Maeontology

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (60)

1. #01

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.59

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

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

   The key point is that the Thing is not a thing at all... Das Ding has no objective existence whatsoever... It is rather a locus of pure lack, a zone of something unknown.

2. #02

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.72

   Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix > It Speaks

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates on two irreducible dimensions—a semantic pole anchoring definite meaning and a "mantic" pole opening toward das Ding as pure lack—and that this bifold matrix grounds both the psychoanalytic method (free association, the slip of the tongue) and the quasi-religious capacity to create ex nihilo, illustrated by Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier of signifying itself.

   One is tempted to make a reference here, as Lacan himself does more than once, to the pre-Socratic notion of non-being. Every signifier harbors within itself an appeal to pure lack, to a Thing that is a No-thing.

3. #03

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.105

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

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

   the entire category of knowledge, at least in the metaphysical sense of an insight into the very fabric of existence, simply did not exist. They merely assumed that whatever appeared was the offspring of cosmic forces that remained beyond human capacity to fathom.

4. #04

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.208

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

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

   identifying the divine with negativity itself... the Godhead is identified with perfect Nothingness, an infinity of kenotic Non-being

5. #05

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.249

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

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

   Non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being.

6. #06

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.272

   **XXI**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language/speech introduces a "hole in the real" that opens the dimension of being, and it is only within this dimension—not the real itself—that the three orders (symbolic, imaginary, real) and the three fundamental passions of transference (love, hate, ignorance) can be inscribed; analysis is therefore the realisation of being through speech, not the reconstitution of a narcissistic image.

   Depending on the way one envisions it, this hole in the real is called being or nothingness. This being and this nothingness are essentially linked to the phenomenon of speech.

7. #07

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.296

   xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\*

   Theoretical move: Hyppolite argues that Freud's *Verneinung* cannot be reduced to positive psychology but must be read as a grand myth founding a fundamental asymmetry: affirmation (Bejahung) is the *Ersatz* of Eros/unification, while negation (Verneinung) is the *Nachfolge* of the destruction drive and expulsion (Ausstossung), and it is precisely the *symbol* of negation — not affirmation — that creates a margin of thought independent of the pleasure principle and makes possible the ego's méconnaissance-structured recognition of the unconscious.

   a margin of thought can be generated, an appearance of being in the form of non-being, which is generated with negation, that is to say when the symbol of negation is linked up with the concrete attitude of negation.

8. #08

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

   PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

   oi'x 6,', use these terms is still to over-substantify the unconscious. This is why I have carefully avoided them.

9. #09

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

   TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

   Theoretical move: The passage makes a brief philosophical-terminological aside, noting that Aristotle's coinage of a Greek neologism (οὐθέν rather than οὐδέν) demonstrates that linguistic manipulation predates Heidegger, and uses this to gesture toward an answer to the question of idealism: 'not nothing' — a formulation pointing toward the Lacanian logic of non-being without full negation.

   answering the question I asked today, that of idealism, Nothing, perhaps?—not perhaps nothing, but not nothing.

10. #10

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.45

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious belongs to a third ontological category—"the unrealized"—neither being nor non-being, and he critically diagnoses how psychoanalytic institutionalization has "desiccated" this radical opening into a rationalist catalogue, betraying the disturbing potential of Freud's original discovery.

    it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.

11. #11

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is "pre-ontological" — it resists ontological capture — and links this to the structuring function of lack (manque-à-être / want-to-be), making an ethical rather than ontological status the proper frame for the unconscious as gap.

    the gap of the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological… the first emergence of the unconscious, namely, that it does not lend itself to ontology.

12. #12

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.45

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan positions the unconscious as neither being nor non-being but the "unrealized," and uses this to critique both spiritualist/parapsychological misappropriations of Freud and the rationalist "desiccation" of the unconscious by orthodox analysis, thereby clearing space for his own structural account of the unconscious and desire.

    it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.

13. #13

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on a Greek philological distinction (οὐδέν vs. μηδέν) to refuse both idealist nihilism and simple negation, staging the question of "nothing" as a coined, non-standard philosophical move that echoes Heidegger's manipulation of language.

