real that we are indeed led to call 'thing', there is an equivocation between this Real and language...language is imperfect.

91. #91

    Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.3

    **Seminar I: Wednesday 15 November 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens his final seminar by positioning psychoanalysis as an irrefutable practice of equivocation (not a science), grounding this in the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the inadequation of the Symbolic to the Real, and the analyst's function as rhetor — then transitions to topological exploration of the Borromean knot and torus as structural models for the RSI (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary) articulation.

    if I said that there is no metalanguage, it was in order to say that language does not exist; there are only multiple supports of language that are called '*lalangue*'

92. #92

    Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    **X**: What does systematising mean? [*Laughter]* > **Annexe to Session VIII** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 11 April 1978**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures the topological grounding of psychoanalysis by moving from a simple Möbius strip to a doubled/tripled one that flattens into a threefold knot, arguing that the absence of the sexual relationship—screened by the incest prohibition and crystallised around the Oedipus myth—requires a material geometry of thread and fabric rather than a metaphorics of thought, because the passage from signifier to signified always involves a loss that mere 'free association' cannot overcome.

    analysis is a fact, a social fact at least, which is founded on what is called thought that one expresses as one can with lalangue that people have

93. #93

    Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    **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.

    one does not know what one is saying when one speaks. This indeed is why the analyser says more than he means to say

94. #94

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.256

    **XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the central question animating all of Freud's work as how the symbolic order — the system of signifiers constituting law, truth, and justice — seizes an animal who has no natural need for it, producing neurotic suffering and guilt; from this he derives the thesis that psychoanalysis must be understood as the science of language inhabited by the subject, fundamentally anti-humanist and anti-egological.

    It is the direction of a positive study whose methods and forms are given to us in this sphere of the so-called human sciences, which concerns the order of language, linguistics.

95. #95

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.213

    FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that hallucinatory satisfaction is not a primitive imaginary phenomenon but is constituted at the level of signifiers and presupposes the locus of the Other; consequently, both the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be rethought as effects of the signifying chain rather than of need-satisfaction or experiential adaptation.

    as soon as the child merely starts to be capable of opposing two phonemes to one another, there are already two vocables. And with two, the one who pronounces them and the one to whom they are addressed... you already have four elements, which is enough to contain potentially... the entire combinatory from which the organization of signifiers will emerge.

96. #96

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.24

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 3*: *Wednesday 29 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses phonetics (the silent P between implosion and explosion), animal communication, baby-talk, pidgin, and cross-species identification to clear the ground for a theory of the signifier and the function of the One — arguing that what specifies a tongue is not simply speech but a differential structure of presence/absence, and that identification (not pre-logical participation) is the fundamental phenomenon underlying the human subject's relation to language and the Other.

    the not universal but overwhelming majority of phonemes PA and MA to designate, to furnish at least one of the modes of designation of the father and of the mother; this irruption of something which is only justified because of developmental elements in the acquisition of a language

97. #97

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 8*: *Wednesday 17 January 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Cartesian encounter with extension and the linguistic analysis of French negation (Damourette & Pichon) to articulate the split between the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject, showing that the "expletive ne" is a trace of the unconscious subject and that negation is not a simple logical operation but indexes a gap in the subject's position within language.

    Usage of the tongue is going to allow me to accentuate before you in a very banal fashion... the distinction between two equally admissible, equally acceptable, equally expressive, equally common formulae: that of 'je ne sais' (I do not know) and 'j'sais pas' (don't know).

98. #98

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.86

    It is not my point of view. I didn r mention religion.

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two registers of the real: the symptomatic real (how the real impinges on living/speaking beings) and the scientific real (accessible through mathematical formulas but producing only 'gadgets'), while grounding the irreducibility of sexual non-relation as the engine of symptomatic proliferation — with wordplay (foi/foire/forum) serving not as decoration but as the very key to psychoanalytic method.

    They are plays on words, that's true. But I attach a great deal of importance to plays on words, as you know. They seem to me to be the key to psychoanalysis.

99. #99

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.79

    IV. Closing in on the Symptom

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends the productive opacity of the Écrits as a formal feature rather than an accidental one, while positioning the Freudian unconscious as a genuinely unprecedented discovery, and introduces the concept of the 'parlêtre' (speaking being) as his own reformulation of the unconscious, tying language and sexuality together in a way that psychoanalysis uniquely illuminates—before religion re-absorbs the symptom.

    The speaking being is a term I use for the unconscious. The altogether unexpected and totally inexplicable fact that man is a speaking animal - to know what that is and with what this activity of speech is fabricated

100. #100

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.158

     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.

