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Where it appears in the corpus (109)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.99

   Good and Evil > Degrees of evil

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of "radical evil" is systematically misread when applied to empirical historical events like the Holocaust; it is instead a transcendental-structural concept—the necessary consequence of freedom itself—that explains the possibility of non-ethical conduct, not its empirical magnitude, and that this misreading enables a reductive "ethics of the lesser evil."

   those who discuss the (Kantian) concept of radical evil in reference to - for example - the Holocaust simply miss the point of this concept.

2. #02

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.46

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

   Theoretical move: The passage traces the genealogy of the concept of ideology from its Enlightenment origins through Marx's materialist reformulation, arguing that ideology names not a set of beliefs but the contingent, gap-ridden relationship between material practices and their ideal representations, making it simultaneously a site of recognition and misrecognition of social contradiction.

   In our colloquial usages, and even in many misconceived theories, 'ideology' means a scheme for politics, a set of committed beliefs about what should be done in society.

3. #03

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.253

   Enjoy, Don't Accumulate

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

   Recognizing it requires the most radical act today—that of interpretation... Capitalism deceives us as to its structure and appeal by laying its cards on the table.

4. #04

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.18

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.

   the ego psychologists' and object-relations theorists' misreadings of The Ego and the Id replace a focus on the unconscious with a privileging of one or more of the three 'agencies' of the second topography/structural model.

5. #05

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.27

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

   Theoretical move: By retranslating Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' against the ego-psychological rendering, Lacan argues that the telos of analysis is not ego-over-id domination but the analysand's de-alienating subjectification toward the unconscious subject ($), grounding his ethics of psychoanalysis and his critique of misreadings of Freud that degrade the primacy of speech and signifiers in clinical practice.

   Lacan's chosen example in this context of the misreadings of the Freudian oeuvre his 'return to Freud' seeks to combat intends to illustrate how non-Lacanian analysts distort Freud's theory.

6. #06

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

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

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

   the various post-Freudians of whom he is so fiercely critical fail to maintain 'a true teaching, that is, teaching that constantly subjects itself to what is known as renewal'

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.69

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

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

   He alludes to, insults, and dismisses a number of what he sees as scandalous misunderstandings and abuses of psychoanalysis, by psychoanalysts who can claim their title only by virtue of their affiliations.

8. #08

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.105

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

   Theoretical move: The passage situates Lacan's 1956 écrit within the Parisian intellectual climate of "situation" (Sartre) and shows how Lacan simultaneously borrows and critiques the concept: where Sartre locates freedom in action, Lacan relocates it in language, and the very rhetorical structure of Lacan's text—its apostrophe and division of address—enacts a solicitation of transference as an analytic strategy.

   The Sartrean idea of freedom could constitute a méconnaisance of the field implied by the term.

9. #09

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

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

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses this appendix to mount a sustained critique of ego psychology and identification-based training analysis, arguing that genuine psychoanalytic cure produces separation from rather than identification with the analyst, and that a return to Freud's texts is the corrective to the conformist institutionalization of psychoanalysis.

   paradigmatic of the ego's misrecognition, and of a theory that bases itself on the ego's purported autonomy

10. #10

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Truly the most, the most truly

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what is "truly proper" to psychoanalysis—the Freudian unconscious—has been systematically domesticated by Neo-Freudian adaptations, institutional identification, and mimetic transmission, and that reclaiming psychoanalysis requires a "militant" return to what is singular in Freud's concept of the unconscious rather than an imaginary identification with an acceptable image of Freud.

    Freud had become influential on an order comparable with Marx—and that the two shared the misfortune of having their names attached to gross misinterpretations and misappropriations of their work.

11. #11

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    **V**

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's *Verneinung* through Hyppolite's commentary, Lacan argues that *Bejahung* (primordial affirmation) is a precondition for symbolisation, and that its failure—*Verwerfung* (non-Bejahung)—causes what is excluded from the symbolic to irrupt back into the real as hallucination; this is illustrated through the Wolf Man's minor hallucination and Kris's clinical case, both showing how the symbolic and imaginary orders operate at structurally distinct levels.

    A great deal is made of the fact that at first we analyse the surface, as they say... What will the alleged interpretation of the surface that Kris offers us actually consist in?

12. #12

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.59

    **V**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego's fundamental function is misrecognition (*méconnaissance*), not synthetic mastery, and that the symbolic system—marked by linguistic criss-crossing (*Verschlungenheit*)—infinitely exceeds any intentional control the ego might exercise over speech; this reorients the analytic experience toward speech and the Other rather than ego-psychology's adaptive model, framing Freud's *Verneinung* as the key text for rethinking judgement and negation beyond positive psychology.

    somewhere, under Mr Fenichel's pen, we find, for example, that the subject indisputably gains access to the meaning of words via the ego. Does one have to be an analyst to think that such a view is, at the very least, subject to dispute?

13. #13

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.158

    **xn**

    Theoretical move: The ego is constituted as a capacity for méconnaissance (misrecognition) through the mirror-dynamic by which the other's body reflects back to the subject, obscuring self-knowledge; this founds the technique of analysis. Simultaneously, the dream-state suspends this libidinal obscuring, enabling the subject to perceive their own corporeality more adequately, while the concept of 'projection' in analysis must be rigorously distinguished from its classical sense as externalization of internal process.

    One must go over this passage carefully, because it allows one to introduce a bit of rigour into the usage, in analysis, of the term projection. It is continually employed in the most confused way.

14. #14

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

    **Xffl**

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

    Misrecognition is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organisation of affirmations and negations, to which the subject is attached.