    Nothing, perhaps?—not perhaps nothing, but not nothing.

14. #14

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

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

    oi'x 6,', use these terms is still to over-substantify the unconscious. This is why I have carefully avoided them.

15. #15

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.286

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

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

    non-being is therefore nothing other than being itself as a radical dimension in so far as without it nothing would be computable... It is the locus of the zero.

16. #16

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Sophist* through the lens of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (*fantasma*), Lacan argues that the subject is constituted as a gap (*écart*) rather than as a knowing reference—and that this gap-structure makes the analyst homologous to the Sophist, just as the Subject Supposed to Know is revealed to be a phantasy.

    It is impossible to think it in any form whatsoever... non-being cannot be attributed to any being.

17. #17

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.267

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

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

    It is here that there is going to be introduced the question which one might think to be the essential one of the dialogue: what status is to be given to non-being, to what lacks being in the simulacrum.

18. #18

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

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

    non-being is therefore nothing other than being itself as a radical dimension in so far as without it nothing would be computable.

19. #19

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.267

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the lens of psychoanalytic experience, Audouard argues that the dialogue's central problem is not the ontological status of non-being per se but rather the status of the subject, whose particular point of view (place) is precisely what makes the simulacrum (fantasma/Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) possible — thereby transposing an ancient metaphysical problem into a Lacanian one about the split, positionally-determined subject.

    It is here that there is going to be introduced the question which one might think to be the essential one of the dialogue: what status is to be given to non-being, to what lacks being in the simulacrum.

20. #20

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

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

    By refusing non-being in favour of the other the Stranger had wanted to, and believed he had shown that non-being was only a creation of the Sophist because the Sophist refuses to give it an ontological status

21. #21

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 7 December 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that negation is not a single logical operation but must be differentiated into at least four distinct levels—classical (non-contradiction), the 'me-' of méconnaissance, the 'not-without' of implication, and negation of being/thinking—and that Freud's claim that the unconscious knows no contradiction has been uncritically repeated because this multi-level logic of writing has never been properly examined.

    what does it mean at the point that we can write it in our logic? This is the question - that of 'I am not' (je ne suis pas) and of the 'I do not think' (je me pense pas) – on which I will bring our next conversation to bear.

22. #22

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates in the structural lack inaugurated by the castration complex, which reverses subjective enjoyment into objectal libido — irreducible to narcissistic libido — and that the objet petit a is the product ('waste-product') of the operation of language on the One/Other dyad, serving as the cornerstone for rethinking logic, the subject, and the analytic act.

    It is precisely the route opened, opened by the Sophist that is imposed on us, properly speaking, on us analysts, in order for us simply to know what we are dealing with... 'No, you will never bend by force non-beings to being'

23. #23

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.42

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 7 December 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "negation" is not a single logical operation but must be differentiated into at least four distinct levels (complementary negation, méconnaissance, the "not-without" of implication, and non-being/not-thinking), and that this formal differentiation is the prerequisite for properly examining Freud's claims about the unconscious—particularly that it knows no contradiction and that the ego/non-ego split is not a logical complementarity but a foundational narcissistic alienation.

    might the idea even come to us that when we speak about 'non-being', it is a matter of this something which is supposed to be in a way on the periphery of the bubble of being?… this non-being that I would prefer, on this occasion, to entitle by what is at stake and that the unconscious puts in question, namely: the place where I am not.

24. #24

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.188

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates from the lack instituted by the castration complex, which produces an irreversible reversal: jouissance becomes objectal (not narcissistic), the phallus functions as the unit marking the distance between Objet petit a and sex, and the o-object itself is revealed as the product of the operation of language — the "metaphorical child" of the One and the Other, born as refuse from inaugural repetition, and the foundational starting-point for rethinking logic and the analytic act.

