Neighbour

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (135)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

   The Subject of Freedom > What freedom?

   Theoretical move: Against both 'humanist' and 'psychological' accounts of freedom, Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is grounded not in the subject's inner inclinations but in a 'foreign body' that is paradoxically most truly one's own — a structure she links to alienation, jouissance, and the ethical dimension that will be connected to guilt rather than psychological causality.

   the question of the (specifically ethical) jouissance, and of its domestication in 'love for one's neighbour'

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.66

   The Lie > The Unconditional

   Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of Kant's "parable of the gallows" exposes a hidden pathological motive (the good of the neighbour) smuggled into what should be a purely formal moral argument; the passage then aligns Kantian duty with the Lacanian ethics of desire by locating the ultimate limit of pathology in the Other, and grounds the ethical act in the dimension of the Real rather than law or transgression.

   can 'humanity' - or, more precisely, love for our fellow-man - justify us in making an exception to the moral law... An ethics that identifies duty with the good of one's neighbour cannot avoid this problem.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Enjoyment - my neighbour

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian commandment to 'love thy neighbour' founders on the problem of jouissance, which Freud evades: the neighbour is structurally the enemy because enjoyment is always 'the Same' (real register) rather than the similar (imaginary) or identity (symbolic), and Sygne's sacrifice dramatizes the crossing from the service of goods into the abyss of desire-as-enjoyment, illustrating Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis through literary and political analysis.

   the commandment, in all its rigour, to love one's neighbour? ... my neighbour, the stranger whom I must love, is by definition, or 'at bottom', my enemy.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.241

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Enjoyment - my neighbour

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Sygne's final 'no' is not an afterthought but the necessary telos of her sacrifice: the logic of pure desire, by driving the subject to traverse the fundamental fantasy from within, opens onto the register of enjoyment (jouissance), where the remainder of flesh that refuses sublimation prevents the sublime image from closing over the void it veils.

   Enjoyment - my neighbour

5. #05

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

   Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

   Theoretical move: Capitalism's ideological power lies not in its cynical realism about human nature but in its flattering misrepresentation of the psyche: it conceals from subjects that their satisfaction is structured around the pursuit of failure (the death drive / jouissance logic), not successful accumulation, thereby shielding them from the trauma constitutive of subjectivity itself.

   The trauma manifested in the neighbor is the trauma of our own subjectivity

6. #06

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.34

   Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* — the Thing — is not primarily a Kantian noumenal kernel of objects but the inaccessible, anxiety-generating core of the mother's desire encountered in the primordial relation with the fellow human being, making the (m)Other's unknown desire the constitutive ground of subjectivity and the original template for all subsequent object-relations.

   Freud notes how the child divides the figure of the *Nebenmensch*, the 'neighbor' or fellow human being, between what the child can recognize on the basis of similarities to its own body . . . and a locus of something that is 'new and non-comparable'

7. #07

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.38

   Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > My Mother, the Monster

   Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's displacement of the Oedipus complex by the enigma of the mother's desire reveals the Thing-dimension within the Other as the primal source of anxiety, and marshals Sartre's phenomenology of the Other and the robotics "uncanny valley" as indirect empirical support for this counterintuitive but theoretically central claim.

   A further suggestive confirmation of Lacan's thesis about the anxiety-arousing power of the neighbor-Thing

8. #08

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.39

   Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > Alone Together

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—located in the Other rather than in consciousness itself (contra Sartre)—is the primal source of both anxiety and desire in intersubjective life, and that contemporary digital behaviour (social-media addiction, 'alone together' gadget use) is best understood as a defensive yet ambivalent negotiation with this void in the Other, simultaneously evading and chasing it.

   The point would seem very precisely to endorse the implication of Lacan's theory of the neighbor-Thing.

9. #09

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.44

   Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Ambivalence and the Falsely False

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian "falsely false" (a structure unique to the signifying subject) reveals ambivalence toward das Ding as the primal form of social intercourse: polite conventions simultaneously defend against the anxiety of the Other while preserving a limited opening toward the hidden excess of the Other-Thing, thereby retracing the structure of the symptom.

   the 'falsely false' conventions of social intercourse enable us simultaneously to defend ourselves against anxiety in the face of Others while also preserving a limited openness toward a hidden excess.