15. #15

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    **XV** > The nucleus of repression

    Theoretical move: By way of a clinical case in which a subject's symptom crystallizes around a single, traumatically foregrounded prescription of the Koranic law, Lacan argues that the Superego is precisely a "blind, repetitive agency" produced when one element of the symbolic order is pathologically isolated from the rest—and that every analysis must ultimately knot itself around the legal/symbolic coordinate instantiated, in Western civilization, by the Oedipus complex, while acknowledging that other symbolic structures can play an equally decisive role.

    I hope that this little case will have been striking enough to give you an idea of a dimension analysts are not often to be found reflecting upon

16. #16

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    **IV**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of Freud's "Dynamics of Transference" to argue that resistance and transference are not identical phenomena but are essentially linked: transference emerges precisely *because* it satisfies resistance, and the clearest evidence of this is the analysand's sudden experience of the analyst's "presence" as a felt break in the discourse — a phenomenon that opens onto the question of who is speaking in analysis.

    There are some peculiar inaccuracies, which go right to the limit of impropriety... They all tend in the same direction, which is to efface the sharp edges of the text.

17. #17

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    **II** > **Sorry? What's that?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes counter-transference and resistance not as signs of the analyst's authoritarian character but as the very conditions that allow resistance to be rendered objective and therapeutically manageable; recognising resistance is what distinguishes Freud's method from the dominatory logic of hypnotic suggestion.

    he feels it more keenly, and he accounted for what he had experienced

18. #18

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.256

    **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

    a source of confusion, a deep lack of grounding, the most tangible form of which lies in what I shall call a purely analogical use of the symbol

19. #19

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

    Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural distinction between projection and introjection by assigning them to different orders — the symbolic and the imaginary respectively — arguing that the intuitive, unreflective use of psychoanalytic vocabulary (identification, idealization, projection, introjection) is the primary source of theoretical confusion, and that language itself has a fundamental topology that pre-orients the speaking subject.

    The intuitive use of these terms, on the basis of the feeling that one has of understanding them... is obviously at the source of all the misapprehensions and confusions.

20. #20

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > ANAMORPHOSIS

    Theoretical move: The gaze is theorised as the privileged scopic object—the objet petit a of the scopic drive—around which the subject's fantasy is suspended, and whose essential unapprehensibility produces a structural méconnaissance that the illusion of self-reflexive consciousness ("seeing oneself see oneself") attempts, but fails, to cover over.

    its privilege—and also that by which the subject for so long has been misunderstood as being in its dependence—derives from its very structure.

21. #21

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan situates his early teaching as a corrective struggle against the méconnaissance of speech as the instrument of psychoanalysis, distinguishing a merely propaedeutic use of Heidegger/philosophy of language from his own project, and pivots toward introducing the concept of repetition by diagnosing a broader "refusal of the concept" in analytic practice.

    for a time at least, I was thought to be obsessed with some kind of philosophy of language, even a Heideggerian one, whereas only a propaedeutic reference was involved

22. #22

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

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

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

    See how Freud—and in a formula worthy in resonance of the pre-Socratics—is translated in French.

23. #23

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.150

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

    Theoretical move: Lacan indicts mainstream analysts ("slag") for retreating from the subversive potential of the unconscious into conformist, evolutionist therapeutics oriented toward a mythical happiness, thereby betraying the radical discovery of psychoanalysis.

    By slag, I mean here the analysts themselves, nothing more

24. #24

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.223

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

    Theoretical move: By critiquing Piaget's concept of "egocentric discourse" as a misreading, Lacan argues that the child's apparent self-directed speech actually exemplifies the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other — the subject's emergence is always already structured by an indeterminate placement beneath the signifier, confirming the concept of aphanisis (fading of the subject).

    The Piagetic error… is an error that lies in the notion of what is called the egocentric discourse of the child

25. #25

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Language does not merely represent the real but actively enters and structures it, making topology the necessary accompaniment to any structural discovery; this is illustrated through the Virgilian two-gates-of-dream figure, which maps the split between truth (horn) and captivating error (ivory/ego-as-subsistent-soul).

    Here it would be easy for me to evoke the misunderstood passage of Virgil at the end of Chapter VI

26. #26

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Language does not mirror reality but constitutes it operationally: by entering the real and creating structure within it, language enables a rigorous topology in which every structural discovery entails a corresponding opening elsewhere — a logic illustrated by Virgil's two gates of dream (horn/truth vs. ivory/error).

    Here it would be easy for me to evoke the misunderstood passage of Virgil at the end of Chapter VI

27. #27

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses his return from the USA to position psychoanalytic interpretation as radically distinct from both hermeneutics and religious interpretation, grounding this on the advent of science and its relation to the subject of the signifier, while also reflecting on how travel reveals the familiar anew—figured here as Europe's "absolute past" transplanted to America.

    after having been for a very long time not simply an assiduous attender but even a confidant of the particular plan of my teaching with regard to psychoanalysis, after having made use of it...then in a work whose goals are properly speaking goals that are contrary to those which constitute the foundation of psychoanalysis

28. #28

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.139

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses his return from America to make two linked theoretical moves: (1) he defends the radical incompatibility of psychoanalytic interpretation with hermeneutics and religion, grounding it in the subject's relation to the signifier and truth; and (2) he reflects on America as a site of "pure past" – a past that never existed in its supposed origin – as a travel experience that will alter his own discourse going forward.

    after having been for a very long time not simply an assiduous attender but even a confidant of the particular plan of my teaching… after having made use of it in lectures given in America… then in a work whose goals are properly speaking goals that are contrary to those which constitute the foundation of psychoanalysis

29. #29

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

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

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

    those whose trade it is to promote themselves, by grabbing in passing any little thing whatsoever that they find in Lacan's discourse … to produce a paper in which 'he' shows his originality

30. #30

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

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

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

    grabbing in passing any little thing whatsoever that they find in Lacan's discourse... to produce a paper in which 'he' shows his originality