    It is precisely the route opened, opened by the Sophist that is imposed on us, properly speaking, on us analysts, in order for us simply to know what we are dealing with... this dross (scorie) of Being, this rejected stone which becomes the cornerstone

25. #25

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

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

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

    That the subject can function as not being (comme n'étant pas), is properly… what can bring us the enlightening opening thanks to which there can be re-opened an examination of the development of logic

26. #26

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.101

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act forces a return to the foundational problem of logic — the status of the subject — and that his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier" re-opens what mathematical logic elides: the initiating positing of any signifier. Using Peirce's schema of the empty box, he demonstrates that the subject is constituted as nothing (no stroke), an effect of discourse rather than a bearer of being (ousia), and that psychoanalysis uniquely ties together the history of logic's ambiguities about the subject by revealing desire as the hidden stake behind logical debates.

    That the subject can function as not being (comme n'étant pas), is properly — I have articulated it, I have insisted on it from the beginning of this year — what can bring us the enlightening opening thanks to which there can be re-opened an examination of the development of logic.

27. #27

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.63

    011111 1

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Frege's derivation of number not as an account of the sequence of whole numbers per se, but as a foundation for repetition — specifically, repetition grounded in the "1 of inexistence," which opens a gap between the repeated 1 and the 1 posited in the numerical sequence, a gap that points toward the logical necessity of inexistence as the correlate of number.

    positing as a necessary correlate of the question of logical necessity the foundation of inexistence

28. #28

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.105

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan performs a philological excavation of the Greek term 'extan' from Aristotle's Physics Book IV to ground the concept of being-that-only-exists-by-not-being, introducing 'Unien' (anagrammatically linked to 'ennui') as a heading for this ontological register.

    the stable being, as stable being starting from the domain of to extan, what only exists by not being

29. #29

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    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.

    a new logic - the one that has to be constructed from what is not (ce qui n'est pas)

30. #30

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.315

    XXIII > Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the -nature of language > LECTURE ^I

    Theoretical move: By contrasting the symbolic with the imaginary through a cybernetic lens, Lacan argues that the symbolic order has an irreducible autonomy—it governs human beings from the outside, constitutes their non-mastery over language, and grounds the Freudian insistence of the repressed as the relation of non-being to being.

    The fundamental relation of man to this symbolic order is very precisely what founds the symbolic order itself—the relation of non-being to being. What insists on being satisfied can only be satisfied in recognition. The end of the symbolic process is that non-being come to be, because it has spoken.

31. #31

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bentham's utilitarianism and Stoic logic (material implication) to articulate the modal structure of jouissance—that enjoyment 'does not cease not to be written' (the impossible)—and to show that repression is secondary to a primal non-suitability of jouissance for the sexual relationship, with metaphor as repression's first effect; he then aligns this with Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (sight, smell, hearing) to locate the objet petit a as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

    even though not-being is not, it should all the same not be forgotten that at every instant... if what I have said about non-being is not, if this is set by the word against the account of being of which it is the fault

32. #32

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.17

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

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

    this truth, the only one that can be incontestable because it is not, that there is no sexual relationship.

33. #33

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972** > What does that mean?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic discourse resists grounding in any substance or being, and that the impossibility of predication (the absolute 'being' that cannot be completed) is revealed precisely through the fracture of sexed being as it is constituted by jouissance—thus breaking with philosophy and grounding analysis in topology rather than ontology.

    never having recourse to any substance, of never referring to any being. And by this fact breaking with anything whatsoever that is stated as a philosophy

34. #34

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    VII. Not Phtlosophizing

    Theoretical move: Lacan distances his concept of the Real from both ontological metaphysics and Kantian epistemology, insisting instead that the Real is irreducibly non-whole, non-transcendent, and open to future formalization — a methodological wager that refuses premature systematization while holding open the possibility of an evolving law of the real.

    It is not at all ontological... It is not even remotely Kantian.

35. #35

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental object (noumenon) marks only the limit of sensuous intuition — a structurally empty space that neither experience nor pure understanding can fill — and that misapplying the understanding beyond its proper field (making objects conform to concepts rather than concepts to intuitions) is the root error of transcendental illusion; the passage closes by systematically dividing the concept of 'nothing' according to the categories.