10. #10

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.48

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > ". . . It's Not My Mother"

    Theoretical move: By reading stranger anxiety as a displacement that inverts and conceals the maternal origin of primal anxiety, Boothby deploys Lacan's concept of extimacy to argue that *das Ding* is the paradoxical locus where the most intimate and the most alien coincide, linking the death drive, desire, and jouissance to the irreducible unknown at the core of the Other.

    Modesty becomes recognizable as a bulwark against too raw— literally, too naked— a confrontation with the monstrous dimension of the neighbor.

11. #11

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.55

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Parting Is Sweet Sorrow

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the primordial function of language is not connection but separation: the entry into the signifier achieves a margin of detachment from the neighbor-Thing in the Other, making disjunction — not communication — the archaic ground of human language acquisition.

    puts the threatening unknown of the neighbor- Thing at a distance

12. #12

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The *Ex Nihilo* of the Signifier

    Theoretical move: By centering the primal challenge on the mother's desire rather than the Oedipus complex, Lacan's concept of das Ding radicalizes Freud's triangular structure of subjectivity, reframing the relation between the little other and the big Other as the organizing problem of subject-constitution.

    his rejection of Freud's posing of the Oedipus complex in favor of the Komplex der Nebenmensch, the complex of the neighbor-Thing.

13. #13

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.63

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates a double function with respect to das Ding: it defensively separates the subject from the Thing (through the big Other, law, grammar, the paternal metaphor) while simultaneously, through its constitutive excess over the signified and its horizon of semantic indeterminacy, reopening pathways toward the Thing — making the signifier both the wall against and the route back to the abyssal Real.

    What if the ultimate function of the Law is not to . . . retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?

14. #14

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.133

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Laws of the Neighbor

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Decalogue's two tablets both address the subject's constitutive bondage to das Ding—first through the logic of the unnameable Other (Yahweh/signifier) and then through the neighbor-as-Thing—such that the final two commandments (against lying and coveting) crystallize an unavoidable double bind: every enunciation of truth about the Thing is already a lie, and every prohibition of desire is what constitutes and inflames that desire.

    The last five commandments, we can say, all aim to make room for the neighbor-Thing.

15. #15

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.137

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Living with the Law— the God Symptom

    Theoretical move: Judaic monotheism's unprecedented proximity to *das Ding* is argued to generate anxiety that is structurally managed through a symptomatic displacement into obsessive legal observance (halacha), which simultaneously creates distance from and intimacy with the terrifying Other; this symptom formation is socially stabilized not by verified conformity but by a collective suppositional regime—what Pfaller calls "interpassivity"—in which the big Other's authority rests on the fiction that everyone else obeys.

    by positioning the subject in relation to the One unnamable God, and in relation to the neighbor as a locus of unknowable enjoyment, Jewish monotheism introduces an unprecedented proximity to das Ding.

16. #16

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.143

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > The Strangest God

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity performs a radical inversion of the established logic of divinity—power, glory, hiddenness—by presenting a God who appears fully in degradation and weakness, and whose sacrificial logic reverses the direction of sacrifice found in pagan and Jewish traditions, culminating in the commandment of love as the singular reduction of all law.

    The teaching of Jesus of Nazareth reduces the meaning of the Jewish law to a single commandment: Love thy neighbor as thyself.

17. #17

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.145

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > To Love Thy Neighbor

    Theoretical move: The passage argues, from a Lacanian vantage, that Jesus's commandment to love the neighbor constitutes a radical injunction to abandon defensive barriers toward the threatening, jouissance-laden dimension of the Other—and, by extension, of oneself—thereby locating the divine wholly in the immanent encounter with the neighbor-as-Thing, a move that goes further than Freud's imaginary-bound critique of neighbourly love by opening onto the unconscious.

    From a Lacanian point of view, the groundbreaking event enacted by the teaching of Jesus is to locate the divine directly and without qualification in the embrace of the neighbor- Thing— the person who is standing right in front of you.