31. #31

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.35

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

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

    everything is done to hide from him, in a quite radical way, what is involved at the end of the training analysis on the side of the psychoanalyst

32. #32

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

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

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

    We no longer retain anything from all these debates that are rightly or wrongly called theological... except texts that we know how to read more or less well

33. #33

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.24

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of 'the act' is constitutively signifying (not merely motor), that its meaning is always retroactively constituted (Nachträglich), and uses a critical reading of a contemporary report on transference and acting-out to distinguish his own theoretical position—that the act is new and unheard-of in its psychoanalytic formulation—from both ego-psychological reductions of transference and naive intersubjective readings of his own Rome Discourse.

    this error, this misconstruction, which consists in believing that this is what I re-introduced into a psychoanalysis that ignored it too much, was made by many people around me at that time

34. #34

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.19

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

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

    I named him, I will not name him here, he is the one that in my Ecrits I call the 'benêt'

35. #35

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.14

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

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

    Mr Pavlov demonstrates here that he is a structuralist, except that he does not know it himself. But this obviously takes away any import from what may claim to be here any proof whatsoever

36. #36

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.26

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function irreducible to a mere insult, arguing that the psychoanalytic act must grapple with the overlap between truth and stupidity—specifically, that the sexual act (marked by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment) renders truth irreducibly compromised, which is the very dimension the psychoanalytic act operates within.

    people, even while supporting themselves explicitly by what I put forward, can only do so on condition that they repudiate it, I would say.

37. #37

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.35

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

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

    Things have also been written that are very instructive because of their mistakes about the end of analysis.

38. #38

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.24

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the act (as distinct from mere motor activity) is constitutively signifying and only achieves its full status nachträglich, while simultaneously critiquing the reduction of transference to an intersubjective relation or a mere defensive concept by ego-psychological and American analytic orthodoxy.

    Everyone knows that if you read the Rome Discourse quickly you may think that this is what I am talking about... this error, this misconstruction, which consists in believing that this is what I re-introduced into a psychoanalysis

39. #39

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.148

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around the forced alienating choice (the 'cogito' quadrangle of "either I do not think, or I am not"), wherein the analyst supports the function of objet petit a so that the analysand can accomplish division-as-subject; this is contrasted with science (which forecloses the subject-effect after Descartes) and revolutionary thinking (which touches the subject-effect but cannot yet isolate its act), making the psychoanalytic act a privileged site for theorising what an act is as such.

    at gauging at what moment, in what is constituted by what I collected, as I was able, with a brush, under the title of Ecrits, I really began to speak about linguistics, at what moment, and up to when, what I am saying overlaps what Jacobson says.

40. #40

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970

    Theoretical move: Lacan, through a detailed philological dialogue with Caquot, uses Sellin's textual manipulations of Hosea as a case study in how a pre-existing interpretive thesis (the murder of Moses) distorts exegetical method, implicitly staging the problem of the subject's desire overdetermining the reading of the Other's text.

    you see the artifices through which, because one cannot call them anything else, by what artifices Sellin has managed to make the text of Hosea say something that it certainly did not intend to say

41. #41

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.22

    THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental contribution is the decentring of the subject from the individual—the subject is ex-centric to the ego and to consciousness—and reads this discovery as the culmination of a moralist tradition (La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche) that exposes the deceptive, inauthentic hedonism of the ego, thereby grounding the necessity of Freud's post-1920 metapsychological revision.

    the metapsychological work of Freud after 1920 has been misread, interpreted in a crazy way by the first and second generations following Freud - those inept people.

42. #42

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.55

    II > A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego is not the subject but a particular imaginary object within experience, and that the core of analytic technique requires intervening at the decentred, symbolic level of the subject's history/destiny rather than at the level of the ego — thereby distinguishing genuine analysis from suggestion and from Ego Psychology's reduction of the Freudian discovery.

    you force the ego back into this I discovered by Freud - you restore the unity. That is what happened in analysis the day when... people reverted to what is referred to as the analysis of the ego

43. #43

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego psychology represents a regression to pre-analytical, substantialist notions of the ego, betraying Freud's Copernican decentring of the subject; the Freudian discovery's radical move — that "I is an other," that the subject cannot be equated with the ego — is grounded in the gap between consciousness, the I, and the unconscious.

    The type of people that we shall define, using a conventional notation, as dentists are very confident about the order of the universe because they think that Mr Descartes made manifest the laws and the procedures of limpid reason

44. #44

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Fairbairn's object-relations reformulation of analysis as exemplary of a deeper theoretical error: the confusion of the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers under the single undifferentiated term 'object', which transforms analysis into an ego-remodelling exercise grounded in the specular/imaginary relation rather than the symbolic register of speech.

    Hence the misapprehensions [meconnaissances] thanks to which misunderstandings no less than ordinary communication which itself rests on the said misunderstandings - become established.

45. #45

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > **PREFACE**

    Theoretical move: This is a translator's preface by Bruce Fink to Seminar XX, making no substantive theoretical argument; it addresses translation methodology, the problem of misrepresentation of Lacan by secondary commentators, and the challenges of rendering Lacan's polyvalent French into English.

    Lacan, instead of presenting himself to the English-speaking world, has been believed by many to be faithfully presented to us by certain of his onetime students - such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, though their views diverge substantially from his on many points - and by a spate of American, Australian, and British critics who have, in my view, grossly misrepresented him.

46. #46

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.48

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan voices ambivalence about having made the unconscious teachable, lamenting the degenerate offspring of his teachings (e.g. Derrida's preface to *Le verbier*), while also articulating that the Real—figured as *l'âme à tiers*—is precisely that to which we have no relation, and that S(Ø) names its non-response, leaving the subject talking alone until a potentially delirious Ego emerges.