     For Jakobson, what does not contribute to meaning, the erratic nature of lalangue on which he keeps stumbling, is then taken as the material for poetic effects

101. #101

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.153

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.

     Lalangue is not language taken as the signifier, but neither is it conceiving language simply under the auspices of sound echoes. It is, rather, the concept of their very difference, the difference of the two logics, their split and their union in that very divergence

102. #102

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.168

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

     lalangue ultimately points to a dimension where 'the voice in the signifier' becomes a vehicle of enjoyment, so that speech appears as a process where signifier and enjoyment amalgamate in the infinity of sound reverberations and puns which form the texture of the unconscious.

103. #103

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.237

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" formula for woman functions as an indefinite judgment in the Kantian sense — affirming a negative predicate rather than negating a copula — which means woman's ex-sistence is neither denied nor confirmed, her non-collectibility into a whole stems from an internal limit (the failure of castration's "no"), and she is ultimately the product of lalangue, a symbolic without the guarantee of the Other.

     Woman is the product of lalangue.

104. #104

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

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

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

     the enjoyment that the sinthome grants is the enjoyment intrinsic in the production of meaning, having to do specifically with the poetic qualities of language, with the fact that imaginative language transmits signifi catory ambivalence

105. #105

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.227

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Female Side: Mathematical Failure**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" with respect to Woman must be read as an indefinite judgment (following Kant's mathematical antinomies), not as an external limitation: Woman's non-existence within the symbolic is not a denial of her ex-sistence but an internal limit constitutive of reason itself, and this structure—where no metalanguage can anchor a judgment of existence—culminates in Woman as the product of lalangue, a symbolic without an Other.

     She, or the symbolic that constructs her, is fraught with inconsistencies. We are thus led to the conclusion that the woman is a product of a 'symbolic without an Other.' For this newly conceived entity, Lacan, in his last writings, coined the term lalangue. Woman is the product of lalangue.

106. #106

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's concept of das Ding through Jakobson's linguistics, the passage argues that the phoneme—as a signifier that signifies nothing—provides the structural condition for an open, indeterminate horizon of meaning, thereby grounding the relation between language and the Thing at the level of pure differential structure rather than binary semantic necessity.

     the 'beyond-of-the-signified.' If language plays a privileged role in this process, its capacity to do so is presumably related to what is most distinctive about language

107. #107

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Žižek's "Sex and the Failed Absolute," listing alphabetical entries with hyperlinks to their textual locations; it contains no theoretical argumentation of its own.

     "mother tongue" [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-1447)

108. #108

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.439

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that in every parallax gap (production/representation, drive/desire, lalangue/language) true materialism requires asserting the primacy of the *second* term—the gap, representation, desire, language—because the supposedly "more basic" first term only functions against the background of the lack opened by the second; and he maps four modes of relating to language (praxis, lalangue, science, and the radical cut of philosophy/poetry/mysticism), concluding that the Klein bottle, not the cross-cap or quilting point, is the appropriate topological model for subjectivization.

     lalangue is the substantial 'material base' of language—but, as such, it tries to cover up the gap opened up by language.

109. #109

     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 terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

     language [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-1350), [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-1351)

110. #110

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.13

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

     Theoretical move: The passage maps the book's structural architecture (theorem/corollary/scholia) as a self-enacting ontological form, and closes by defending the "thwarted identity" of the Real—the irreducible gap between transcendental space and reality—against both new realist critics and the ideological "fine art of non-thinking" that converts the symbolic into image and forecloses genuine thought.

     Scholium 4.1 deals with Jean-Claude Milner's reading of the Lacanian couple of language and *lalangue*, with the special accent on the asymmetry of the two terms—it asserts the primacy of language over *lalangue*.

111. #111

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive passage consisting of index entries (P–S) from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing topics and their page locations with no argumentative content.

     psychic turmoil [here] … language [here] … qualia [here]

112. #112

     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.

     *lalangue* [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-1213)

113. #113

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.429

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: By mapping the Lacanian triad of language/*lalangue*/matheme onto the RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) structure and arguing through the topological figures of the Möbius strip and cross-cap, Žižek resists any materialist-genetic primacy of *lalangue* over language, insisting instead that the cut introducing differential symbolic order is originary and irreducible to bodily or pre-symbolic ground.

     There is also a Lacanian version of this opposition, the couple of language and what Lacan calls lalangue—one can say that the minimal formula of this opposition is L+, language and its excess.

114. #114

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.434

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Milner's symmetrical opposition between language and lalangue by reordering their relationship: language is primary (constituted by a traumatic "wound" or symbolic castration), while lalangue is secondary—a defense that attempts to fill or obfuscate the constitutive lack of language through homophonic enjoyment. The subject of the signifier belongs to the death drive, while lalangue aligns with life and pleasure.

     lalangue is far from being simply prohibited or ignored in the public and philosophical discourse.

