Masochism

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (189)

1. #01

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

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

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

   it sustains the fantasy of infinite suffering, the fantasy in the frame of which every body functions as a sublime body.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.249

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

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

   the rarity of 'good' becomes the omnipresence of 'evil'; the incompatibility of ethics and pleasure leads to a methodical masochism

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

   Theoretical move: Freud extends the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams by analysing "counter wish-dreams" — dreams with unpleasant or apparently unwished-for content — and showing they still satisfy wishes, either through displacement and disguise, through the patient's wish to prove the analyst wrong (resistance), or through masochistic satisfaction, thereby defending the universality of wish-fulfilment as the engine of dream-formation.

   In the sexual make-up of many people there is a masochistic component, which has arisen through the conversion of the aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite. Such people are called 'ideal' masochists, if they seek pleasure not in the bodily pain which may be inflicted upon them, but in humiliation and in chastisement of the soul.

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream-affects are not simple transpositions of waking emotions but are overdetermined confluences of multiple affective sources — some censor-approved, others suppressed — whose co-operation or mutual reinforcement explains both the qualitative justification and quantitative excess of neurotic and dream emotions, thereby complicating the wish-fulfilment thesis.

   One should remember that there are masochistic tendencies in the psychic life to which such an inversion might be attributed.

5. #05

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

   . A MOR E TOLE R ABLE INFINIT Y

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

   the losing side often fights when defeat is certain because they find satisfaction in the defeat itself

6. #06

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.30

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

   Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological defense analysis shows it to be self-defeating: by privileging the ego as analytic interlocutor, it redoubles alienation and misrecognition, reinforces defenses rather than dissolving them, and substitutes the analyst's suggestive opinions for genuine analytic truth—whereas Lacan insists that the Freudian Thing speaks even through defenses, making everything said (or unsaid) by the analysand available to interpretation.

   Such a 'cure' appears to Lacan to amount simply to even more of the neurotic disease itself, merely offering additional desubjectification and (moral) masochism.

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.85

   [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The intersubjective game by which truth enters reality

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symptom is constituted by the diachronic and synchronic operations of the signifier rather than by object-relations or emotional causality, and that the signifier's arbitrary yet overdetermined nature means it cannot serve as a guide to adaptive reality but instead generates a complex web of meanings that impacts reality — a view that Lacan uses to critique the ego-psychological and object-relations reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptive "corrective emotional experience."

   Lacan makes reference to some of the perversions here: sadism, masochism, and scopophilia

8. #08

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.20

   Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Freud's Three- Pronged Spear

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's critique of religion operates along three interlocking prongs—wish-fulfillment, superego masochism, and symptomatic compromise-formation—showing how infantile illusion and self-punishing ascesis are not contradictory but complementary modes of controlling helplessness, with Nietzsche's bad conscience serving as a structural precursor to Freud's account of the superego.

   The self- inflicted sufferings of the monastics who kneel upon little stones while praying, who flagellate themselves on long pilgrimages, who fast, sleep upon oak- hard beds, or labor in the fields wearing agonizing hair shirts all testify to the ferocity of the superego.

9. #09

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.26

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

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

   it is turned inward upon the subject itself in the form of what Freud called the 'primordial masochism' of the death drive.

10. #10

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.150

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > From Circumcision to Crucifixion

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that bodily mutilation rituals in Judaism (circumcision) and Christianity (crucifixion) operate as structurally distinct symbolic operations: circumcision establishes the signifier of the phallus and holds open the regime of signification, while crucifixion installs a phantasmatic identification with the objet a that risks collapsing into a narcissistic-masochistic perversion rather than genuine opening toward the Other.

    The Christian masochistically identifies in toto with this 'waste object,' sacrificing itself to the greater glory of God.

11. #11

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.28

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > Death at the Bott om of Everything

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

    The death drive creates an essentially masochistic structure within the psyche… masochism functions as the paradigmatic form of subjectivity.

12. #12

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.42

    I > 1 > Th e Importance of Losing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constituted through a foundational act of self-sacrifice — the ceding of a lost object that was never substantially possessed — which converts animal need into desire and makes loss the irreducible structural condition (rather than a contingent misfortune) of the speaking subject; this grounds a politics of repetition rather than progress.

    Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually repeats the masochistic act that founds it.

13. #13

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

    I > Against Knowledge > Th e End of Class Consciousness

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

    There is a fundamentally masochistic structure to enjoyment. It always comes in the form of an alien force that overcomes us from the outside.

14. #14

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.233

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Even the Losers

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

    A masochistic scene of loss at the hands of some figure embodying authority seems central to the structure of fantasy.

15. #15

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.246

    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.

    Even when it appears most securely on the side of life, fundamentalism remains devoted to the value-creating power of death.

16. #16

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

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

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

    'masochism is the main enjoyment that the real gives' (Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976, 78)

17. #17

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

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

18. #18

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_55"></span>**drive**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's reworking of Freudian drive theory: by distinguishing drive from instinct, articulating the drive's circuit through three grammatical voices, insisting on the irreducible partiality of drives, and identifying every drive as a death drive, Lacan reframes the drive as a symbolic-cultural construct whose circular aim — not goal — constitutes the only path beyond the pleasure principle.

    Even supposedly 'passive' phases of the drive such as masochism involve activity (S11, 200).

19. #19

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    Lacan argues that masochism is primary, and sadism is derived from it: 'sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism' (S11, 186).

20. #20

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_199"></span>**superego**

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

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

21. #21

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    6

    Theoretical move: Freud reconstructs the history of his drive theory, arguing that the introduction of the death drive beside Eros is not a rupture but a clarification of a long-developing dualism, and concludes that civilization itself is the arena of the struggle between Eros and the death drive—the life drive's project of binding humanity into ever-larger units against the autonomous, original drive for aggression and destruction.

    masochism, would be a combination of inward-directed destruction and sexuality, through which the otherwise imperceptible striving became conspicuous and palpable.

22. #22

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    8

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the sense of guilt—conceived as a topical variety of anxiety and the central cost of civilization—must be theorized through its mostly unconscious operation, its two-layered origin (fear of external then internal authority), and its privileged relationship to aggression rather than erotic drives, with repression converting libidinal elements into symptoms and aggressive components into guilt.

    Fear of this critical authority... amounts to a need for punishment – is the manifestation of a drive on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of the sadistic super-ego.

23. #23

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys psychoanalytic categories (obsessional neurosis, masochism, the impossible object, fantasy screens, jouissance) to argue that Smiley's character is misread by Alfredson's film, which imposes a neoliberal logic of consumerism and youth onto a figure whose allure depends on the baroque mechanisms of self-deception proper to obsessional neurosis and the organisation of enjoyment around an unattainable object.

    to suggest that Smiley would straightforwardly feel pain when confronted with Ann's infidelities is to betray the very idea that he is masochistic.

24. #24

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses a comparison between Peace's novel and Hooper/Morgan's film adaptation to argue that "pulp modernism" confronts a Real that bourgeois/middlebrow realism forecloses, while the adaptation's reduction to received images and jaunty tone neutralises the novel's masochistic jouissance and existential dread.

    the jouissance of sport is essentially masochistic

25. #25

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.81

    <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses the figure of Smiley to theorize a subject driven not by repressed sexuality but by a constitutive lack of interiority — a "chameleon" subjectivity that dissolves into role-playing, making desire, drive, and perversion irreducible to sadomasochism or therapeutic models of repression. The passage pivots on distinguishing Smiley's ascetic renunciation-as-perversity from both repression and sadomasochistic enjoyment.

    he also characterised Smiley as masochistic (repeatedly subjecting himself to adulterous humiliations) and sadistic (the way he pursues his prey goes far beyond professional duty).

26. #26

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.308

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

    Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Seminar I, listing terms and page references; it contains no original theoretical argument but maps the seminar's conceptual terrain through cross-referenced entries.

    masochism and 'Fort/Da' game 172 and mirror-stage 172 and murder of thing 174, 219 and super-ego 196

27. #27

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    **Xffl**

    Theoretical move: The Fort/Da game is read as the originary moment where desire becomes human through its entry into language: the symbol's power to negate the thing (the "original murder of the thing") opens the world of negativity, grounds both human discourse and reality, and locates primal masochism at this inaugural negativation; desire thereafter is only ever reintegrated through symbolic nomination, and analytic technique must be understood in terms of freeing speech from its moorings within language.

    Primal masochism should be located around this initial negativation, around this original murder of the thing.

28. #28

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.176

    **Xffl**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Mirror Stage inaugurates a fundamental imaginary alienation in which desire is projected onto the other, generating an irreducible aggression toward the other as the site of that alienation; the symbolic order (language, the Fort/Da game) is the only mediation that rescues the subject from the destructive logic of the imaginary dual relation, while also locating primary masochism and the death drive at the juncture of the imaginary and symbolic.

    What, in its structurating form, is generally called primary masochism is located at this juncture. That is also where one must locate what is usually called the death instinct, which is constitutive of the fundamental position of the human subject.

29. #29

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.188

    **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a series of aphorisms on the love-desire-jouissance relation, arguing that anxiety mediates between desire and jouissance, that sadism and masochism are not reversible but constitute a fourfold structure each concealing the other's true aim, and that "only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire" — with castration functioning as the structural impasse that governs the encounter between the sexes.

    he aims in fact, as the ultimate term, at the Other's anxiety. This is what allows the manoeuvre to be outmanoeuvred.