    I do not find this book, nor this preface to have the right tone... I am scared of that which in short I feel myself more or less responsible for, namely, to have opened the floodgates

47. #47

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    **II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of paranoia cannot be grasped through the "pattern" of understandable behaviour, because the elementary phenomenon of a delusion is not a nucleus around which deduction builds but is itself an irreducible structure — the same structuring force operative at every level of the delusion — and that psychiatry's persistent failure to theorise this is evidenced by Kraepelin's definition, which point-for-point contradicts clinical observation.

    the whole discourse on paranoia I was talking about before bears the mark of that misrecognition

48. #48

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.176

    **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

    Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the preconscious/imaginary domain and the unconscious proper, arguing that the analytic field is defined not by preverbal or imaginary communication but by the structural fact that unconscious phenomena are "structured like a language" — meaning they exhibit the signifier/signified duality where the signifier refers to another signifier, not to any object.

    I'm not surprised that something of a misunderstanding remains to be dispelled, even in people who think they're following me.

49. #49

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.332

    XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Little Hans case as structured around the imaginary phallus of the mother, arguing that the horse phobia functions as a crystallising signifier that organises Hans's libidinal development, while the successive fantasies punctuate transformations in the signifying configuration—and that Hans's ultimate heterosexuality is won at the cost of a narcissistic, fetishistic relation to women as imaginary objects.

    the observation develops wholly in the register of misunderstanding. I would add that this is quite ordinarily the case in any kind of generative interpretation between two subjects.

50. #50

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.267

    HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the child's passage through the Oedipus complex requires moving from an imaginary dialectic of veiling/unveiling around the phallic object (as the mother's imaginary phallus) to the symbolic register of castration in relation to the father, and that little Hans's phobia enacts this transition mythically. The scopic drive is shown to be structurally distinct from the purely imaginary dual relation, grounding the analysis of perversion and the misrecognition of female castration.

    The effacing of this fact from our experience shows the extent to which we have been incapable of benefiting from the most elementary terms of Freud's teaching.

51. #51

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.302

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

    Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized as the privileged signifier that introduces the relationship to the little other (a) into the big Other (A) as the locus of speech, thereby barring the Other and implicating it in the dialectic of desire — a structural move that critiques Jones's reductive biologism (aphanisis as disappearance of desire) in favour of a properly symbolic account of the castration complex.

    He was, strictly speaking, condemned to understand nothing, insofar as, from the outset, from his first sentence, as soon as he tried to spell out what the castration complex is in Freud, he felt the need to produce an equivalent for it, instead of clinging to what there is in the Oedipus complex that might be tough, even irreducible, namely the phallus signifier.

52. #52

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's clinical case to argue that interpreting a patient's symptoms (cough, dream, enuresis) at the level of imaginary rivalry and omnipotence misses the properly symbolic dimension: what is at stake is the omnipotence of discourse via the Other, not the subject's own omnipotence — and the cough must be read as a signifier (message) addressed to the Other, not a spontaneous affective release.

    She also has preconceived ideas. The latter are, after all, often founded - for an error is never generated except through a lack of truth - but they are grounded in another register that she knows neither how to articulate nor how to handle.

53. #53

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.62

    THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the representation) is strictly equivalent to the signifier, establishing that what is properly unconscious is a signifying element — not affect, sensation, or feeling — and uses Freud's dream of the dead father to demonstrate that dream-interpretation proceeds via the insertion of missing signifiers into the dream-text, not via wishful thinking or affective content.

    those who understand absolutely nothing unremittingly repeat that I am espousing an intellectualist theory, to which they naturally oppose affective life and dynamics.

54. #54

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.293

    *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

    Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

    What incredible vocation to platitude was required in what one could call the mentality of the analytic community to believe that this is a reference to what is called 'the biological agency'!

55. #55

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    IV. Closing in on the Symptom

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

    One imagines that people buy my Ecrits but never open them. That is false. They open them and they even work on them.

56. #56

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.26

    2 The Orthopsychic Subj ect: Film Theory and the Reception o£Lacan

    Theoretical move: Copjec identifies a central theoretical error in film theory's reception of Lacan: film theory conceives the screen as mirror (yielding a fully visible, surveilled subject), whereas Lacan's more radical move inverts this to conceive the mirror as screen — a distinction grounded in the impossibility of total truth/visibility and the constitutive role of the Real.

    the significance of these words may also be missed, as they have been generally in our theories of representation, the most sophisticated example of which is film theory

57. #57

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.30

    2 The Orthopsychic Subj ect: Film Theory and the Reception o£Lacan > The Screen as Miror

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory effected a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into a panoptic structure of total visibility, thereby reducing the subject to a fully determined, knowable position and eliminating the radical Lacanian insight that signifying systems never produce determinate identity—a move that makes resistance theoretically impossible.

    My argument is that film theory operated a kind of 'Foucauldization' of Lacanian theory; an early misreading of Lacan turned him into a 'spendthrift' Foucault.

58. #58

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.42

    Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory's appropriation of the Lacanian gaze fundamentally misreads it: where film theory locates the gaze as a positive, signified presence that centers and confirms the subject (aligning it with Foucauldian panopticism), Lacan's gaze is the Objet petit a in the visual field—a blind, jouissance-absorbed point of impossibility that annihilates rather than confirms the subject, constituting desire as constitutionally contentless pursuit of an impossibility.

    this coincidence can only be produced by a precipitous, 'snapshot' reading of Lacan, one that fails to notice the hyphen that splits the term photo-graph

59. #59

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Translator's Preface

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Standard Edition's systematic mistranslations and bowdlerizations of Freud have ideologically transformed his work from a daring, open-ended inquiry into a dogmatic corpus, and that new translations must restore both his precise meanings and his stylistic voice.