    The highest conception, with which a transcendental philosophy commonly begins, is the division into possible and impossible… the conception of an object in general—problematically understood and without its being decided whether it is something or nothing

36. #36

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION. > NOTHING AS

    Theoretical move: Kant's fourfold table of Nothing distinguishes empty conceptions (ens rationis, nihil negativum) from empty data for conceptions (nihil privativum, ens imaginarium), establishing that pure negation and pure form both require something real as their condition of possibility.

    We see that the ens rationis is distinguished from the nihil negativum or pure nothing... Both, however, are empty conceptions.

37. #37

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > How to Remain a Rationalist?

    Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freudian psychoanalysis establishes a "materialist rationalism" whose founding gesture—taking parapraxes and other seemingly trivial phenomena seriously—entails a non-exclusive universalism about rational explanation, a new concept of existence that encompasses what "inexists" (the unsaid, the unconscious), and an immaterial materiality ('un-matter') that constitutes the Real underlying psychoanalytic inquiry.

    We must be attentive to that which inexists in the situation and not be content with what exists... Being attentive to what inexists or remains unsaid and concretely analyzing *this* peculiar inexistence

38. #38

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    The End of All Things > The Third Cognition and the Double-Count

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Kant's categorical imperative and its three interpretations, the passage argues that the Kantian free will is structurally fatalist: the will wills freely only by willing nothing (an absent object), such that freedom resides not in a choice between determinations but in the blind spot produced by the subject's double-count across phenomenal and noumenal realms—a third cognition that embodies the very incomprehensibility of freedom.

    the will wills nothing... It is Nothing itself... as 'objectless object' that should be willed here.

39. #39

    Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.289

    <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the limits of knowledge in love and grief are not deficiencies but constitutive dimensions of intimate bonds, and that psychoanalysis teaches not perfect transparency but a tolerant, even productive relation to irreducible unknowing — in others and in oneself.

    what we don't know of our loved ones, far from diminishing our relationship with them, is an enduring part of the richness of the bond that ties us to them

40. #40

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

    Theoretical move: Heidegger's concept of authenticity is redefined through the primordial encounter with the nothing: Dasein's openness to being is only possible via anxiety before nothingness, and this structure — beings appearing only against the backdrop of a primordial absence — is positioned as a philosophical precursor to Lacan's logic of lack.

    Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing.

41. #41

    The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.87

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > God’s name as a noun

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that dominant theological and popular religious traditions (from the Lilith myth through Descartes and creationism) share a common structure of grounding faith in God as an object of rational contemplation and reflection, and that this objectifying move—treating religious truth as a factual claim of the same ontological status as scientific statements—is the central problem the author seeks to displace in favor of a different understanding of faith's source.

    the possibility that the source and truth of faith is something other than an object of contemplation... of this source's manifesting itself as some(no)thing.

42. #42

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.90

    Fuzzy Math > **P**⊋**{{***n*+**1},{Ø}}**

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a mathematical re-reading of Kierkegaard's "all and nothing" definition of the public, arguing that the public's structure is best captured as the proper superset P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}: an expansive subset of somebodies-turned-nobodies plus an empty subset whose "nothing" is not additive but subtractive, anticipating Badiou's set-theoretic ontology and showing that the public's apparent excess over its own totality is a formation-into-one-of-zero rather than a genuine whole.

    an incandescent being-nothing that avoids being-all but also manages to elude non-being.

43. #43

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.129

    part iii

    Theoretical move: Against Bergson's model of comedy as the mechanical encrusting upon pure life, Zupančič argues that life is non-identical with itself—constitutively split—and that the comic works not by extracting mechanism from life but by relating life to itself so that 'pure life' appears as an object; the comic's two-step movement (splitting the imaginary One, then revealing the intrinsic bond between the resulting duality) is driven by the Real as the connective silence that prevents the two terms from becoming fully independent.

    life is what remains after we single out (for example, through imitation) everything there is. In other words: life is what is not. It exists only as an irreducible leftover of what is.

