Montage of Semblances

The "Montage of Semblances" is a structural operation specific to the comic paradigm, as theorized in Žižek/Zupančič's reading of Lacan in The Shortest Shadow. Where the sublime/tragic mode stages a montage of the Real (as inaccessible, transcendent Thing, das Ding) and a semblance (an appearance that gestures toward the Thing while remaining forever separate from it), the comic mode stages something categorically different: a parallel montage of two semblances, two appearances, two doubles — neither of which is the Real. The Real does not pre-exist this composition as an unreachable beyond; rather, it is produced by the gap between the two semblances. The non-coincidence of the two appearances — their failure to collapse into one — is precisely what generates the Real as an emergent effect, a gap-become-object. This is the logic of objet petit a: not a positive thing, but the remainder or void that falls out of the relation between terms.

This structure is identified as the proper formal analogue of love. Love does not work by elevating the beloved into an inaccessible sublimity (the tragic-sublime move); it works by holding two ordinary, accessible semblances in a precise compositional tension such that something transcendent — the Real — appears within accessibility rather than beyond it. The montage is thus both a formal operation (editing, juxtaposition, composition) and an ontological one: it does not represent the Real but constructs or recognizes it from within the play of appearances.

This concept appears in the-shortest-shadow-nietzsche-alenka-zupancic (p. 178) and is situated at the intersection of Zupančič's ethics of comedy and the Lacanian account of love. It directly refunctions the canonical concepts of das Ding, objet petit a, and the Gap by redistributing their roles. In the standard sublime economy, das Ding anchors the Real as an excluded, transcendent kernel that desire circles without ever reaching — semblance is measured against the Thing as its inadequate double. The Montage of Semblances displaces this economy: rather than one semblance orbiting an absent Thing, two semblances are set into composition, and the Real (structurally equivalent to objet petit a — the gap, the remainder, the object-cause of desire) is produced as the effect of their non-coincidence. It is an extension and specification of the logic of objet petit a (not a positive entity but a void falling out of a relation) applied to the aesthetic-ethical register of comedy and love.

In relation to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, this concept offers a counter-model to sublimation (which "raises an object to the dignity of the Thing"). The Montage of Semblances does not elevate; it composes horizontally, allowing transcendence to emerge from within the immanent. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the comic, unlike the tragic, does not sacrifice desire on the altar of the inaccessible — it finds the Real in the midst of the accessible. The concept thus serves as a formal, quasi-cinematic figure for how love and comedy together constitute an Ethics of Unbelief — refusing the sublime fiction of the unreachable Thing while still preserving the dimension of the Real.

The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the TwoAlenka Zupančič · 2003 (p.178)

comedy introduces a kind of parallel montage: a montage not of the Real (as the transcendent Thing) and the semblance, but a montage of two semblances or doubles. 'Montage' thus means: producing or constructing or recognizing the Real from a very precise composition of two semblances.

The phrase "producing or constructing or recognizing the Real from a very precise composition of two semblances" is theoretically loaded because it inverts the standard Lacanian topology: instead of the Real being primary and semblance being secondary (a failed approximation of the Thing), the Real here is an output — an emergent effect of the composition of appearances. The triple verb ("producing or constructing or recognizing") deliberately leaves open whether the Real is ontologically generated or epistemically disclosed, preserving the ambiguity that is central to the comic-love paradigm.