    This agenda is what also underlies the gravest and most pervasive defect of the Standard Edition, and that is its wilfully turgid and often obfuscatory style.

60. #60

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Theology and the voice of God*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that theology should be understood not as human discourse that defines God, but as the site where God speaks into human discourse — a shift from idolatrous representationalism to a responsive, a/theological posture that acknowledges the irreducible excess of the divine over any tradition's understanding of it.

    For some, this change in the understanding of theology seems to undermine the legitimacy of various Christian traditions, and ultimately that of Christianity itself. However, this is not the case.

61. #61

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.129

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > <span id="unp-ruda-0016.xhtml_p127" class="page"></span>Absolute Knowing, Absolute Fatalism

    Theoretical move: Absolute knowing is recast as "absolute fatalism" and "absolute comedy": it is the impossible-yet-necessary self-assumption of what makes knowledge impossible, a sacrificial move in which reason surrenders itself to its own constitutive limit, thereby distinguishing truth from knowledge and collapsing the distinction between knowing and unknowing.

    Neither is it the knowledge of an object that may be called the absolute, which is a traditional misreading of Hegel.

62. #62

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.219

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Whose Multiculturalism?*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's and Žižek's universalist critiques of identity politics and multiculturalism are themselves enactments of institutionalized marginalization, enabled by a Foucauldian power/knowledge system that suppresses entire fields of inquiry, and that sophisticated multiculturalism—building coalitions across differences—may be the closest approximation to genuine universalism.

    I occasionally encounter graduate students in my advanced theory seminars who credit Žižek for single-handedly inventing these critiques

63. #63

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

    **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan**

    Theoretical move: Copjec identifies the central error of film theory's reception of Lacan as an inversion: film theory conceives the screen as mirror (imaging the subject's visible self-presence), whereas Lacan's more radical insight conceives the mirror as screen (blocking or barring full visibility), and this error is symptomatic of a broader misreading of Lacan's claim that truth holds onto the real precisely through its impossibility of being spoken whole.

    so strong are our misperceptions of Lacan… the significance of these words may also be missed, as they have been generally in our theories of representation, the most sophisticated example of which is film theory

64. #64

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.19

    **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Screen as Mirror**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory committed a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into the panoptic apparatus, thereby substituting a logic of total visibility and determinate subject-positions for Lacan's more radical thesis that signifying systems never produce determinate identities—a substitution that renders the theory structurally resistant to resistance.

    film theory operated a kind of 'Foucauldization' of Lacanian theory; an early misreading of Lacan turned him into a 'spendthrift' Foucault

65. #65

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.32

    **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Mirror as Screen**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory fundamentally misreads Lacan's concept of the gaze by collapsing it into a Foucauldian optics of total visibility and perspectival construction; the Lacanian gaze, properly understood from Seminar XI, is not a point of surveillance but the Objet petit a in the visual field—an unoccupiable, impossible-real absence that founds the subject as desiring precisely through what it cannot see.

    this coincidence can only be produced by a precipitous, 'snapshot' reading of Lacan, one that fails to notice the hyphen that splits the term photo-graph

66. #66

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.8

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes the Death Drive as the most contested and rejected concept in Freud's metapsychology, then argues that rehabilitating it—by reconceiving the grand opposition between Eros and death down to the microincrements of psychical operation—is the central theoretical task of the book.

    Other commentators, seeking to explain how Freud could have spun such an obviously fantastic and implausible hypothesis, reckoned the death drive to be an expression of Freud's horror at the murderous spectacle of World War I

67. #67

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.10

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

    Theoretical move: Boothby positions Lacan's "return to Freud" as a theoretically ambitious refounding of psychoanalysis through three cardinal registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), a radical critique of Ego Psychology's adaptation model, and an insistence that the signifier—not the ego—determines the subject, with the Other as the ultimate horizon of desire.

    Lacan often gives the maddening impression that he intentionally resists being understood... One advantage of this choice is to prevent too easy a reading.

68. #68

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the persistent rejection of Freud's metapsychology is based on fundamental misunderstanding, and that recovering metapsychology is essential for grasping the genuine philosophical radicality of Freud's thought—without it, psychoanalysis collapses into merely a talking therapy defined by the Oedipus and castration complexes.

    the rejection of metapsychology is based on misunderstandings of its basic concepts. The result is a profound misconstrual of the real meaning of Freud's work and a failure to grasp its true radicality.

69. #69

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian cathexis/anticathexis can be re-read through Gestalt figure-ground dynamics, and that this perceptual automatism is ultimately grounded in Lacan's Imaginary order — whose constitutive power to unify perceptual objects is inseparable from an effect of méconnaissance.

    precisely correlative with the power of the Gestalt is an effect of misrecognition, or méconnaissance

70. #70

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.74

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freud's neurological mechanism of "side-cathexis" (from the Project for a Scientific Psychology) and the psychoanalytic phenomena of resistance, screen memories, and fetishism all operate through the same structural logic: a gestalt shift in which a peripheral perceptual element metonymically substitutes for and occludes the threatening focal content, a logic that Lacan explicitly links to the imaginary ego's function of méconnaissance.

    Lacan insists that his own conception of the imaginary ego and its function of méconnaissance, or alienating misrecognition, compared by him to the lessons of Gestalt psychology, can already be discerned in the Project.

71. #71

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

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter001.html_page_16"></span>The misguided fidelity of Judas

    Theoretical move: The passage reinterprets Judas's betrayal not as cold-blooded malice but as a misguided fidelity — an attempt to force a political-messianic confrontation — thereby using the figure of Judas to introduce the book's central paradox that betrayal can be an act of loyalty.