44. #44

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.281

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics is structurally homologous to the Lacanian concept of symbolic registration by the big Other, and further proposes a three-level ontology (quantum Real, abyssal Void, macroscopic reality) modeled on the Klein bottle, where the collapse of the wave function is not an anomaly but constitutive of quantum reality itself — with the 'snout' of the Klein bottle retroactively producing the 'mollusk' of the Real.

    this texture is pre-ontological, a 'less than nothing,' the hole in its midst indicates that something, a kind of abyssal attractor, drags down the field, pushing 'less than nothing' to Nothing, to the Void

45. #45

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.289

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

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

    What if we accept its implication—that, ultimately, 'nothing exists'… Is this not Badiou's position, the assertion of multiplicities of multiplicities as the ultimate real?

46. #46

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.300

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

    Theoretical move: Žižek maps a triadic ontological structure—Nothing/Void ($), the One (objet a), and the Two (sinthome)—onto unorientable topological surfaces (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle), arguing that at every level there is a constitutive antagonism: nothing is never fully nothing, the One is never one, the Two never forms a relation, and the barred subject ($) is the operator that transforms pre-ontological void into ontological nothingness.

    we begin with the swarm of pre-ontological dens (LTNs) around the abyss of the Void

47. #47

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.344

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [Madness, Sex, War](#contents.xhtml_ahd22)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "abstract negativity" (madness, sexuality, war) is not an accidental excess to be sublated but a constitutive, immanent remainder that persists at the heart of every ethical and ontological edifice; the Möbius-strip topology of this persistence means that the barbaric core sustaining civilization cannot be simply overcome by expanding rational order, and Hegel's own failure to follow through on this insight (in sexuality and in his conservative politics) reveals the limit of any synthesis from Substance to Subject.

    What does the vision of thwarted ontology (as deployed in this book) mean for our approach to reality?

48. #48

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.61

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that radical materialism requires rejecting both "objective reality" and consistent subjectivity, identifying the Real not with nature-in-itself but with the crack/gap in every ontological edifice—a deficiency shared by transcendental reason and reality itself—which Freud/Lacan name 'sexuality,' and whose trans-ontological elaboration requires a concept of 'less than nothing' formalized through the Klein bottle as the minimal definition of the Absolute.

    a new trans-ontological function is to be introduced, that of 'less than nothing,' not of some primordial pre-ontological chaos but of a subtractive agency which makes nothing out of not-yet-something

49. #49

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.285

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues for a three-level ontological triad (pre-ontological quantum proto-reality, ordinary physical reality, and the symbolic universe) in which Lack/absence must be primordial rather than emergent, and where the logic of retroactivity, the quilting-point, and the Not-all operate homologously across quantum physics, Hegel's Logic, and the Lacanian symbolic order—displacing both evolutionary materialism and standard idealism.

    We are clearly dealing here with the logic of retroactivity: the first being … only retroactively, through its repetition, becomes being … The first being is not yet pure being … but a pre-ontological 'less-than-nothing'

50. #50

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.17

    Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

    Theoretical move: Against new materialisms and realist ontologies, the passage argues for a Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism in which the subject—understood as the void of absolute negativity and identified with the Lacanian objet petit a—is not one object among others but constitutes the very hole in reality, such that "the hole in reality is the subject," and material reality is properly characterized as "non-all" rather than a fully constituted whole.

    a truly radical materialism is non-reductionist: far from claiming that 'everything is matter,' it confers upon 'immaterial' phenomena a specific positive non-being.

51. #51

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.71

    <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Vel of Alienation*

    Theoretical move: The passage develops Lacan's vel of alienation as a forced, asymmetric either/or in which the subject is structurally assigned the losing position, giving rise not to being but to a pure place-holder (empty set) within the symbolic order; it then introduces separation as the complementary operation—a neither/nor overlap of two lacks—through which the subject attempts to fill the Other's lack with its own manque-à-être, thereby generating desire as coextensive with lack.

    The subject's concept of manque-à-être is useful here: the subject fails to come forth as a someone, as a particular being; in the most radical sense, he or she is not, he or she has no being.