30. #30

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Lucia Tower's clinical case report, Lacan argues that countertransference only becomes analytically operative when the analyst's own desire is genuinely implicated in the transference relation; and that sadism, properly understood, aims at the missing partial object rather than at masochistic self-punishment in the analyst.

    putting oneself on the line through which the sadistic object-search passes in no way amounts to being a masochist. Our Lucia Tower accuses herself of nothing of the sort

31. #31

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and law are structurally identical—sharing the same object—such that the Oedipus myth encodes the originary coincidence of the father's desire with the law; this identity is then mapped onto masochism (where the subject appears as *ejectum*/objet a), the castration complex, transference (structured around agalma and lack), and the passage à l'acte, illustrated through Freud's case of the young homosexual woman.

    What the masochist means to show—and I'll add, on his little stage—is that the desire of the Other lays down the law.

32. #32

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.360

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section from Seminar X, listing proper names, concepts, and bibliographic references alphabetically with page numbers; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

    masochism see moral masochism; perversion; woman's masochism

33. #33

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.115

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

    to recognize oneself as the object of one's desire, in the sense I have been spelling it out, is always masochistic.

34. #34

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.355

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index/reference section from Seminar X, listing concepts, proper names, and bibliographic entries alphabetically; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

    Christian masochism 220-1

35. #35

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan maps the perverse positions of sadism and masochism through the differential concealment of anxiety and the object (objet a), arguing that anxiety is the subject's real leftover and that castration is best understood not as threat but through the structural "falling-away" of the phallus as object—a detumescent object whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence.

    What is masked over for him by his fantasy of being the object of a jouissance of the Other - which is his own will to jouissance... What does this position of object mask over, if it is not the fact of meeting up with himself again, of positing himself in the function of a human wreck

36. #36

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.232

    **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the body's engagement in the signifying chain produces an irreducible remainder — the "pound of flesh" — that cannot be dissolved by phenomenological non-dualism, and uses this structure to contrast the Christian (masochistic identification with the waste-object) against the Buddhist relationship to desire-as-illusion, ultimately grounding the mirror/eye dialectic in the logic of objet petit a as what is cut from the subject rather than projected outward.

    the Christian solution... none other than the mirage that is attached to the masochistic outcome, inasmuch as the Christian has learnt, through the dialectic of Redemption, to identify ideally with he who made himself identical with this same object, the waste object left behind out of divine retribution

37. #37

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses clinical material and the figure of Don Juan to argue that feminine jouissance is structurally distinct from masculine desire: whereas man's anxiety is tied to the (–φ) and the lost object, woman's relation to jouissance is mediated by the desire of the Other rather than by lack, making her "truer and more real." Women's masochism is consequently reframed as a male fantasy, and the male "imposture" is contrasted with the female "masquerade."

    women's masochism is a male fantasy. Second point. In this fantasy, it is by proxy and in relation to the masochistic structure that is imagined in woman that man sustains his jouissance through something that is his own anxiety.

38. #38

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.217

    **x** > **xv**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of vessels (the pot of castration as minus-phi, the Klein bottle as the structure of objet a) to argue that anxiety arises not from castration itself but from the way the object a comes to half-fill the hollow of primordial castration via the desire of the Other; circumcision is then read as a ritual embodiment of this topological structure, instituting a normative relation between subject, objet a, and the big Other.

    how recourse to the imaginary dimension of castration, to an I'd like them to be snipped off, can be a soothing, welcome way out of the masochist's anxiety.

39. #39

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.361

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    moral masochism 105, 190

40. #40

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.277

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

    What woman asks of the analyst at the end of an analysis conducted in accordance with Freud's indications, is without doubt a penis, Penisneid, but so that she might do better than the man.

41. #41

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

    What escapes his notice... is the fact that he is seeking the Other's anxiety.

42. #42

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

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Freud's grammatical derivation of drive opposites (exhibitionism/voyeurism, sadism/masochism) as conflating grammatical subject/object with real functions, while conceding that through this very game Freud conveys something essential about the drive: what Lacan will call 'the trace of the act.'

    how can one say, just like that, as Freud goes on to do, that exhibitionism is the contrary of voyeurism, or that masochism is the contrary of sadism?

43. #43

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity opposition functions as a metaphor that covers over the unfathomable character of sexual difference, and that sado-masochism is not simply a 'ready money' sexual realization but rather an injection structuring the field of love and desire; he further challenges the notion of 'feminine masochism' as a masculine fantasy rather than a clinical fact.

    the supposed value, for example, of feminine masochism, as it is called, should be subjected, parenthetically, to serious scrutiny. It belongs to a dialogue that may be defined, in many respects, as a masculine phantasy.

44. #44

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's three-stage account of the drive circuit (active, reflexive, passive) to argue that the appearance of a new subject — the other — is constitutively produced by the drive's circular course, making the subject not a presupposition but an outcome of the drive's reversal.

    what he cannot designate other than by the combination of two terms in sado-masochism. When he speaks of these two drives, and especially of masochism, he is careful to observe that there are not two stages in these drives, but three.

45. #45

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

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

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

    everyone knows that this, verging on all the resonances of masochism, is the altrified term of the oral drive

46. #46

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

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

    even in their supposedly passive phase, the exercise of a drive, a masochistic drive, for example, requires that the masochist give himself if I may be permitted to put it in this way, a devil of a job.

47. #47

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's essential structure — its circular return to the subject rather than simple object-directedness — is irreducible to love or well-being, and that the subject's realization in the signifier depends on a constitutive gap in its relation to the Other, theorized topologically as the function of the rim.

    Here the reversal of the drive is something quite different from the variation of ambivalence... It is not when the object in one's sights is not good that one becomes a masochist.

48. #48

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is never the aim of desire but rather the foundation of identification (or its disavowal), and uses this to pivot toward Freud's analysis of love, establishing that love's fundamentally narcissistic structure is what must be interrogated to understand how the love object can come to function as an object of desire.

    In this sense, sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism.

49. #49

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive is structured around a lacunary apparatus in which the lost object (objet a) is installed, while fantasy functions as the support of desire by placing a split subject in relation to an object that never shows its true face; perversion is then theorized as an inversion of this fantasy structure wherein the subject determines itself as object.

    It is in so far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself.

50. #50

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.198

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

    Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive—illustrated through exhibitionism and sado-masochism—is only completed in its reversed, active form when the other is brought into play; this circuit constitutes the sole permitted transgression of the pleasure principle, revealing that desire is a detour aimed at catching the jouissance of the other.

    we have the key, the nodus, of what has been so much an obstacle to the understanding of masochism. Freud articulated in the most categorical way that at the outset of the sado-masochistic drive, pain has nothing to do with it.

51. #51

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the narcissistic field of love (where the Other is structurally absent) to the partial drive's circular movement as the proper mechanism through which the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — distinguishing narcissistic self-love from the drive's heterogeneous, gap-bearing circularity, and using the scopic drive as the exemplary case.

    the representatives of this sex in the analytic circle are particularly disposed to maintain the fundamental belief in feminine masochism.

52. #52

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

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Freud's grammar-based logic of drive opposites (voyeurism/exhibitionism, sadism/masochism) as a confusion of grammatical with real functions, while arguing that Freud's deeper contribution is what the drive reveals about 'the trace of the act' — a concept to be formally defined.

    how can one say, just like that, as Freud goes on to do, that exhibitionism is the contrary of voyeurism, or that masochism is the contrary of sadism?

53. #53

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's account of the drive's reversibility (active/passive poles) as demonstrating that the drive's circuit is fundamentally circular and that this circularity is what occasions the appearance of a new subject — the Other — not as a pre-existing subject but as an effect produced by the drive completing its round.

    When he speaks of these two drives, and especially of masochism, he is careful to observe that there are not two stages in these drives, but three.

54. #54

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

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

    Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive — illustrated through exhibitionism and sadomasochism — is only completed in its reversed form (return to the subject via the Other), and the drive's course is posited as the sole form of transgression available to the subject with respect to the pleasure principle, with jouissance of the Other as the drive's ultimate, always-missed aim.

    we have the key, the nodus, of what has been so much an obstacle to the understanding of masochism. Freud articulated in the most categorical way that at the outset of the sado-masochistic drive, pain has nothing to do with it.

55. #55

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

    Theoretical move: The passage theorises the drive's circuit through the lacunary apparatus of the subject, distinguishing the lost object's role in the drive from fantasy's role as the support of desire, and pivoting to argue that perversion is fantasy's inverted effect—where the subject determines itself as object—which in turn constitutes the sado-masochistic drive structure.

    It is in so far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself.

56. #56

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is never the aim of desire but rather functions as a pre-subjective foundation or disavowed identification, and uses this to reframe the love object's relationship to desire as resting on equivocation, with love's fundamentally narcissistic structure grounded in the pleasure principle rather than the drive.

    sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism.