    While there is a certain ambiguity within the traditional reading of the story regarding who the ultimate betrayer really was, Judas is still viewed as corrupt and evil

72. #72

    The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.23

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

    Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-ethical argument that Christ's teachings of non-retaliation and love of enemies are addressed to the oppressed, not the powerful, thereby implicating the affluent Western reader as oppressor rather than recipient; the accompanying parable then dramatises how unconditional hospitality—giving without reserve—paradoxically preserves the very interiority the adversary seeks to destroy.

    By reading these words in an affluent, Western setting we can so easily domesticate the words of Jesus to the extent that they become little more than advice on how to treat a shop assistant or a passerby.

73. #73

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.61

    Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots** > **The Age of Distinctions**

    Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's distinction between the *eiron* (ironic self-aware figure who acknowledges the limits of knowledge) and the *alazon* (boastful pretender who parrots claims beyond his understanding) is deployed as the philosophical hinge between worldly social sagacity and genuine ironic instruction, positioning irony as the proper response to the outer limit of human understanding rather than speculative chatter.

    There surely have been some who simply have not cared very much about understanding Hegel but have certainly cared about the benefit one has by even going beyond Hegel

74. #74

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.54

    Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's concept of *Eftersnakken* (parroting) to argue that Hegelian discipleship in Denmark constitutes a form of self-deluding intellectual mimicry, in which derivative repetition is compounded by delusional claims of having surpassed the original — a duplicity of tedious parroting cloaked in pretentious chatter (*snak*).

    those who have gone beyond Hegel but nevertheless are Hegelians

75. #75

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.259

    The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **The Opening Song of Analysis**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that empty speech, far from being merely deficient, performs a foundational symbolic function—the formation of community and the assurance of being—thereby establishing it as the necessary opening condition of psychoanalysis rather than a mere obstacle to full speech.

    However empty his discourse may seem, it is so only if taken at face value

76. #76

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.122

    Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity** > **Epistemic Probability**

    Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Christendom is leveraged to show how "epistemic probability" — the habit of assessing degrees of belief by historical evidence — becomes naturalized as "second nature," displacing the paradox and leap of faith with a penchant for proof, and thereby rendering authentic religious subjectivity impossible.

    well-trained babblers [Svatzer] in whose mind there is neither a suggestion of offense nor a place for faith

77. #77

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.42

    Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies: > **Traveler's Logorrhea** > **Communicable Disease**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces a conceptual genealogy of "chatter" (snak/Geschwätz/adoleschia) from Plutarch through Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Lacan, arguing that the medical metaphor of talkativeness as a communicable disease—flowing through barbers, journalists, and audiences alike—is the structuring logic behind Kierkegaard's critique of everyday talk as a collective, self-perpetuating civic pathology.

    encouraging generations of German intellectuals to misunderstand Kierkegaard's radical philosophical notion of chatter as a conservative social critique of babble

78. #78

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

    Translator's Preface

    Theoretical move: The Translator's Preface argues that the Standard Edition's systematic mistranslations, bowdlerizations, and stylistic obfuscations have distorted Freud's original theoretical voice and concepts, making new translations not merely desirable but theoretically necessary—particularly because dominant English terminology has itself shaped how Freudian concepts (drive, pleasure principle, superego, etc.) are understood globally.

    The Standard Edition fed Freud through a kind of voice-synthesizer to make him sound like a droning academic

79. #79

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.39

    *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter01.xhtml_pg_36" class="pagebreak" title="36"></span>**Antagonism and Universality**

    Theoretical move: Universality is not a neutral container for particular cultural identities but is inscribed within them as their inner antagonism; postcolonial "fluid ontology" frameworks that privilege the multiplicity of particular communities systematically disavow this universality, and this disavowal is itself the flip side of their failure to recognize the internal antagonisms that traverse every community.

    It is this unreadiness to accept the primary role of universality which saps the bulk of postcolonial studies.

80. #80

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.109

    *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's formula "the rational is actual" is not a conservative reconciliation but an affirmation that history is genuinely contingent and exposed to decay — and that this immanent-critique method (systems criticising themselves from within) is precisely why Marx, as a materialist, could adopt the Hegelian framework to "carve out" indetermination within capitalism, making a return to Marx's critique of political economy necessary for communist politics today.

    According to his critics, this statement is meant to justify the Prussian monarchy, and thereby closes up the possibility for change, transformation, and revolution of the contemporary present.

81. #81

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

    *Unexpected Reunions*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx today requires a philosophical act of "profanation" — de-sacralizing a canonized "Saint Marx" — in order to restore the singular, historically-situated revolutionary edge of Marxist thought against its ideological domestication through omission, distortion, and assimilation.

    Lenin provides a detailed list of the specific operations involved in doctoring Marx(ism): for example, repression, distortion, omittance, 'amelioration,' denial, the cover-up, simplification, betrayal, vulgarization, evasion, disregard, malapropism.

82. #82

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.11

    *Unexpected Reunions*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the present historical conjuncture demands a specifically philosophical, inventive reading of Marx—against both orthodox Marxist teleology (capitalism as its own gravedigger) and Althusserian symptomatic/epistemological reading—because capitalism's immanent limit is not socialism but barbarism, rendering any reliance on capitalism's internal logic for emancipation untenable.

    we need to read Marx in such a way that we can imagine how he would have answered those of his critics who have declared him dead or tamed him by over-embracing a doctored Marxist position

83. #83

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.

    Contrary to the usual parallel between Kant-Mozart on one side and Hegel-Beethoven on the other, we should stress that here Hegel is Mozartian.

84. #84

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Žižek, via Sohn-Rethel's concept of 'real abstraction', argues that the commodity-form harbours an unconscious of the transcendental subject: the formal categories of pure reason (Kantian a priori) are already at work in the act of commodity exchange before thought arrives at them, making the symbolic order the external 'Other Scene' where thought's form is staged in advance—and this structural misrecognition is the fundamental dimension of ideology.