52. #52

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

    Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

    Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's rapprochement between Hegel and Schelling by arguing that Hegel's opening of the Science of Logic is actually a covert refutation of Schelling's pure indeterminacy, and that Hegel's emergentist 'layer-cake' ontology is genuinely different from and superior to Schelling's pseudo-emergentist 'layer-doughnut' model, with Lacan's 'rabbit in the hat' critique being recruited to illuminate Schelling's circular presupposition of spirit within nature.

    the Hegelian ontology of the Real (as per Realphilosophie divided into Naturphilosophie and Geistesphilosophie) arises on the basis provided by objectively given spatio-temporal nature

53. #53

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.325

    Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's das Ding, properly understood as a locus of pure lack encountered in the Other rather than in self-referential Dasein-anxiety, is distinguished from Heidegger precisely by extimacy; integrating objet a with das Ding produces not theoretical closure but a coherent account of the impossibility of ultimate theoretical coherence.

    The key point is that the Thing is not a thing at all… Das Ding has no objective existence whatsoever… it is rather a locus of pure lack.

54. #54

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

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

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

    This all has deep connections with the original Eleatic problems of non-being (how I could possibly say 'what is not' in uttering falsehoods... hence Žižek's sustained attention to the second half of Plato's Parmenides.

55. #55

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

    Žižek Responds! > [Response to Boothby](#contents.xhtml_ch14a)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Boothby's reversal of the ontic/ontological assignments of *objet a* and *das Ding*: *objet a* is ontological (as object-cause of desire that structures reality through subtraction), while *das Ding* exceeds the entire ontic-ontological distinction as a "trans-ontological" trace of what the ontic was before disclosure — and this logic extends to the subject itself, which is ultimately also a supposition rather than a positive given.

    there is what one could call a trans-ontological dimension in the Thing… it is what the ontic was before it became properly ontic (i.e., brought to light within an ontological horizon).

56. #56

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.62

    Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > Pippin on Žižek’s “Gappy Ontology”

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Pippin's retorsion critique of Žižek (that a "gappy ontology" undermines rational normativity and risks justifying any regime retrospectively) rests on a covert Kantian Doctrine of Method, and that the real divergence between Žižek and the Pittsburgh Hegelians lies in this unacknowledged methodological commitment rather than in the ontological dispute itself.

    Instead of structures of being, structures of non-being apparently dominate.

57. #57

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.47

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

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

    This ontologically determinative negativity involved in the concept of sexual difference is precisely what is lost with the replacement of this concept with that of 'gender differences.'

58. #58

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.126

    Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze converge in treating the death drive as a foundational "crack" around which drives congregate, but diverge crucially: where Deleuze collapses the tripartite topology (original negativity / surplus-enjoyment / signifiers) into a single dynamic movement of pure Difference, Lacan preserves the Real as an irreducible third term whose effect is the subject itself — making subjectivation the very index of an irreducible Real rather than an obstacle to realism.

    It does not imply, for example, that something is 'impossible to be repeated' in its unique singularity; rather, it implies the non-being of what is to be repeated. It is impossible to repeat it because it is not there in the usual sense of the term.

59. #59

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.153

    From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel

    Theoretical move: Sexuality (as linked to the unconscious) constitutes a short circuit between ontology and epistemology: the lack at the heart of sex is not a contingent missing piece of knowledge but a structural incompleteness of being itself, and the unconscious names the inherent link between sexuality and knowledge in their shared fundamental negativity. The 'dream's navel' figures this gap where the lack in knowledge coincides with a lack in being.

    We do not know, because there is nothing to know. Yet this 'nothing' is inherent to being, and constitutes its irreducible crack.

60. #60

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.143

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's "para-ontology" locates impossibility as internal to being itself (not external as in Badiou's Event), such that an Event is a disjunction of the necessary and the impossible rather than an interruption from elsewhere—and that love, as the paradigm case of the Event, produces a comic coincidence-of-split that generates a "new signifier" capable of sustaining contingency without forcing necessity.

    This is what Lacan's so-called 'para-ontology' (also sometimes referred to as 'parontology') would be about: being is collateral (hence the expression 'para-being') to its own impossibility