18. #18

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.147

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > . . . and Love Thine Enemy

    Theoretical move: By deploying Lacan's concept of the jouissance of the Other alongside das Ding, the passage argues that loving one's neighbor and loving one's enemy are structurally identical challenges: the neighbor's undomesticated jouissance makes the neighbor an enemy, so that Christian love of the enemy constitutes an acceptance of the Other's radical alterity and, reflexively, of one's own.

    my neighbor's jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a problem for my love.

19. #19

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.151

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that crucifixion, read through the intersection of Lacanian and Hegelian frameworks, figures not as sacrificial atonement but as the subject's embrace of the Other's foreignness as an opening to what is unknown in itself — a "dying away" of the ego that parallels Lacan's rereading of Freud's *Wo Es war, soll Ich werden* and Hegel's dialectical conception of love as constitutive self-division, which in turn grounds a psychoanalytic ethics of non-judgement toward the analysand.

    Hegel...fully endorses the view that the distinctive core of Christianity is the commandment to love one's neighbor, while also insisting that true love must engage precisely what is most other in the Other.

20. #20

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.155

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross > The True Religion Is Atheism

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity constitutes the "one true religion" precisely because its teaching of love — as direct embrace of the neighbor-Thing — collapses the defensive triangulation effected by paganism and Judaism, thereby generating atheism from within its own theology: God's kenotic self-emptying in the crucifixion is the Hegelian-Lacanian move by which the transcendent big Other is abolished and divinity is identified with human love itself.

    the gospel of Jesus directly identifies divinity with accepting the threatening unknown in the fellow human being

21. #21

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.160

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Abyss of Freedom

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the radical Christian ethic of love—grounded in freedom, unknowing, and relation to das Ding beyond the law—is systematically betrayed by orthodox Christian dogma, which functions as a defensive, compensatory reinvestment in the symbolic big Other against the anxiety produced by that original abyssal encounter; the psychoanalytic transference is offered as a structural parallel to this dynamic of supposed knowledge arising from a void of unknowing.

    The truly revolutionary message of Jesus was about love as an unhesitating embrace of the Other-Thing.

22. #22

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.167

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Christianity's distinctive innovation is the elevation of *belief itself* (the act of believing, for-itself) over religious action or content, and that this structure of belief is fundamentally a social/ideological defense against the unknown Other — making it the very mechanism by which the church betrays Jesus's teaching of love.

    In the context of our approach to Christianity, centered on Jesus's exhortation to lovingly embrace what is unknown in the Other, it becomes possible to read these strange and contradictory features of belief in a consistent way.

23. #23

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.172

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology > The Manichaean Temptation

    Theoretical move: The Lacanian architecture of belief—which requires a supposed non-believer as its structural support—explains why mainstream Christianity persistently "substantializes" evil into a gnostic dualism despite both orthodox Augustinian theology and Jesus's own teaching; the psychic requirement of belief generates the division between good and evil as its ideological shadow.

    the Jesus's admonition to give oneself wholly to the loving embrace of the stranger, not allowing the fear of evil to sire even a moment's hesitation.

24. #24

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.173

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Other Paths, Other Gods

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the three Abrahamic/Western religious traditions represent a progressive trajectory of increasing directness in approaching *das Ding* — from Greek paganism's indirect relation to unknowing, through Jewish monotheism's concentration of the unknown in an inscrutable deity, to Christianity's most radical move: fully restoring the abyssal Thing to its primordial site in the relation with the human Other, reframed as the imperative to love what is unknown and threatening.

    When Jesus of Nazareth identified divinity with love of the enemy as much as of the neighbor, challenging his followers to fully embrace what is unknown and potentially threatening in every human being

25. #25

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.174

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Religious Symptom

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Lacan's tripartite RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) framework to argue that the three Abrahamic-plus-Greek traditions are each symptomatic formations organized around a defensive response to das Ding: Greek polytheism as imaginary, Judaism as symbolic, and Christianity as the religion of the Real—and therefore the most extravagantly symptomatic, generating both the greatest defenses and the greatest historical violence. Religion itself is thus theorized as the most elemental and ubiquitous human symptom, substitutable only by other forms of sublimation.