57. #57

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud, argues that the activity/passivity opposition does not map onto masculine/feminine but rather serves as a metaphorical cover for an unfathomable sexual difference; furthermore, the injection of sado-masochism into the sexual relation cannot be taken at face value, and feminine masochism is exposed as a masculine fantasy rather than a natural given.

    the supposed value, for example, of feminine masochism, as it is called, should be subjected, parenthetically, to serious scrutiny. It belongs to a dialogue that may be defined, in many respects, as a masculine phantasy.

58. #58

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the narcissistic field of love (where the Other cannot be represented) from the circularity of the partial drive, arguing that it is precisely through the drive's circular movement around the objet a that the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — a move that also introduces the concept of 'masquerade' as operating at the symbolic rather than imaginary level.

    the representatives of this sex in the analytic circle are particularly disposed to maintain the fundamental belief in feminine masochism.

59. #59

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

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

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

    verging on all the resonances of masochism, is the altrified term of the oral drive

60. #60

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

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

    even in their supposedly passive phase, the exercise of a drive, a masochistic drive, for example, requires that the masochist give himself if I may be permitted to put it in this way, a devil of a job.

61. #61

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's logic — its circular return upon the subject — is irreducible to ambivalence or well-being, and that the subject's realization is produced through a structural gap in its signifying dependence on the Other, grounded topologically in the function of the rim/cut.

    It is not when the object in one's sights is not good that one becomes a masochist.

62. #62

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.47

    IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages with Conrad Stein's theory of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to sharpen the distinction between imaginary dual relations and the properly Lacanian categories of the big Other, the small other, and objet petit a — arguing that the analytic situation cannot be reduced to fusional narcissism but involves an articulated structure of desire and the object.

    The second article elaborates this position in opposing to narcissism this time the masochism of the patient in the treatment.

63. #63

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's Wager as a vehicle to articulate the structure of the subject's division between knowledge and truth, arguing that the Wager's logic—wagering a finite life for an infinite series—mirrors the fantasy structure in which the subject is constituted as split by the objet petit a, while also repositioning feminine masochism and narcissism as the deceptive face of truth itself.

    Relationships engaged in in psychoanalysis... concerning the phantasy that is called, and which is in question under the name of feminine masochism.

64. #64

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan positions the analytic experience as requiring the analyst to occupy a Pyrrhonian/sceptical stance toward truth, introduces the Subject Supposed to Know as the patient's trap for the analyst's epistemological drive, and pivots toward Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject's relationship to infinity, the real, and the impossibility of enjoying truth.

    why so quickly define as masochism something after all of which we have nothing to say at the beginning, except who wants it... Is all desire then to be desire and in itself masochistic?

65. #65

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Möbius strip and its cuts to furnish a structural (non-metaphorical) account of the barred subject ($) and its relation to the non-specular objet a, arguing that the strip resulting from cutting a Möbius strip is applicable to the torus and models the subject, while the discal residue from cutting the projective plane models the o-object as non-specular.

    I will find myself lead here to one of these turning points of the introduction, of the highlighting, of the bringing out of a structural given which will be, especially for us analysts, of the greatest utility as a foundation, in order to try to order things that are completely confused because collapsed together, crushed, as I might say, by the different planes that it invokes on the subject of masochism.

66. #66

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.254

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic formation but its very substance — the 'stuff into which the analyst cuts' — and uses the mathematician's disclosure that mathematical discourse conceals its own referent to illuminate the structural parallel with the psychoanalyst's position, where the unconscious (Urverdrangung) prevents any direct saying of what is spoken about; jouissance, caught in the net of language/the signifier, is identified as the hidden dimension that grounds desire and that only topology can begin to approach.

    what Freud named the death instinct (*instinct*), the primordial masochism of *jouissance,* namely, metaphors, the lightning reflections that our experience projects onto this question.

67. #67

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.50

    IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical confrontation between a framework centred on frustration, narcissism, and the pleasure/reality principle duality (Stein's position) and Lacan's alternative, which reorders the analytic situation around lack, the subject supposed to know, and the signifier/signified distinction—arguing that frustration is not the terminal category of analysis and that the symbolic dimension is being systematically underweighted in current analytic theory.

    the opposition of narcissism and masochism, this overlapping the Freudian dualities of the pleasure principle and the reality principle

68. #68

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.111

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage records a seminar discussion in which Lacan and interlocutors (Conté, Melman, Audouard) interrogate Stein's theoretical articles on psychoanalytic treatment, centering on whether the analyst's word can function as objet petit a, and identifying the absence of the big Other as the critical gap in Stein's articulation of narcissism, desire, transference, and truth.

    the second article, that on masochism in the treatment, insisted on the reference to the word pronounced by the psychoanalyst as real, this being opposed to the dimension of the imaginary

69. #69

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative 'stuff' — the medium in which the analyst cuts the subject — and uses the mathematician's structural concealment of his object as a foil to show that the analyst's non-saying differs because an irreducible unconscious (Urverdrängung) prevents knowledge, while jouissance, caught in the net of language as sexual jouissance, is the hidden ground that desire defends against, pointing toward the death drive as the only genuine philosophical question.

    the primordial masochism of *jouissance,* namely, metaphors, the lightning reflections that our experience projects onto this question

70. #70

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.280

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless it is re-articulated as the foundation of desire through the phallic function, and that feminine jouissance is structurally located at the place of the big Other (O), while the minus-phi (−φ) serves as the mediating organ-as-object between male and female jouissance — against any naïve notion of genital maturation or "oblativity" as explanatory.

    This has different origins. One must not discredit it in advance. It may have noble origins: masochism, for example. It is an excellent position.

71. #71

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.59

    IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes to reframe Melman's reading of Stein's article: the analyst's word is not a 'preaching' that serves truth but must be situated at the place of the objet petit a, and the analyst's position is better defined through Verneinung (negation/denial) than through Bejahung (affirmation), because truth serves itself — it cannot be served.

    it is not a matter of masochism, we have left completely to one side today our conception of masochism because it poses too many problems. But a conception that is in a way hypochondriacal of the function of the word of the analyst.

72. #72

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless articulated through the phallic function and the (-phi), and that sexual jouissance must be mapped through the structure of the Other — locating feminine jouissance at the place of the Other (O) while exposing "Hegel's error" of placing jouissance on the side of the master.

    This has different origins. One must not discredit it in advance. It may have noble origins: masochism, for example. It is an excellent position.

73. #73

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the Möbius strip and its topological transformations (cutting, doubling, the toric strip, the projective plane, and the discal residue) as the structural support for the barred subject ($) and the non-specular objet petit a, arguing that the conjunction of identity and difference proper to subjectivity can only be rigorously grounded in these topological—not metaphorical—structures, and that distinctions between real and imaginary reversal depend entirely on which surface-structure is in play.

    in order to try to order things that are completely confused because collapsed together, crushed, as I might say, by the different planes that it invokes on the subject of masochism.

74. #74

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement for the psychoanalyst but the very material into which the psychoanalytic operation cuts, and that jouissance—placed on the hither side of the big Other and caught in the net of subjective topology as sexual jouissance—is the irreducible, unsayable dimension that language/desire both defends against and compels us to question, linking the emergence of the signifier to the individual's relation to jouissance via Freud's death drive.

    what Freud named the death instinct (*instinct*), the primordial masochism of *jouissance*, namely, metaphors, the lightning reflections that our experience projects onto this question.

75. #75

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's Wager as a more radical formulation of the Cartesian cogito's splitting of the subject, arguing that the subject constituted by the signifier is irreducibly divided between knowledge and truth, and that the fantasy structure revealed by the Wager discloses how the objet petit a functions as the unknown object that sustains this division.

    Relationships engaged in in psychoanalysis... concerning the phantasy that is called, and which is in question under the name of feminine masochism.

76. #76

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a seminar discussion in which participants (Conté, Melman, Lacan) critically interrogate Stein's theoretical framework, converging on the argument that his account of the analyst's word, narcissism, desire, and predication remains incomplete precisely because it lacks a structural reference to the big Other as the third locus from which the subject receives his own word — a lacuna that collapses the treatment into a dual imaginary game between analyst and patient.

    the second article, that on masochism in the treatment, insisted on the reference to the word pronounced by the psychoanalyst as real

77. #77

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.50

    IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a debate between a frustration-based model of analytic treatment (Stein's) and Lacan's structural alternative, pivoting on the claim that 'lack' is more fundamental than 'frustration', and that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know rather than in the analyst's representative function of reality — while Melman's intervention presses toward the primacy of the signifier/signified distinction over mere content of speech.

    the alternation of narcissistic regression and the re-emergence of conflicts or the opposition of narcissism and masochism

78. #78

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.46

    IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages Stein's account of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to distinguish the imaginary dual relation from the big Other and to locate the o-object (objet petit a) within the structure of desire rather than as a supplement to fusional narcissism—thereby insisting that the analytic situation has an articulated symbolic structure, not merely a fusional lack of distinction.

    Transference has masochism as a correlate. But in conferring on his analyst such absolute power, the subject aims in fact at making himself the master of this power which is lacking for his narcissistic completion.

79. #79

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analytic situation — where every demand is necessarily disappointed — to critique masochism as a hasty diagnostic label, introduces the analyst as Subject Supposed to Know whose epistemological drive toward truth is itself caught in the law of disappointed demand, and pivots to Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject who must wager on truth while initially renouncing access to it in a Pyrrhonian suspension.

    why so quickly define as masochism something after all of which we have nothing to say at the beginning, except who wants it ... Is all desire then to be desire and in itself masochistic?