    Sohn-Rethel is thus quite justified in his criticism of Althusser, who conceives abstraction as a process taking place entirely in the domain of knowledge.

85. #85

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Against the standard critique of Hegel as fetishizing abstraction, Žižek argues that the true Hegelian move is the opposite: abstracting from empirical over-determination to isolate the notional/signifying determination, whereby language (Aufhebung as signifying reduction to the 'unary feature') makes potentiality visible as such - it is appellation that 'posits' a thing's inner potential.

    one of the main topics of the pseudo-Freudian dismissal of Hegel: the notion of Hegel's System as being the highest and most overblown expression of an oral economy

86. #86

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the visible Habermas-Foucault debate masks a theoretically more fundamental opposition—the Althusser-Lacan debate—and that Habermas's systematic avoidance of both figures (Lacan treated only in chains of equivalence, Althusser not mentioned at all) is symptomatic rather than accidental.

    Why this refusal to confront Lacan directly, in a book which includes lengthy discussions of Bataille, Derrida and, above all, Foucault, the real partner of Habermas?

87. #87

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that repetition is not the mechanism by which an objective historical necessity gradually imposes itself on lagging consciousness, but rather the process through which symbolic necessity itself is constituted retroactively via misrecognition: the first event is experienced as contingent trauma (non-symbolized Real), and only through repetition does it receive its symbolic status, its law, anchored by the Name-of-the-Father in place of the murdered father.

    historical necessity itself is constituted through misrecognition, through the initial failure of 'opinion' to recognize its true character - that is, the way truth itself arises from misrecognition.

88. #88

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.219

    Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

    Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

    I will examine Deleuze's crucial misreading of one of modernism's most emblematic literary figures—Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway—as an exemplary figure for Becoming.

89. #89

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.133

    Adrian Johnston

    Theoretical move: Johnston positions his "transcendental materialism" against both external critics (OOO, especially Harman) and internal Lacanian critics (Chiesa, De Vos, Pluth), defending a dialectical-materialist Hegelianism against the charge of antirealist spirit monism, while introducing Žižek's "universalized perspectivism" as the key exhibit in that dispute.

    Harman assaults the Hegelianism common to Žižek and me as an antirealist spirit monism. Of course, this all-too-familiar caricature of Hegelian philosophy mistakes absolute for subjective idealism.

90. #90

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.228

    Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

    Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's affirmative ontology of Becoming as positive flux without lack, the passage argues—through a Hegelo-Lacanian reading of Woolf's *Mrs Dalloway*—that subjectivity is constituted by an irreducible structural lack, and that this very lack (figured as absence, the void, *das Ding*, *objet a*) is what generates multiplicity, desire, and the intensity of lived experience rather than cancelling them.

    in his most consequential misreading of Woolf, Deleuze sees Clarissa as a figure of liberating multiplicity.

91. #91

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.164

    <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Formalization and the Transmissibility of Psychoanalysis**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's mathemes are theorized as a non-quantitative, qualitative mode of formalization whose value lies not in guaranteeing perfect communication but in the transmissibility of the written trace itself across time and interpreters; the "pass" is offered as an allied institutional mechanism for establishing a scientificity peculiar to psychoanalysis.

    Early on, Lacan's concern with the transmissibility of psychoanalysis is clearly based on English and American misinterpretation of Freud's work in particular, his hope being that such misinterpretation can be avoided by formulations and formalization akin to those of the 'hard sciences.'

92. #92

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.118

    <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's theory of sexuation turns on a dialectic of part and whole (not all and some), and that misreadings—especially in translations of Seminar XX—have distorted this; he proposes to reframe castration as alienation, the phallus as the signifier of desire, and the Name-of-the-Father as S(Ⱥ), thereby advancing a theory of sexuation that transcends Freud's culture-specific terms.

    A number of authors writing in English (or whose work has been translated into English) have discussed Lacan's work on sexuation without having a firm grasp of other aspects of his thought; they have thus provided the reading public with patently or partially false interpretations.

93. #93

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.212

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

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

    most contemporary readings of Lacan on sexual difference are misguided, confusing as they do the father and the phallus, the phallus and the penis, and so on

94. #94

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.171

    <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States is reduced to a disembodied textual corpus because it lacks the clinical and institutional praxis through which the discourse is transmitted in France; genuine transmission requires subjective experience, not merely publications.

    learning from someone else about Lacan in the United States generally means learning from someone who started reading these hermetic texts only a couple of years before you did.

95. #95

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.99

    12

    Theoretical move: The nouvelle vague's formal emphasis on absence, contingency, and the impossibility of the gaze-as-object constitutes a cinema of desire that resists ideological fantasy by refusing to produce the objet petit a as attainable, thereby structurally positioning the spectator as a desiring subject rather than a fantasizing one.

    Through the character of Antoine, we see how desire originates in the fundamental, constitutive misunderstanding that occurs in the relationship between the subject and the social order.

96. #96

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.105

    **The Banality of Orson Welles**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Welles's cinema enacts a Hegelian correction of the Kantian logic of the nouvelle vague: rather than sustaining the gaze as an impossibly absent transcendent object (which risks feeding fantasy), Welles renders the object's absence fully present by embodying it in a banal, everyday object, thereby exposing the void at the core of desire and foreclosing fantasmatic resolution.

    This would be a misreading of these films, but it is the danger that accompanies their emphasis on openness.

97. #97

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.186

    24

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that new Lacanian film theory (Copjec, Žižek) reverses the premises of early Lacanian/Althusserian film theory by positing the gaze—not ideology—as cinema's primary function, and by reconceiving the subject as a site of ideological failure rather than its product, thereby making theoretical critique of ideology philosophically coherent.