    The revolutionary event of Christianity consisted in Jesus's direct solicitation of the real in the neighbor-Thing... The teaching of Jesus turns every person we meet into a burning bush.

26. #26

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.176

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

    Theoretical move: The passage extends Boothby's Lacanian framework for the sacred to non-Western religions, arguing that Hinduism's moksha, Buddhism's sunyata, and Nishitani's Zen phenomenology all instantiate the same fundamental structure: an encounter with the unknowable neighbor-Thing, achieved through the sublimation or dissolution of the ego, confirming religion as the master symptom organized around the irreducible opacity of das Ding.

    what unmistakably emerges is a quasi-historical progression toward a more intimate (and anxious) approach to the unknown neighbor-Thing.

27. #27

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.181

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

    Theoretical move: By aligning the Kyoto School's Buddhist paradox of "knowing of non-knowing" (docta ignorantia) with Lacan's das Ding as the unknown dimension of the Nebenmensch, the passage argues that the deepest intimacy—with others, with God, with oneself—is constitutively unknowable, making radical unknowing the shared ground of Buddhist and psychoanalytic accounts of the sacred.

    At his home-ground, a friend remains originally and essentially a stranger, an 'unknown.' . . . Essentially speaking, then, all men, be they the most intimate of friends or the most distant of acquaintances, are exactly to the same degree 'unknown.'

28. #28

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.183

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View? > Along the Path of the Fourth Prophet

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Islam, like Christianity before it, enacts a symptomatic defensive closure against the radical opening toward das Ding that its own mystical and ethical traditions intimate: it re-transcendentalizes the divine (al-Ghaib, Allah's ineffability) and amplifies the letter of the Law, thereby countermanding the Jesusian gospel of love and the neighbor, making Islam the strongest rival to Christianity as the religion most tensed between an opening toward das Ding and defenses arrayed against it.

    it also shares with both Judaism and Christianity a powerful concern with duty toward the neighbor… directing religious fervor toward relation with the fellow human being

29. #29

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.187

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing!

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that money in capitalist culture functions as a phantasmatic incarnation of *das Ding*, structuring social relations by both intensifying and defending against the anxiety produced by the unknown Thing in the Other — capitalism thereby operates as a religion, with the market economy displacing the "human economy" of gift-exchange that kept subjects entangled with the Other's desire.

    We have gods to help manage our fundamentally anxiety-producing relations with our fellow human beings… the subject's profoundly ambivalent relation to the unknown of the neighbor-Thing.

30. #30

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.200

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Money God

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that money functions as the true interpellating agency of modern capitalist society—replacing Althusser's divine Big Other with an anonymous, faceless force—by occupying the structural position of das Ding: it colonizes the void of desire so completely that subjects are always-already constituted as 'free' agents before any explicit ideological address, atomizing the social body and foreclosing collective solidarity.

    Gods triangulate our relation with Others by taking up into divinity itself the anxious potential of das Ding... money succeeds in individuating the mass of persons, establishing to an unprecedented degree the rule of 'to each its own.'

31. #31

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.201

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions

    Theoretical move: Against a purely defensive/repressive reading of religion (Freud), Lacan's position is reframed as a positive 're-linking' (re-ligare) to the enigmatic Real encountered in the human Other, such that the sacred is constituted around an irreducible locus of unknowing — Das Ding / the 'No-thing' — that human desire perpetually orbits.

    the mystery involved is less about the celestial orbs whirling above our heads than about our tense relations with the human Other who is sitting beside us.

32. #32

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.226

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Part 2

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2) providing citations and brief clarifications supporting the main argument; it is largely non-substantive apparatus, though it contains scattered theoretical anchors linking Lacan, Žižek, Hegel, and Freud to the book's argument about religion, the sacred, and the neighbor.