80. #80

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative material, and uses the structural parallel between mathematical discourse (which speaks what it cannot name) and psychoanalytic discourse (which cannot name what it speaks about due to the irreducible unconscious) to re-ground the function of language, desire, and jouissance as the hidden field from which the subject withdraws its object.

    what Freud named the death instinct (instinct), the primordial masochism of jouissance, namely, metaphors, the lightning reflections that our experience projects onto this question.

81. #81

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: By critically engaging Bergler's theory of "oral neurosis" and its invocation of masochism, Lacan argues that masochism cannot be reduced to the enjoyment of pain; rather, it is structurally defined by the subject assuming the position of the object (objet petit a as remainder/waste) within a contractual scenario that implicates the big Other as the locus of a regulating word—thereby illuminating the Other's role in jouissance and the logic of fantasy.

    It is incorrect to say that what characterises masochism, is the painful aspect of a situation, assumed as such ... the dimension of masochism is defined, specifically, no doubt, by the fact that the subject assumes the position of an object

82. #82

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.206

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism, neurotic rejection, and the sexual act cannot be understood through moralistic or pleasure-based frameworks but require a rigorous logical articulation of the subject's structural position; the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the Other, the phallus, the mother) that prevents any simple dyadic union, and feminine jouissance remains irreducible to what psychoanalytic theory has so far been able to articulate.

    to pin to it, in addition, the term masochist is simply, on this occasion, to introduce into it a pejorative note, which is immediately followed … by a directive attitude of the analyst which may on occasion go as far as to be persecutory.

83. #83

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance-value—not truth—is the primary currency of the unconscious economy and of any discourse, including analytic discourse; this reframes the relation between truth, the unconscious, and the analyst's desire, while grounding the objet petit a topologically as the "setting" of the subject produced by the cut of repetition in the projective plane.

    Someone who is not a psychoanalyst, M Deleuze to name him, presents a book by Sacher Masoch… He writes on masochism undoubtedly the best text that has ever been written!

84. #84

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

    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.

    I simply remind you here of the link that I made, between the ideology of Sade and the imperative of Kant. This soll Ich werden is perhaps just as impracticable as the Kantian ought

85. #85

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.112

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

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

    what he tackles at this level as an effect (question mark) of primordial masochism, as that which, in a life, insists on remaining in a certain medium … of sickness or failure — this is what we ought to grasp as repetition thinking.

86. #86

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a, and that perversion—unlike neurosis or the master/slave dialectic—constitutes an experimental, subject-driven inquiry into jouissance by seeking the partial objects that escape signifying alienation; sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual act rather than natural gender attributes.

    masochism has nothing specifically feminine about it… a woman is not naturally masochistic… Because if she were, in effect, masochistic, that would mean that she is capable of filling the role that the masochist gives to a woman

87. #87

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight/Möbius strip) provides the structural model for both repetition and alienation, showing how the "additional One" (Un-en-plus) generated by the retroactive return of repetition fractures the Other and the subject alike, and that the act emerges precisely at the point where the passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition intersect on these non-orientable surfaces.

    the anxiety of the Other - the true root of the position of the subject as a masochist position.

88. #88

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that it is precisely this disjunction—marked by the barred Other—that grounds the question of jouissance in the sexual act; perversion responds directly to this question (via objects a), while neurosis merely sustains desire, making the perverse act and the neurotic act structurally distinct.

    the masochist - and it is from him that I will start - questions the completeness and the rigour of this separation and sustains it as such, it is through this that he comes to subtract, as I might say, from the field of the Other, what remains available for him in terms of a certain operation of jouissance.

89. #89

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism exemplifies the fundamental economy of perversion: the masochist's identification with the rejected o-object and his demonstrative capture of jouissance reveals that sadism is not the reversal of masochism but its naive counterpart—the sadist, believing himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position of the o-object, enslaved to jouissance from the outside.

    the masochist - in order to withdraw, as one might say, to steal away, to the only corner where manifestly it is graspable, which is the little o-object - gives himself over, for his part deliberately, to this identification to this object as rejected.

90. #90

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the subject's constitution through the signifier effects an alienation that structurally separates body from jouissance — making castration the condition of possibility for any genuine sexual act, while systematically dismantling the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as a sufficient account of jouissance's distribution.

    the masochist is not a slave. He is on the contrary, as I will tell you later, a cute whore, someone very able. The masochist knows that he is in jouissance.

91. #91

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively excluded from the locus of truth (the Other), such that the sexual act can only be established through a structural lie or dissimulation; the Oedipus myth is re-read not as a story of ignorance but as the mythic formula for a 'canned' (killed-off/aseptic) jouissance whose sacrificial negation is the precondition for all subsequent economies of jouissance in psychoanalytic experience.

    this x-field into which our measurements do not penetrate. There is normally a whole crowd there: masochists, hermits, devils, empusae and larvae.

92. #92

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the sexual act by truth—the locus of the Other is the site where jouissance questions itself in the name of truth, but truth cannot be heard in the field of the sexual act without causing it to collapse. Lacan re-reads the Oedipus myth (and Freud's primal-father myth) to establish that originary, absolute jouissance only functions as already "canned" (killed-off, asepticised), and that this transformation of jouissance is the prerequisite for all psychoanalytic economy of exchange and reversal.

    Namely this x-field into which our measurements do not penetrate. There is normally a whole crowd there: masochists, hermits, devils, empusae and larvae.

93. #93

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.112

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

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

    what he tackles at this level as an effect (question mark) of primordial masochism, as that which, in a life, insists on remaining in a certain medium … of sickness or failure

94. #94

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.249

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that this separation is the structural ground on which both the perverse act (which directly questions jouissance via the objet petit a) and the neurotic act (which merely sustains desire) must be rigorously distinguished; masochism is proposed as the exemplary perverse structure that lets us make this distinction.

    the masochist - and it is from him that I will start - questions the completeness and the rigour of this separation and sustains it as such, it is through this that he comes to subtract, as I might say, from the field of the Other, what remains available for him in terms of a certain operation of jouissance.

95. #95

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.204

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bergler's concept of "oral neurosis" and its triad of masochistic mechanism as a critical foil to develop his own theory of the oral drive, distinguishing raw aggression, narcissistic aggression, and pseudo-aggression, and then redefines masochism not as assumption of pain but as the subject taking the position of the object (objet petit a as waste/remainder) in a contractual scenario involving the big Other and jouissance.

    the dimension of masochism is defined, specifically, no doubt, by the fact that the subject assumes the position of an object, in the most accentuated sense that we give to the word object, in order to define it as this effect of falling and of waste, of remainder from the advent of the subject.

96. #96

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.206

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "masochism" as a clinical label obscures the logical structure of neurotic desire (specifically the "wish to be refused"), and that grasping the full range of satisfactions implied by the sexual act requires logical articulation—not moralistic or adaptive frameworks—culminating in the claim that the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the prohibited mother, the phallus) and that feminine jouissance remains fundamentally unarticulated by sixty-seven years of psychoanalytic practice.

    to pin to it, in addition, the term masochist is simply, on this occasion, to introduce into it a pejorative note, which is immediately followed … by a directive attitude of the analyst which may on occasion go as far as to be persecutory.

97. #97

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.78

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural relationship between the Id (Es) and the unconscious as two non-overlapping fields defined by complementary negations ("I am not thinking" and "I am not"), arguing that their mutual eclipsing produces, on one side, the o-object as the truth of alienation's structure, and on the other, castration as the incapacity of any Bedeutung to cover sexual difference—with the drive's grammatical montage (as read through "A Child is Being Beaten") serving as the hinge for this demonstration.

    you can be sure that the year will not pass without our having to question more closely what is involved in the relation of the I as essential in the structure of masochism.

98. #98

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism—not sadism—reveals the naked economy of perversion: the masochist's frantic identification with the rejected object (objet petit a) as the locus of jouissance is itself a demonstration that constitutes his jouissance, while the sadist, thinking himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position as slave of the drive. Both perversions share the same logic as fantasy, linking perversion to neurosis.

    the masochist - in order to withdraw, as one might say, to steal away, to the only corner where manifestly it is graspable, which is the little o-object - gives himself over, for his part deliberately, to this identification to this object as rejected.

99. #99

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.179

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance-value is the foundational economy of the unconscious, and that the unconscious speaks of sex without necessarily saying the truth about it — establishing a structural gap between speaking and saying that conditions the analyst's position and explains the psychoanalyst's constitutive resistance to his own discourse.

    Someone who is not a psychoanalyst, M Deleuze to name him, presents a book by Sacher Masoch… He writes on masochism undoubtedly the best text that has ever been written!

100. #100

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.

     as is shown by the structure of the position of the subject in these two exemplary terms, which are defined as that of sadist and the masochist.

101. #101

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle that "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the introduction of the subject as an effect of signification necessarily alienates the subject from jouissance — separating body from jouissance — with castration named as the structural mechanism by which jouissance is cancelled in the sexual relation, making any genuine sexual act contingent on this loss.