115. #115

     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 from H–I with page-reference hyperlinks to various chapters; it performs no theoretical argument of its own.

     I(i)maginary of *lalangue* [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-975)

116. #116

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (partial alphabetical listing B–C) from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, providing page/location references with no theoretical argument.

     Cartesian *cogito* [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-234)

117. #117

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing key terms and their page/section locations. It is non-substantive in itself but maps the conceptual architecture of the book, pointing to where core Lacanian and Hegelian concepts are developed.

     "semiotic materialism" [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-2027) … sexual difference … language [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-2047)

118. #118

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.41

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **The Unconscious Assembles**

     Theoretical move: The unconscious operates as a formal, non-semantic ciphering system: it is structured not by meaning but by letter-assemblages functioning like set-theoretical inscriptions, so that psychoanalytic interpretation aims not at unveiling meaning but at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning in order to locate the determinants of the subject's behavior.

     'what you hear is the signifier,' not meaning (Seminar XX, p. 34). Here the signifier is not so much signifying—devoted to making sense—as nonsensical substance

119. #119

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.28

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **The Unconscious**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is constituted by the Other's discourse—a chain of signifiers obeying language-like rules—such that what appears as the subject's innermost desire is in fact the desire of the Other, rendering the very notion of a self-transparent, sovereign subject untenable.

     the unconscious pays attention to details like that in substituting one word for another in dreams and fantasies… 'conservation' and 'conversation.' They are anagrams: they contain the same letters

120. #120

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

     Lalwzgue, 183n.l3

121. #121

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.213

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus consolidates and defends Fink's interpretive positions on Lacan's formulas of sexuation, the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the structure of the signifier, and the Other jouissance—correcting common misreadings while flagging key conceptual distinctions (existence vs. ex-sistence, the bar of negation, the role of the phallus, S1/S2, and object a).

     semiotic jouissance… the jouissance of meaning ('jouis-sense') derived from lalangue

122. #122

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.48

     <span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Interpretation Hits the Cause**

     Theoretical move: Interpretation functions by hitting the traumatic cause that the analysand's discourse circles but cannot enunciate; through the analyst's intervention a signifier is introduced or pronounced that begins the subjectivization of the cause, with phonemes and garbled speech marking the bridge between the Symbolic and the Real.

     Garbled speech and conflated words bring us closer to the 'stuff' of language than well articulated phrases... they may be libidinally cathected and have a deeper effect on the subject than words can ever tell.

123. #123

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.202

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Creative Function of the Word

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus consolidates several key Lacanian theoretical commitments: the Real as without gap or fissure, reality as fantasy-laden and symbolically constituted, extimacy as the logic of internal exclusion structuring the subject's relation to its object, and the signifier's irreducible surplus beyond itself.

     This is related to Lacan's notion of lalangue, introduced in his later work.

124. #124

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.149

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth is structurally "not-whole" not because of lack but because of an irreducible surplus—an auto-referential doubling where the level of enunciation always sticks to what is enunciated—and that this same structure (the Real as the gap between knowledge and jouissance, between the Symbolic and Imaginary) underlies the Nietzschean "double affirmation," the Lacanian not-all, and the ontological status of Woman/Truth as irreducible to objet petit a.

     The Other is included in the Other, and this is precisely what makes the Other not-whole. Lacan expresses this doubleness with a neologism coined from the word language (langue): lalangue ('llanguage,' in the English translation). But, if the criterion of the distinction between true and false is interior to language itself (thereby becoming lalangue), where or what is this criterion?

125. #125

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.81

     Contradictions that Matter > Hm…

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacanian formalization is not a truth *about* the Real but the formalization of the impasse of formalization itself—the point where speech "holds onto" the Real through its own impossibility—and that the proper psychoanalytic position is not passive acceptance of contradiction but active engagement with it, taking one's place within it as the condition of emancipation.

     there is Mallarmé lurking behind even the simplest expressions… a perfect example of equivocity that can function as a formula.

126. #126

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.142

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's position is stronger than Badiou's: whereas for Badiou the impossibility of the Event is a consequence of the law of ontological discourse, for Lacan being itself is inseparable from its constitutive gap/impossibility (the "minus-one"), so that the wandering excess is not the Real of being but its symptom—a distinction that grounds a non-romantic, formalizing ethics of the Real and a specific theory of the subject as the name of the gap in discourse.

     Our recourse, in language (lalangue), is that which shatters it (la brise).