    The whole law is fulfilled in one word, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'

33. #33

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.129

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of the Ten Commandments identifies the Hebrew God (YHWH/haShem) as S1—the master signifier without a signified that inaugurates the signifying chain—and argues that the Jewish religion is the sacral institutionalization of objet petit a as the unsymbolizable remainder of every signifier, while contrasting the Greek real/imaginary axis with Judaism's real/symbolic axis as two opposed cultural solutions to the enigma of the real.

    'Love thy neighbor' became for the first time a possible tenet of religious life.

34. #34

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.125

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

    Theoretical move: Violence directed at the enjoying other is structurally self-defeating and self-sustaining: it does not aim to eliminate the other's enjoyment but to perpetuate it, revealing that anxiety about jouissance can be managed through flight, violence, or—as a third ethical option—embracing anxiety itself.

    Violence directed at the enjoying other is insatiable not just because the other's enjoyment cannot be destroyed but because the real goal of the violence is not eliminating this enjoyment but sustaining it.

35. #35

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.131

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that anxiety in the face of the Other's enjoyment is not merely an ethical posture but the very mechanism through which subjects access their own enjoyment, since enjoyment is structurally unavailable directly and must be fantasized through the enjoying Other—making the disturbing fantasy-encounter with the real Other ethically superior to both liberal tolerance (which neutralizes otherness) and fascist persecution (which disavows enjoyment while depending on it).

    What bothers us about the other — the disturbance that the other's enjoyment creates in our existence — is our own mode of enjoying.

36. #36

    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.

    It is not simply the mode of enjoyment of the neighbour, of the other, that is strange to me. The heart of the problem is that I experience my own enjoyment... as strange and hostile.

37. #37

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.199

    I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that emancipatory politics fails when it aligns itself with knowledge/expert authority against enjoyment, because popular identification with political figures operates precisely through shared enjoyment rather than rational conviction — and documentary film, as a form structurally committed to facts over enjoyment, exemplifies this failure.

    The genius of Bowling for Columbine is that it attributes American gun violence not... to the widespread availability of firearms... but to the American retreat from the neighbor.

38. #38

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.319

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 4. Sustaining Anxiety

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section traces Lacan's theoretical trajectory from an early Hegelian recognition-based psychoanalysis toward a later framework that integrates destructiveness and jouissance into subjectivity, while also mapping how anxiety, enjoyment, and the enjoying Other function in contemporary consumer society, political violence, and fascism.

    See, most importantly, Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology

39. #39

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.114

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

    Theoretical move: Recognition's ethical value is undermined by its constitutive failure: it reduces the subject to a symbolic identity and never reaches the real other (the neighbor); genuine ethics and encounter with the other are grounded not in the sacrifice of enjoyment but in enjoyment itself, since it is the other's singular, untranslatable enjoyment that first constitutes the real other as such.

    Encountering the real other, the other that several thinkers have christened the 'neighbor,' requires turning away from social authority and abandoning the project of recognition.

40. #40

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    3

    Theoretical move: Freud advances a structural homology between civilizational development and individual libidinal development, arguing that civilization is built on drive-renunciation (via repression, suppression, and sublimation), that order is a compulsion to repeat modelled on natural regularities, and that the tension between individual freedom and communal restriction is the fundamental, potentially irreconcilable problem of civilization.

    how the mutual relations of human beings are regulated, the social relations that affect a person as a neighbour, employee or sexual object of another

41. #41

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    5

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is constitutively threatened by an innate human drive to aggression that is irreducible to socio-economic conditions, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor functions as civilization's ideological demand precisely because it runs counter to this fundamental hostility—thus establishing the antagonism between Eros and aggression as the central engine of cultural development.

    It runs: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' ... Why should we behave in this way? What good will it do us? But above all, how shall we manage to act like this?

42. #42

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    7

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the paradoxical thesis that the superego/conscience is not merely the product of drive-renunciation imposed by external authority, but that drive-renunciation itself dynamically generates conscience, which in turn demands further renunciation — a reversing of the causal relation that explains why virtue intensifies rather than appeases the severity of conscience.

    What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggression it faces, to render it harmless and possibly eliminate it?