     The masochist is not a slave. He is on the contrary, as I will tell you later, a cute whore, someone very able. The masochist knows that he is in jouissance.

102. #102

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a — the partial objects that escape signifying domination — and uses the master/slave dialectic to demonstrate that jouissance subsists on the side of the slave, not the master; perversion is then recast as a systematic, subject-driven inquiry into this residual jouissance of the Other, while sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual relation rather than natural gendered dispositions.

     masochism has nothing specifically feminine about it … The woman has, precisely, no vocation to fill this role. This is what constitutes the value of the masochistic enterprise.

103. #103

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight) is the structural ground of both repetition and alienation, and uses this topology to argue that the Other is inherently "fractured" (barred), that the subject's division is ineradicable from truth, and that the Act emerges as the logical consequence of alienation's passage through the topology of repetition.

     the anxiety of the Other - the true root of the position of the subject as a masochist position.

104. #104

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.

     I already sufficiently indicated it in connection with masochism for people to know here what I mean and that I am only indicating a path to be taken up again.

105. #105

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.

     I already sufficiently indicated it in connection with masochism for people to know here what I mean and that I am only indicating a path to be taken up again.

106. #106

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.106

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Jouissance is irreducible to the pleasure principle and is topologically structured as the subject's own topology; he then deploys this against Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic (where the master renounces enjoyment from the start) and Pascal's Wager (where Surplus-jouissance, not enjoyment itself, is what is actually at stake in the bet).

     Freud writes, 'Enjoyment is fundamentally masochistic'. It is quite clear that this is only a metaphor, because moreover masochism is something at a level that is differently organised than this radical tendency.

107. #107

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the perverse drives (scoptophilic, sadomasochistic) are fundamentally asymmetrical and structured around the topology of the Objet petit a: each drive operates not as a return of its counterpart but as a supplement to the Other, aimed at producing or evacuating the jouissance of the Other rather than of the subject—a logic that makes the pervert a "defender of the faith" of the Other's jouissance.

     If we can speak about a certain moral masochism, this can only be founded on this point of impact of the voice of the Other not in the ear of the subject but at the level of the Other that he establishes as being completed by the voice.

108. #108

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 22 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mathematical proportion I/o = 1+o (the golden ratio / Fibonacci series) and Pascal's wager to argue that the Objet petit a (o) is the structural measure of loss in relation to the Other, and that surplus-jouissance (masochistic enjoyment) is the analogical position by which the subject takes on the role of the waste-product (o) in order to constitute the Other as a complete field — thus linking the formalization of desire's cause to the topology of the Other.

     The most characteristic, the most subtle form that we have given of the function cause of desire, is what is called masochistic enjoyment. It is an analogical enjoyment, namely, that at the level of the surplus enjoying, the subject takes on in a qualified fashion this position of loss.

109. #109

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.

     the conjunction of the perverse subject with the o-object properly speaking. In a certain way, one can say that as long as he wants it, the masochist is the true master.

110. #110

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.60

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that repetition—rooted in the pursuit of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle—necessarily produces a loss (entropy), and it is precisely at the site of this lost enjoyment that the lost object (objet petit a) and knowledge as a formal apparatus of enjoyment originate; the unary trait is redeployed from Freud as the minimal mark that simultaneously founds the signifier and introduces surplus-jouissance.

     the whole text of Freud turns... explicitly around masochism, conceived of only in the dimension of the search for this ruinous enjoyment.

111. #111

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of the unconscious is analogous to mathematical logic (Gödel-type incompleteness), where the "false" (falsus) is causally operative in the production of being through interpretation — and that Freud's unique insight into this topology was sustained by a Jewish hermeneutic tradition (the Midrash) of reading the letter literally, rather than by any natural truth.

     This level has no ensoi (in itself) except what falls into it from masochism... not without coherence with the morality of a politicised masochism.

112. #112

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language uses subjects rather than being used by them — enjoyment is the motor of discourse — and that truth stands in a sisterly relation to forbidden enjoyment, a relation legible only from within the discourse of the Hysteric. He frames this against Sade's theoretical masochism (the second death), Freud's discourse on the unconscious as self-speaking knowledge, and a sustained critique of Ego Psychology as a regression to the discourse of the Master.

     the practitioner is simply masochistic. It is the only clever and practical when enjoyment is at stake, because to exhaust oneself at being God's instrument, is backbreaking.

113. #113

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: By reading Poe's M. Valdemar alongside Oedipus at Colonus and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan argues that life is fundamentally a detour toward death, that desire emerges only at the joint of speech/symbolism, and that the phenomena of wit, dream, and psychopathology all inhabit the vacillating level of speech where the subject's being is at stake.

     What Freud's primary masochism teaches us is that, when life has been dispossessed of its speech, its final word can only be the final malediction expressed at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. Life doesn't want to be healed.

114. #114

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.117

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallic Real constitutes man's fundamental affliction — "aphligé" by a phallus that bars him from genuine access to the body of the Other — such that all discourse, especially the Discourse of the Master, is grounded on a semblance that phallus-as-signifier-index-1 installs; the Name-of-the-Father is reread as a merely tribal supplement to the Borromean knot, and unconscious signifier-copulation (savoir) is what gives rise to the subject as pathème divided by the One.

     To enjoy it, what would be called to enjoy it like that, it would have to be torn to pieces, huh! ... The concept here is not lacking. It is called sadomasochism

115. #115

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > There you are!

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Borromean knot as the first genuine philosophical writing—a "logic of sacks and cords"—and uses Joyce's anomalous relationship to his own body (body-as-foreign, affect that "drains away" like a fruit skin) to theorise a specific ego-function that writing fulfils when the normal bodily imaginary fails, distinguishing this from the Freudian Unconscious as ignorance of the body.

     Masochism is not at all to be ruled out from the possibilities of Joyce's sexual stimulation. He insisted enough on it in the case of Bloom.

116. #116

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's relationship to madness, faith, and writing as a clinical-theoretical probe to distinguish the true from the Real, locating jouissance (including masochism) in the Real rather than the true; he simultaneously advances a topological argument about the Borromean knot and the torus as the best available "physics" for measuring belief and subjective structure.

     Masochism is the major part of the enjoyment the Real gives. He discovered it, he had not immediately foreseen it.

117. #117

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Joyce's artistic ambition functions as a topological compensation for a de facto Verwerfung (foreclosure) by the father, and uses this to stage the broader claim that the Borromean knot articulates the entanglement of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real — with the sinthome as the supplementary loop that prevents their dissolution, while also developing the logic of per-version (père-version) as the son-to-father relation structuring the drive.

     The sadism is for the father, the masochism is for the son. There is between them strictly no relationship.

118. #118

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan analyses the three stages of the beating fantasy to argue that perverse fantasy represents a radical desubjectivation in which signifiers are preserved in "pure state" - stripped of intersubjective signification - and that this structure (like the fetish as screen-memory) reveals the valorisation of the imaginary image as a frozen residue of unconscious speech articulated at the level of the big Other; perversion is therefore not a pre-Oedipal relic but is fully constituted through and by the Oedipus complex.

     one will conclude with Freud that this is linked to something that is the essence of masochism, but that in this instance the ego is firmly accentuated in the situation.

119. #119

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.

     if, effectively, her jouissance consists in the masochistic frustration that the acquired position comprises, by the same token it requires that the position from which this frustration is capable of being exercised be maintained.

120. #120

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's 'A Child is Being Beaten' to argue that the drive never appears nakedly in perversion but only as a signifying element, thereby collapsing the classical neurosis/perversion opposition and subordinating both to the logic of the signifying chain and repression; the primitive beating fantasy is further situated within a pre-Oedipal triangular structure that anticipates the Name-of-the-Father.

     Here we find what Freud will emphasize in an article in 1924, 'The Economic Problem of Masochism', and which is necessitated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle

121. #121

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.520

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar V, listing concepts, proper names, and page references in alphabetical order (L–N). No original theoretical argument is advanced here.

     masochism 59-60, 213, 240 ... beating/whipping fantasy and 213-14, 217-25, 229, 324-5, 387-8 ... Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 220, 225, 226-31

122. #122

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.68

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy is irreducible to metaphor by using Heine's "Golden Calf" witticism to show that the wit resides not in metaphorical substitution but in a metonymic displacement that subverts the metaphor; this is grounded in a structural distinction between desire and need, where need is always refracted through the laws of the signifier before it can appear as demand.

     It's the story that you are all no doubt familiar with about the masochist and the sadist - 'Hurt me!' says the former to the latter, who replies, 'No!'

123. #123

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten" through his own symbolic/imaginary framework to argue that the masochistic fantasy is fundamentally a signifier-event: the whip is not an instinctual object but a hieroglyphic signifier that marks (crosses out) the subject, and the Phallus is theorized as the signifier of signification itself—the pivot-signifier around which the entire dialectic of desire revolves. This reading connects the structure of fantasy to the Death Drive by showing that the pleasure principle's logic of return-to-zero is extended, not overturned, by what lies beyond it.

     It's here that the whole enigma of the essence of masochism resides… The fundamental character of the masochistic fantasy as it actually exists in a subject… is the existence of the whip.