    The problem with Althusser's vision of ideological interpellation resides in its inability to account for the theorist who recognizes the process.

98. #98

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

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

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

    the later Schelling's attacks concerning the transition from the logical to the natural in Hegel's System are based on a misreading according to which the formal categories of Hegelian Logik are free-standing metaphysical realities preexisting in time

99. #99

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

    Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real](#contents.xhtml_ch3)

    Theoretical move: Harman argues that Žižek's *Less than Nothing* is organized around a Hegel/Lacan composite structure, and identifies a productive tension within it between a retroactivist (idealist) ontology and concessions to scientific realism, with the quantum theory section serving as the hinge of that tension.

    his longest book is no doubt one of his least attentively read

100. #100

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage mounts a systematic critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan, arguing that his central ethical axiom "Do not give up on your desire!" is a fundamental misreading of Seminar VII, and that his use of Antigone as a paradigm for contingent, concrete-universal socio-political transformation is undermined both by internal inconsistencies and by a close reading of Sophocles' text.

     Žižek's interpretation of this passage from Lacan's *Seminar VII* thus constitutes a fundamental misreading, although it has to be said that, over the years, he has not been alone in 'perverting' Lacan's words in this way.

101. #101

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.253

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs scholarly philological critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," documenting systematic misattributions, citation errors, and misreadings across Žižek's corpus while tracking the precise textual sources in Sade, Lacan's Seminar VII, and related literature for concepts such as the second death, desire, alienation/separation, and the quadripartite structure of Lacanian theory.

     Throughout his works, i.e., from beginning to end, Žižek erroneously situates this disquisition in Book 5 of Juliette… this error is repetitive, the psychoanalyst in me is tempted to interpret 5 as the number of Žižek's (unfulfilled) desire

102. #102

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.4

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > On Critics and Disciples

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive editorial introduction surveying the secondary literature on Žižek, contrasting the present volume's constructive dialogue with prior polemical anthologies, and noting Žižek's peculiar failure to generate doctrinal disciples despite his popularity.

     these responses typically do not attend to the precision of Žižek's arguments... the sole goal seems to be maligning Žižek not just as a thinker but even as a person.

103. #103

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's "layer-cake" emergentism, which insists on genuine non-identity between substance and subject (via "sondern ebensosehr"), is philosophically superior to Schelling's "layer-doughnut" panpsychism, which covertly presupposes subjectivity within nature; and further that Hegel's privileging of contingent actuality over possibility as the foundational modal category provides a more defensible metaphysics than Schelling's potentiality-first ontology—a distinction that also bears on how Žižek should interpret quantum collapse.

     This enormously important Žižekian recognition runs contrary to the standard misreading of Hegel as a metaphysician of necessity, a philosopher for whom Absolute Spirit as a God-like mega-Mind teleologically orchestrates from above

104. #104

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage contextualizes Žižek's theory of the Act by grounding it in critiques of gradualism, the big Other, and cowardice — arguing that true political courage requires accepting the inexistence of the big Other, while situating Žižek's positions on Stalinism, Badiou's event, and Benjamin's critique of violence against his academic critics.

     Adam Kirsch claims that 'the curious thing about the Žižek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror … the more indulgently he is received by the academic left'

105. #105

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's anti-systematic, dialectically ironic mode of philosophy—while genuinely innovative in re-founding dialectics as a discipline—risks collapsing into a "negative philosophy" or ironic stance that undermines reason itself, a charge framed through Pippin's critique that Žižek misreads Hegel by importing a negativist ontology alien to German Idealism.

     Experts on Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger may ask whether Žižek actually wants to participate in an exegetical dialogue with them or whether he is not primarily interested in presenting… his own Žižegel

106. #106

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction to *Žižek Responds!*, providing bibliographic references for secondary literature on Žižek and brief editorial glosses on key theoretical commitments (ideology's obscene underside, antagonism, theory's belatedness); it is primarily citational apparatus rather than an original theoretical argument.

     critics feel licensed to launch insults in his direction that they would not use on any other theorist. Just substituting the name 'Judith Butler' for 'Žižek' in the above sentence proves this point.

107. #107

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage critically documents a chain of misreadings by Žižek (and others) of Lacan's Seminar VII ethics: the central error is attributing to Lacan the imperative "Do not give up on your desire!" when Lacan's actual formulation concerns guilt as arising from having given up on one's desire—a paradox, not an imperative. Secondary misreadings of Antigone's ἄτη, her desire, and related textual inaccuracies are catalogued.

     For similar misinterpretations, see Alain Badiou… Alenka Zupančič… Mari Ruti… Simon Critchley… Deborah Anna Luepnitz

108. #108

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.108

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **THE SILENT TURN AWAY FROM STALIN**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Stalinism's crimes stem not from an excess of universality but from a *misconception* of universality—the belief that total belonging is a realizable goal—and that the Left's silent retreat from universalism toward particularism after Stalin, rather than theorizing his error, is itself a theoretical and political catastrophe.

     By interpreting Stalin's violence as that of the universal, it accepts Stalin's own view of what he is doing, just as the prevailing interpretation of Nazism accepts Hitler's own conception of the Nazi program.

109. #109

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.90

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **HOW TO MISRECOGNIZE A CATASTROPHE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the predominant theoretical interpretation of Nazism and Stalinism as crimes of universality is a fundamental misrecognition: Nazism was in fact grounded in an ontology of particular difference, and Stalinism in a particularized distortion of the universal, meaning that the post-war theoretical "ethical turn" toward respecting particular identity—exemplified by Adorno—has paradoxically undermined emancipatory universalist politics and ceded political ground to the Right.

     figures as diverse as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, despite their theoretical divergence and personal animosity, created an inverted understanding of the twentieth-century catastrophes.