43. #43

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    8

    Theoretical move: Freud extends the Eros/death-drive formula from individual psychology to civilization by arguing that civilization develops its own super-ego whose ethical demands (especially "Love thy neighbour") are therapeutically defective for the same reasons as the individual super-ego, and tentatively raises the diagnostic possibility that entire civilizations may be neurotic—while cautioning against mechanical application of psychoanalytic concepts beyond their original sphere.

    'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is the strongest defence against human aggression and an excellent example of the unpsychological manner in which the cultural super-ego proceeds.

44. #44

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan marks a decisive 'leap' beyond Hegel on the function of desire: whereas Hegel's desire is desire of/for another *consciousness* (leading necessarily to the struggle to the death), Lacanian desire is desire of the Other qua *unconscious lack*, mediated by the fantasy as image-support — a distinction formalised through four formulae and the division-remainder algebra that produces the barred subject and objet a as co-residues on the side of the Other.

    It's the Other as locus of the signifier. It is my semblable amongst other things, but only in so far as it's also the locus at which the Other as such of the singular difference I was telling you about at the beginning is instituted.

45. #45

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.338

    **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his seminar on anxiety by arguing that anxiety is a signal prior to the cession of object *a*, that the scopic level most fully masks *a* and thus most assures the subject against anxiety, and that birth trauma (understood as intrusion of a radically Other environment rather than separation from the mother) and the oral/anal stages of object constitution reveal how desire is fundamentally structured around the yielding of *a* in relation to the demand of the Other — a structure irreducible to Hegelian dialectics.

    the very heart of this Other inasmuch as it is completed for us at a certain moment in the form of our neighbour.

46. #46

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), articulates the lying structure of truth, anchors the analyst's position in the hystorization of desire rather than institutional validation, and grounds the pass-procedure in the object as cause of desire and the real as the 'lack of lack.'

    This is an odd aspect of that love of one's neighbour upheld by the Judaic tradition.

47. #47

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), repositions the analyst as one who 'hystorizes only from himself', introduces the 'pass' as a test of analytic truth, and locates the object as cause of desire as the only conceivable idea of the object—with the lack of the lack constituting the Real.

    what is presented to the analyst is something other than the neighbour: it is the unsorted material of a demand that has nothing to do with the meeting

48. #48

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.162

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a theoretical figure, Lacan argues that silence is not the ground of the scream but is caused by it—paralleling the structure of the big Other as a holed, divided surface—and uses this to articulate how the o-object emerges as a remainder/residue in the operation of demand, structuring fantasy, desire, and transference around an irreducible cut.

    Freud himself in a letter to Fliess articulates it, it is at the level of the scream that there appears the Nebenmensch, this neighbour whom I showed should effectively be named in this way, this close neighbour because he is precisely this hollow, this uncrossable hollow

49. #49

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a topological illustration, Lacan argues that silence is not mere absence of speech but the structural correlate of the voice-as-object (objet petit a), such that the scream *causes* silence rather than silence grounding the scream; this models the Möbius/Klein bottle topology of demand, from whose cut the objet petit a falls as remainder—the origin of desire, fantasy, and transference.

    it is at the level of the scream that there appears the Nebenmensch, this neighbour whom I showed should effectively be named in this way, this close neighbour because he is precisely this hollow, this uncrossable hollow marked within ourselves

50. #50

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    Dr Lacan

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.

    the chosen woman is the one - which appears paradoxical to us and it is in Guillaume IX d'Aquitain - the good neighbour. The good neighbour, for me, if I had the time I could insist on it, is here as close as possible to what in the most modern mathematical theory is called the function of neighbourhood.

51. #51

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    Dr Lacan

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is non-specular — it appears as an image of nothing — and that courtly love (as in Dante's poetic construction) uniquely structures the relationship between the subject, the ego ideal, the o-object, and jouissance, thereby grounding psychoanalytic theory of sublimation in a topological framework.

    the function of the other and of the beloved other, that the chosen woman is the one... the good neighbour. The good neighbour, for me... is here as close as possible to what in the most modern mathematical theory is called the function of neighbourhood.