124. #124

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

     These demons — winged, booted, not helmeted, but almost, and in any case armed with a flagellum — are beginning to administer the ritual punishment to one of the applicants or initiates

125. #125

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.504

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > Chapter X The Three Moments of the Oedipus Complex (I)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus (editorial footnotes and bibliographic references) for Seminar V, providing source citations, translations, and cross-references for chapters X–XVI. It is non-substantive theoretical content.

     See Sigmund Freud, 'The Economic Problem of Masochism', SE 19: 159-70

126. #126

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's 'beyond the pleasure principle' by grounding it in the subject's fundamental relation to the signifying chain: the death drive, negative therapeutic reaction, and masochism are not biological inertia but expressions of the subject's refusal to constitute itself in signifiers, a refusal that paradoxically binds it ever more tightly to the chain.

     In masochistic fantasies, there is always a degrading and profanatory aspect, one that indicates both the dimension of recognition and the subject's prohibited mode of relation with the paternal subject.

127. #127

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the bar as the essential property of the signifier — its capacity to be cancelled/effaced — and uses this to ground the relationship between the signifying chain, the subject, desire, and the phallus; the Aufhebung of a non-signifying element (real or imaginary) is precisely what raises it to the dignity of a signifier, making the bar the hinge between signification, subjectivity, and the castration complex.

     The same act which, when it applies to the other, is taken to be abusive and perceived by the subject as the sign that the other is not loved, assumes an essential value when it's the subject who becomes its support.

128. #128

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.

     I really have no idea what one would have had to be thinking about to be satisfied with, for example, terms like 'masochism' or 'sadism'... why does the fact of being beaten... very specifically with a switch, or anything else analogous, play an essential role

129. #129

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from jouissance by showing that desire is fundamentally structured by signifiers (not reducible to imaginary relations or need), and uses Joan Riviere's case of 'womanliness as masquerade' to demonstrate that the subject's relation to the phallus — whether as theft, mask, or sign of being — reveals the constitutive splitting of the subject between existence and signifying representation, grounding the unconscious.

     this constitutes the ultimate form of what, in analysis, we call masochism, namely that by which the subject apprehends the pain of existing.

130. #130

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.300

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces three formulas of desire (articulating desire's relations to narcissistic identification, demand/the Other, and the phallus as signifier) while arguing that Freud's *Totem and Taboo* discloses the constitutive link between desire and the signifier — specifically that the murder of the father marks the emergence of signifiers from death, and that human desire is irreducible to adaptation because the subject enjoys desiring itself.

     The entire evolution of desire has its origins in these lived facts that are classed in, let's say, the masochistic relation... the subject grasps himself as suffering, and he grasps his existence as a living being as one of suffering, that is, as being a subject of desire.

131. #131

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes a minimal three-term schema for secondary identification: a libidinal object is transformed into a signifier that anchors the ego-ideal, while desire undergoes substitution via a third term (the rival/father), with the phallus functioning as the universal "lowest common denominator" — the metonymic pivot through which desire must pass in any signifying economy, regardless of sex.

     what matters to her is to follow its subsequent vicissitude, where the girl adopts the masochistic position that is constitutive, she says, of the female position.

132. #132

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three-phase schema of "A Child Is Being Beaten" and the optics of the inverted bouquet to argue that the subject constitutes itself as barred subject ($) only by passing through a fantasmatic phase of near-abolition (primary masochism), and that the phallus functions as the mediating signifier through which desire is structured in the imaginary-symbolic interplay.

     The latter comes in at the precise moment at which the subject gets closest to realizing himself as a subject in the signifying dialectic.

133. #133

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.470

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

     masochistic jouissance essentially requires one not to go beyond a certain point when it comes to physical abuse... an essential dimension of masochistic jouissance lies in the specific sort of passivity experienced by the subject: he enjoys thinking that his fate is being decided in some upper echelon

134. #134

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject of enunciation is structurally split from the subject of the statement, and that desire is neither identical to demand nor to repressed signifiers, but is what the subject *is* as a function of demand — a being-dimension introduced and simultaneously stolen by language. He then demonstrates this through a clinical dream reported by Ella Sharpe, showing how the fantasy culminating in the dream's key signifier ("masturbate her" used transitively) will reveal the true meaning of desire.

     I am referring here to the precise desire that intervenes in one or another of his life events - whether masochistic desire, suicidal desire, or even selfless [oblatif] desire.

135. #135

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.449

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: By re-reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through the lens of metaphor and alienation, Lacan argues that the obsessive fantasy stages the neurotic's structural relation to desire: the subject sustains desire precisely by perpetuating its precariousness, finding jouissance not in satisfaction but in the symptomatic metonymy of 'être pour' (being-for) that defers 'pour être' (being as such).

     We find ourselves faced here with the ultimate enigma of what in psychoanalysis we call masochism. A conjunction presents itself here in a pure form, a conjunction by which something in the subject perpetuates the happiness of the initial situation in a hidden, latent, unconscious situation of unhappiness.

136. #136

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

     Theoretical move: Desire cannot be reduced to demand or frustration but must be grasped through the tight knot of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; the dream of the dead father exemplifies how the imaginary interposition of the father's image props up desire as a shield against the anxiety of subjective elision, with the fantasy formula (S◇a) expressing the structural absence of the subject that is constitutive of desire itself.

     The subject's primary masochism

137. #137

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian ethical position constitutes a radical reorientation relative to Aristotle and utilitarianism by locating the human subject's relation to the real—not the ideal—as the proper ground of ethics, and by identifying the pleasure principle with the symbolic-fictitious rather than with nature, thereby reframing the economy of desire, fantasy, and masochism as the central problems for a psychoanalytic ethics.

     you will see emerge the question posed by the fundamental character of masochism in the economy of the instincts... if we managed to deepen our understanding of the economic role of masochism.

138. #138

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.345

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar VII, non-substantive in theoretical content but reflecting the conceptual terrain of the seminar through its entries.

     masochism in economy of, 14, 15

139. #139

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the field "beyond the good principle" is delimited on one side by the beautiful (which suspends desire rather than fulfilling it) and on the other by pain/masochism, and that neither side exhausts that field; it pivots toward Antigone as the exemplary case of an absolute, non-good-motivated choice, while grounding the whole inquiry in the relationship between the human being, the signifier, and the death drive.

     Masochism is a marginal phenomenon... the whole behavior of the masochist... points to the fact that it is a question of a structural feature in his behavior... the point aimed at by the position of the perverse masochist is the desire to reduce himself to this nothing that is the good.

140. #140

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the foundational thesis of Seminar VII: the moral law, structured by the Symbolic, is the agency through which the Real is actualized; and psychoanalytic ethics must be distinguished from all prior ethics (exemplified by Aristotle) by seeking a particular, hidden truth in the subject rather than conformity to a universal order or Sovereign Good.

     It extends from the recognition of the omnipresence of the moral imperative, of its infiltration into all our experience, to the other pole, that is to say, the pleasure in a second degree we may paradoxically find there, namely, moral masochism.

141. #141

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates — his *atopia*, his daemon, his relation to truth and death — to theorize a pre-subjective, discourse-grounded dimension of truth and the Real, drawing a genealogy from pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato's *Symposium* in order to illuminate what is demanded of the analyst: a situatedness-nowhere analogous to Socrates' own unsituable position.

     it is clear that it cannot be taken in the sense of a tendency toward suicide or failure, or in the sense of any kind of masochism, whether moral or otherwise.

142. #142

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

     the end, that the high point of masochistic jouissance is not so much in the fact that it offers itself to support or not one or other bodily pain, but in this extreme particularity that namely in the books you will always find... this cancelling out properly speaking of the subject in so far as he makes himself pure object.

143. #143

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.31

     <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > The Formative Power of Destruction

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Catherine Malabou's critique, the passage argues that both Freud and Lacan fail to conceptualise trauma as genuinely formative and irreparable: the death drive is domesticated back under the pleasure principle, and the Real's intrusion is assumed to be ultimately assimilable, leaving psychoanalysis unable to think the 'living dead' — a new posttraumatic subject formed by destruction itself, without continuity or possibility of restoration.

     the brutal intrusion and the psychic devastation of the traumatised subject cannot be explained by the psychoanalytic concept of masochism

144. #144

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.46

     <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > ŽiŽek's Response > Troubles de Jouissance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance, far from rescuing psychoanalysis from the pleasure principle as Žižek claims, actually re-anchors it more firmly within that framework—because its dialectical structure always presupposes pleasure as the governing term, leaving pure suffering (and by extension, the "living dead" subject as Homo Dolorum) theoretically unaccountable.

     The same logic is at work here as in the Freudian logic of masochism, which Malabou criticises as a detour of the assertion of the final enjoyment of pain.

145. #145

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.55

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>Destructive Plasticity, War, and Anarchism: A Conversation Between Catherine Malabou and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: Malabou argues that Freud accurately sensed destructive plasticity through the concept of the death drive but failed to give it autonomous form independent of Eros; the passage uses this gap to introduce destructive plasticity as a concept that radically destabilises identity, reframes trauma as a new form-creating force, and proposes anarchism as the political translation of plasticity.

     the only examples we can give of it are sadism and masochism… these forms are always a mix between Eros and Thanatos.