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation from both Marxist and idealist versions, and uses this to argue that the objet petit a — exemplified by the breast as an unrepresentable object — is what supplies for the lack in Selbstbewusstsein, with the analyst necessarily occupying the position of this object, which grounds a legitimate anxiety in the analyst.

    it is in the most secret part of myself that there ought to be sought the mainspring of the love of neighbour

53. #53

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation sharply from both Marxist and idealist-philosophical senses, then develops the Objet petit a as the structural support of the subject's "I am not" — the analyst occupies the position of objet a in the analytic operation, while the breast-as-object exemplifies the fundamentally non-representable, jouissance-laden character of the partial object that supplies for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein.

    it is in the most secret part of myself that there ought to be sought the mainspring of the love of neighbour

54. #54

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual relationship cannot be grasped through biological, logical, or identificatory schemas (active/passive, male/female, +/−), and that Freudian logic ultimately reduces sex to the formal mark of castration as constitutive lack; this requires distinguishing the Other (as terrain cleared of enjoyment, site of the unconscious structured like a language) from Das Ding (the intolerable imminence of jouissance/the neighbour), and poses the central question: is the Woman the locus of desire (the Other) or the locus of enjoyment (the Thing)?

    Where is there, outside this centre of myself that I cannot love, something that is more neighbour to me?

55. #55

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical structure of the field of the Other — its constitutive incompleteness and the necessary exteriority of the subject-signifier (S2) — to reground the "I" not in being but in the truth-function of speech, showing that the subject can only be represented outside the totality of signifiers, a structure that anticipates his formalization of sexuation via universal/particular quantifiers placed "outside the field."

    this prohibition on 'coveting the wife, the ox, the ass of your neighbour' who is always the one who kills you (qui te tue). It is hard to see what else one could covet! The cause of desire being, indeed, precisely there.

56. #56

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.109

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that knowledge is grounded in the Other as a locus of the signifier, and that its true nature lies in the identity between the jouissance of its acquisition and its exercise — not in exchange value but in use — while the analyst, by placing objet petit a in the place of semblance, is uniquely positioned to investigate truth as knowledge; this culminates in a meditation on the not-all, the Other's not-knowing, and the link between jealouissance, the gaze, and das Ding as the kernel of the neighbor.

    the Freudian Thing, in other words, the very neighbor (prochain) Freud refuses to love beyond certain limits.

57. #57

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.188

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan links the objet petit a as a semblance of being to a primordial scene of jealous enjoyment (jalouissance) drawn from Augustine, positioning it as the first substitutive enjoyment that founds desire through metonymy and demand addressed to the Other, and closes on the question of whether having the object a is the same as being it — a question he refers to "The Meaning of the Phallus."

    the very neighbour whom Freud sets his face against loving beyond certain limits

58. #58

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.228

    **XVII** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

    There is an echo here, which should be given full weight, of what is said in the commandment, Love thy neighbor as thyself.

59. #59

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.485

    **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's demand for death must be understood as a signifier mediated by the Oedipal horizon rather than reducible to Penisneid or castration, and that the Christian commandment 'love your neighbour as yourself' discloses—when formulated from the locus of the Other—the unconscious circuit in which the subject is the one who hates (demands the death of) itself, converging with Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'.

    It's the one that, on the horizon of all the commandments, is promoted in its Christian wording in the formula 'You will love your neighbour as yourself.'

60. #60

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    **VII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's doctrine of the libido (against Jung's cosmological misreading) to establish Das Ding as the structural obstacle around which the subject must navigate on the path of pleasure, arguing that sublimation cannot be reduced to direct drive-satisfaction or collective approval because it always involves an antinomy—a reaction formation—that reveals the fundamental incompatibility between the drive and any Sovereign Good.

    'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' That's the commandment that appropriately enough... is the terminal point of Civilization and Its Discontents.

61. #61

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.188

    **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's engagement with the commandment to love one's neighbor (from *Civilization and Its Discontents*) as the pivot for a meditation on the death of God, the Name-of-the-Father, and the political/ethical consequences of Freud's demystification of the paternal function, arguing that the "truth about truth" must be approached step by step rather than through metaphysical pretension.