146. #146

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.67

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Death Drive is constitutive not only of the subject but of the social bond itself, grounding sociality in shared lack, trauma, and reciprocal sacrifice of nothingness — and critically intervenes against McGowan's framework by insisting that the death drive must be thought beyond and without recourse to enjoyment (jouissance), whose admixture betrays the genuine negativity of suffering.

     His subject is hedonistic, even if, in this case, masochistically hedonistic. She wants to get satisfaction, but she can't get any.

147. #147

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.98

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that utilitarianism's equation of use with pleasure—and its corollary that pleasure is usable—is the hidden engine of functionalism's imperialism and social despotism; against this, Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis intervenes by positing a subject constituted by a 'beyond the pleasure principle' (the death drive), making pleasure structurally unavailable as an index of the good and thereby exposing the utilitarian subject as a fiction of zero-resistance manipulability.

     masochism, including the 'moral masochism' that rules our ethical conduct, would be incomprehensible. This reasoning is extended in Civilization and Its Discontents

148. #148

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.254

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section (bibliographic apparatus) for a chapter on lethal jouissance, the femme fatale, and sexual difference; it contains no independent theoretical argument, only citations and brief editorial glosses.

     Doane shows how the 'woman's film' of the 1940s made the female spectator's pleasure simultaneous with a masochistic viewing position.

149. #149

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud consolidates his dualistic drive theory by aligning life/death drives with biological anabolism/catabolism, traces the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissism to the identification of Eros as the universal binding force, and accounts for sadism as a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function — all while insisting that this dualism cannot be collapsed into Jung's monism.

     the sadistic drive, which aims to harm its object, derives from Eros… this sadism is actually a death drive that has been ousted from the ego at the instance of the narcissistic libido, and as a result only becomes apparent in conjunction with the object

150. #150

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis the regression of the libido doubly exacerbates the conflict between ego, id, and super-ego: it forces erotic impulses into aggressive forms, enabling the super-ego to punish the ego for drives the ego cannot consciously recognise as its own, and symptom-formation gradually shifts from defense to surrogate gratification until the ego reaches paralysis of will.

     these symptoms represent the gratification of masochistic drive-impulses, which the regression process has likewise served to reinforce.

151. #151

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud uses traumatic neurosis and the fort/da game to establish that certain psychic phenomena — repetition of painful experiences in dreams and play — cannot be explained by the pleasure principle alone, pointing toward tendencies "beyond" the pleasure principle that are more primal and independent of it.

     or we might have to turn our minds to the mysterious masochistic tendencies of the ego

152. #152

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that masochism exemplifies a primary death drive turned back on the ego, while sexual drives serve as life-preserving counter-forces oriented toward reunification; the chapter concludes with a methodological self-critique acknowledging the speculative and figurative character of drive theory, framing the entire edifice as provisional hypothesis rather than empirical certainty.

     masochism – an individual's drive turning back upon his own ego – is in reality a return to an earlier stage of the drive, a regression. The account of masochism given at that time may need correcting in one particular, on the grounds that it was altogether too restrictive: masochism could also very possibly be a primary phenomenon

153. #153

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section providing translator/editor commentary on Freud's terminology and cross-references between texts; the substantive theoretical content is minimal, confined to note 53 (on repression and the fate of drive-impulses) and note 74 (on masochism and the death drive in phobias).

     the drive whose demands the ego so fearfully shrinks from gratifying is probably a masochistic one, namely the destruction drive directed against the subject's own person. Perhaps it is this additional element that accounts for those cases where the fear reaction ends up being excessive, counter-purposive and paralysing.

154. #154

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freud's theory of Eros is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion rooted in the lost maternal object, narcissism, and submission to authority—such that erotic life, political life, and the compulsion to repeat are all expressions of the same libidinal economy governed by the super-ego and the drive to restore an originary, impossible object.

     The sado-masochist, debased by uniforms, badges and rank, is, alas, an active sexual prototype that looms before us all.

155. #155

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Driven Destiny Makes a Voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive *is* destiny (Triebschicksale = tautology), because drives are the constant, inescapable force that determines the subject from within, and the four modes of drive-destiny (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are defense formations that never abolish what they defend against—meaning psychoanalysis is a rationalist theory of psychical determinism that collapses the distinction between fate and will.

     sexual drives can turn against the subject itself, as when sadism becomes masochism

156. #156

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.123

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *. . . To Forcing the Act*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, via Zupančič, that forcing the Real to appear as a direct ethical goal collapses into terror and a simulacrum of ethics, and that a genuine ethics of the act must distinguish between the terror inherent in the encounter with the Real and terror as a deliberate strategy—a distinction that also cautions against the nihilistic privileging of destruction found in certain readings of the death drive.

     the latter, while perhaps overtly 'designed' to subvert the dominant order, easily veers into 'methodical masochism' that reifies pain, suffering, and self-injury as an ethical stance in itself

157. #157

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.171

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Other vs. the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals a productive distinction between two levels of the Other—the tyrannical demands of authority figures versus the symbolic order as a generative structure of meaning-production—and that the very alienation imposed by the signifier is the condition of possibility for creativity, love, and singularity, rather than an irremediable wound to be mourned.

     In Butler's, it tends to generate a masochistic discourse of irremediable deprivation.

158. #158

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.212

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Third of Justice*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Lacanian ethics (via Žižek) corrects the Levinasian privileging of the face-to-face encounter by resurrecting the impersonal "Third" as the proper seat of justice, establishing a structural incompatibility between love (which singularizes a privileged One) and justice (which must remain blind to the particular face), grounding ethics in universality rather than in the affective pull of the other's face.

     Taken to an extreme, this logic leads to the (strangely masochistic) conclusion that the victimized remain responsible for their victimizers

159. #159

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.243

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *5. The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: This passage (a notes section) deploys Žižek's and Zupančič's arguments to develop the theoretical claim that the Real's internal contamination of the Symbolic ensures the big Other's constitutive incompleteness, while also staging the political-ethical deadlock that follows from Lacanian theory when it confronts questions of action, revolutionary violence, and the Kant-Sade nexus.

     the incompatibility of ethics and pleasure leads to a methodical masochism

160. #160

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.223

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.

     it is possible to push the Levinasian respect for the other too far so that interpersonal ethics collapses into masochism

161. #161

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.87

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**

     Theoretical move: Copjec uses Lacan's seminar to argue that the psychoanalytic subject is not a utilitarian zero (fully manipulable by pleasure) but a minus-one — radically separated from what it wants — and that this structural lack obligates psychoanalysis to ground ethics in the death drive and the superego rather than the pleasure principle.

     masochism, including the 'moral masochism' that rules our ethical conduct, would be incomprehensible. This reasoning is extended in Civilization and Its Discontents.

162. #162

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 3**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 3, providing scholarly references and brief clarificatory asides on sources cited in the main argument, including Freud, Lacan, Bergson, Aristotle, Derrida, and others. It is primarily bibliographic and non-substantive, though a few notes carry minor theoretical glosses.

     Doane shows how the 'woman's film' of the 1940s made the female spectator's pleasure simultaneous with a masochistic viewing position.

163. #163

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.151

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Aggressivity and the Death Drive

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's reinterpretation displaces the death drive from biology onto the imaginary register: the death drive is the disintegrating pressure of the Real against imaginary binding, making psychical life a ceaseless dialectic of formation and deformation that grounds both aggressivity and desire in the alienating structure of the ego.

     Sadism must ultimately be traced back to a more fundamental masochism. 'For a sadistic fantasy to endure, the subject's interest in the person who suffers humiliation must obviously be due to the possibility of the subject's being submitted to the same humiliation himself.'

164. #164

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.156

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian death drive has two complementary faces—the pressure of the Real against the Imaginary and the agency of the Symbolic—and that both operate by dissolving the alienating coherence of the imaginary ego, thereby opening the subject to jouissance either through violence or through symbolically mediated exchange.

     Primal masochism should be located around this initial negativation, around this original murder of the thing... the coming-to-be of the subject beyond the imaginary entails the enactment of a certain primordial masochism.

165. #165

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: By moving from traumatic neurosis (and the compulsive return of its dreams) to the fort/da game, Freud establishes that repetition of unpleasurable experience cannot be fully accounted for by the pleasure principle, thereby opening the conceptual space for drives that are 'more primal than and independent of' the pleasure principle — i.e., the Beyond.

     or we might have to turn our minds to the mysterious *masochistic* tendencies of the ego.

166. #166

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freudian erotic theory is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion: libidinal life is structured by the unattainable lost (maternal) object, narcissistic fascination, and the superego's demand for punishment, such that the compulsion to repeat past fixations makes genuine erotic liberation—and by extension political freedom—structurally impossible.

     The sado-masochist, debased by uniforms, badges and rank, is, alas, an active sexual prototype that looms before us all.

167. #167

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis, regression of the libido to an aggressive-sadistic organization produces a doubly exacerbated conflict: the superego becomes hyper-severe while erotic impulses emerge as repellent destructive tendencies, ultimately leading to a paralysis of ego will as symptoms progressively serve gratification rather than defense.

     Furthermore, there are obsessional neuroses that exhibit no guilty conscience at all... these symptoms represent the gratification of masochistic drive-impulses, which the regression process has likewise served to reinforce.

168. #168

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section for a volume of Freud's writings, providing translator's glosses, cross-references, and one substantive Freudian note (note 53) on the fate of repressed drive-impulses and another (note 74) linking masochism to the death drive in phobias. The passage is predominantly bibliographic/apparatus but contains some theoretical content.

     the drive whose demands the ego so fearfully shrinks from gratifying is probably a masochistic one, namely the destruction drive directed against the subject's own person. Perhaps it is this additional element that accounts for those cases where the fear reaction ends up being excessive, counter-purposive and paralysing.

169. #169

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud simultaneously consolidates and qualifies the death drive hypothesis by: (1) recasting primary masochism as evidence for it; (2) invoking the Nirvana principle as the psyche's dominant tendency toward tension-reduction; (3) using Plato's Aristophanes myth to ground Eros in a regressive drive to restore a prior state of unity; and (4) candidly acknowledging the speculative, figurative, and ultimately uncertain character of the entire theoretical edifice.

     masochism – an individual's drive turning back upon his own ego – is in reality a return to an earlier stage of the drive, a regression. The account of masochism given at that time may need correcting in one particular… masochism could also very possibly be a primary phenomenon

170. #170

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a dualistic drive theory by aligning biological distinctions (anabolism/catabolism, soma/germ-plasm) with the life drive / death drive polarity, tracing the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive antithesis to narcissistic libido, and arguing that sadism represents a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function—insisting against Jung's monism that a genuine dualism of Eros and death drive remains irreducible.

     the sadistic drive separates off, and ultimately, in the phase of genital primacy, it serves the purposes of reproduction by taking on the role of subjugating the sexual object

171. #171

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.164

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian formula "there is no big Other" must be taken in its strongest ontological sense—not merely that the symbolic order exists only as a virtual fiction, but that it cannot even cohere as a fiction due to immanent antagonisms—and that this non-existence of the big Other is the very condition for the subject, while simultaneously exposing guilt and jouissance as structurally co-constitutive in conditions of permissiveness.

     a pain in pleasure? … the pain of carrying the cross not part of the joy, so that one cannot just say that love is a burden but also a joy, but joy in carrying the burden

172. #172

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Marx, <span id="scholium_22_marx_brecht_and_sexual_contracts.xhtml_IDX-211"></span>Brecht, and Sexual Contracts

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip topology of political logic reveals that the incel/hierarchy position flips into a demand for egalitarian redistribution at its extreme, just as the logic of egalitarian human rights flips into its opposite at the point of sexuality; simultaneously, Marx's analysis of the 'free' labor contract is extended to the sexual contract to show that formal consent/freedom conceals structural coercion, and that surplus-jouissance is the sexual homologue of surplus-value, making contractual sex inherently asymmetric and ideologically limited.

     When I engage in sex with a partner, I may only found pleasure in the other's displeasure and humiliation, or vice versa, I may enjoy in my serving the other and only find pleasure in the signs of the other's ecstatic pleasure

173. #173

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.81

     With Tenderness There's Something Missing

     Theoretical move: By inverting Kant's verdict on the antinomies—relocating contradiction from reason's failure to a feature of being itself—Hegel dissolves the idealism/materialism opposition and constitutes subjectivity as the entity uniquely capable of owning contradiction rather than merely suffering it, a capacity the passage names a "fundamental masochism" of the subject.

     Paradoxically, the privilege of spirit lies in its ability to destroy itself rather than to simply be destroyed. Hegel's subject emerges through a fundamental masochism that defines it.

174. #174

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.39

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

     Theoretical move: Fantasy operates through a necessary duality of positive and negative modes: the positive mode grants access to the impossible object while the negative mode preserves that object's desirability by keeping it threatened — and Lynch's cinematic crosscutting establishes the speculative identity of compassion and cruelty as structurally equivalent positions within this fantasmatic economy.

     Merrick accepts this treatment unquestioningly not because he is a masochist or suffers from some kind of false consciousness but because he understands unconsciously that the enjoyment of his daytime acceptance depends on this nighttime exploitation.

175. #175

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.124

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > NOTES > J. Sacrificing One's Head for an Eraser

     Theoretical move: This notes section consolidates several theoretical moves: it links surplus-jouissance to Marx's surplus value, establishes the masochistic structure of fantasy as requiring a revisiting of loss, and articulates the forced choice of entry into the social order as constitutive of the subject through sacrifice of enjoyment.

     the structure of fantasy requires at least some type of masochistic dimension, even if it transposes this masochism into sadism.

176. #176

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.70

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the pursuit of complete enjoyment is structurally self-defeating: enjoyment requires loss/absence as its condition, so subjects compulsively self-sabotage to recreate the constitutive lack, a dynamic that drives the transition from the pleasure principle to the death drive and explains the perverse/masochistic turn as the unconscious path desire takes when blocked by the suffocating presence of the privileged object.

     The masochistic turn to the cockroach appeals to Dell because the cockroach allows him to suffer and, while suffering, he feels the absence of the privileged object, which is the mode in which one can enjoy it.

177. #177

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.139

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

     masochism, 62, 124,23212

178. #178

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.426

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 6The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the argument that ideological formations (anti-Semitism, the Decalogue, totalitarian power) require a fantasmatic obscene supplement, and that the structure of castration paradoxically entails losing castration itself as surplus-enjoyment; several notes further develop the structural logic of the Master-Signifier and the irreducibility of symbolic identity to private psychic content.

     In psychoanalytic terms, this killing would clearly display the temporal structure of masochist perversion: the order is inverted—you are punished first, and thus gain the right to commit the crime.

179. #179

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.233

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that music (via Wagner's *Tristan*) lies about its own affective status—its true "truth" resides not in the grand metaphysical affect but in the ridiculous narrative interruptions that enable it—and then uses this insight to critique Damasio's homeostatic/adaptationist account of emotion by invoking the psychoanalytic "death drive" as the minimal structure of freedom: a dis-adaptation from utilitarian-survivalist immersion that ruptures biological determinism.

     the elementary formula of the 'autonomization' of pain and pleasure from their instrumental functions is that of finding pleasure in pain itself.

180. #180

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.140

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

     He fell in love with her gesture of dying *for* him and Kate, with how she turned her inevitable death from illness into a sacrificial gesture. Why, precisely, is this a betrayal? Because such love is a fake, a case of what Freud called 'moral masochism.'

181. #181

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.354

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

     after being raped by her lover, after her fantasy has got back at her in reality, this traumatic experience enables her to leave it behind?

182. #182

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.395

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

     it is the apparently 'masochistic' acceptance of suffering in the first two films which is much closer to the feminine Versagung.

183. #183

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.23

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the early Lacanian film theory tradition misreads Lacan by conflating desire with a Nietzschean/Foucaultian will to mastery; the properly Lacanian gaze is not the vehicle of mastery but an objet petit a—a point of traumatic, unassimilable enjoyment in the Other that causes desire precisely by remaining out of reach, thereby reorienting film theory from the imaginary look to the real gaze.

     In Seminar V, Lacan even goes so far as to claim that 'what we find at the foundation of the analytic exploration of desire is masochism.'

184. #184

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.229

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

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

     masochism is the main enjoyment that the real gives

185. #185

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.49

     **Name of the Father**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs two related theoretical moves: first, it defines the Name-of-the-Father as a signifier/metaphor that installs the symbolic order of desire and lack via the Oedipus complex; second, it grounds narcissism in Freud's drive theory, showing how drive vicissitudes (scopophilia, sadism/masochism) are structurally dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego.

     the transformation of sadism into masochism implies a return to the narcissistic object

186. #186

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.93

     **Vicissitude**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's taxonomy of drive vicissitudes — reversal into its opposite (change of aim or content), turning round upon the self, repression, and sublimation — as modes of defence against the drive, with the theoretical pivot being the distinction between transformation of *aim* versus transformation of *object* or *content*. The second half of the passage is a non-substantive bibliography of sources.

     masochism is actually sadism turned round upon the subject's own ego, and that exhibitionism includes looking at his own body

187. #187

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.44

     **Interpellation** > **Little Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage works through four related concepts—the little other as site of quasi-traumatic subjectivity-formation, the lost object as the structural condition of desire and enjoyment, phallic jouissance as the masculine structure of constitutive dissatisfaction, masochism as sadistic reversal, and the master signifier as the empty signifier that initiates the symbolic order and organizes enjoyment through exclusion—demonstrating that lack, loss, and emptiness are not failures of the system but its generative engine.

     When once feeling pains has become a masochistic aim, the sadistic aim of causing pains can arise also, retrogressively; for while these pains are being inflicted on other people, they are enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identification of himself with the suffering object.

188. #188

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.158

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Neroni](#contents.xhtml_ch6a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses self-critique to advance three corrective moves on his standard positions: (1) the disintegration of the big Other is a real social danger, not merely a theoretical non-existence; (2) jouissance is the irreducible motor of ideology that neither class-interest analysis nor discourse-hegemony models can capture; (3) the state must be theorized not only as an instrument of class oppression but as the material embodiment of a 'real illusion' of common protection, as revealed by the pandemic.

     All such passionate ideological investments are traversed by sadism, masochism, and all their perverted combinations like enjoying one's own humiliation.

189. #189

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.145

     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.

     she elects him *so as not to enjoy him*, and then draws masochistic enjoyment from her very pain