    Freud confronts this commandment directly... Freud situating himself directly at the center of our true experience. For he doesn't attempt to evade the issue... in the commandment which is expressed in our civilization in the form of the love of one's neighbor.

62. #62

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the barrier to jouissance and the resistance to the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" are one and the same thing, not opposites — thereby locating the paradox of jouissance at the intersection of the Law, the death of God, the superego's aggression, and the imaginary identification with the other that grounds altruism.

    I retreat from loving my neighbor as myself because there is something on the horizon there that is engaged in some form of intolerable cruelty. In that sense, to love one's neighbor may be the crudest of choices.

63. #63

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.187

    **XI** > **XIII**

    Theoretical move: The Law and transgression are constitutively bound together as the condition of access to jouissance; without the Law's prohibition, desire loses its driving force. This dialectic is grounded in Freud's myth of the murder of the father, which reveals that God was never anything but the father of the son's mythology — a structure whose inner atheism Hegel already diagnosed as Christianity's own consequence.

    he stops short at the commandment to love thy neighbor. It is to the heart of this problem that his theory of the meaning of the instinct brings us back.

64. #64

    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.

    love of neighbor, 177-78, 179-90, 193-94, 196

65. #65

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's work to argue that the literary experiment of transgression reveals the structure of jouissance as approach to an unbearable centre, and introduces two theoretical terms: the part object (as the logic of Sade's social law) and the indestructibility of the Other in fantasy — ultimately connecting the Sadistic relation to the structure of obsessional neurosis.

    Doesn't that indicate that he locates in the fantasm the content of the most intimate part of himself, which we have called the neighbor, or in other words the metipsemus?

66. #66

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    **XI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that courtly love operates as a structural technology of sublimation that installs an artificial vacuole—an emptied, depersonalized object (das Ding)—at the center of signification, thereby organizing desire through inaccessibility and privation rather than mystical or historical derivation; this structural analysis then pivots to the ethics of eroticism, connecting the courtly logic of foreplay (Vorlust) and detour to the psychic economy as something irreducible to the pleasure principle.

    What is for us much more important than the reference to the neighbor... is the relationship between the expression just referred to and the one Freud uses in connection with the first establishment of the Thing... the Nebenmensch.

67. #67

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.205

    **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade as a limit-figure who, in his theory (if not his fantasy), points toward the genuine space of the neighbor as irreducibly other — beyond imaginary capture by the fellow-man — and thereby illuminates the structure of jouissance, transgression, and the ethical problem of loving one's neighbor as oneself.

    Can't one nevertheless say that Sade teaches us, in the order of symbolic play, how to attempt to go beyond the limit, and how to discover the laws of one's neighbor's space as such?

68. #68

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

    **VI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Decalogue—especially the commandments against lying and coveting—structurally reveals the dialectical relationship between desire and the Law: the Law does not merely prohibit desire but constitutes and inflames it, so that das Ding, as the primordial lost correlative of speech, is only accessible through (and as the excess produced by) the Law's interdiction, a logic Lacan demonstrates by substituting 'Thing' for 'sin' in Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

    it is a thing that is my neighbor's Thing.

69. #69

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.60

    **IV**

    Theoretical move: Lacan explicates Freud's *Entwurf* and Letter 52 to establish that *Das Ding* (the *Nebenmensch* as irreducible alien core) is the primordial outside around which the subject's entire economy of desire is oriented, and that the lost object — structurally unfindable — is what drives the subject's search for satisfaction; simultaneously, the signifying structure interposing between perception and consciousness is what constitutes the unconscious as such.

    it is at this point that that reality intervenes, which has the most intimate relationship to the subject, the Nebenmensch. The formula is striking to the extent that it expresses powerfully the idea of beside yet alike, separation and identity.

70. #70

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    **VI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Kantian ethics and Sadian ethics are structural mirrors of each other—both arrive at *das Ding* by eliminating all pathological (affective) reference from the moral law—and that this convergence reveals the fundamental relationship between the moral law, desire, and the Real, with pain as the sole sentient correlative of pure practical reason.

    which is literally close to it, in the way that one can say that the Nebenmensch that Freud speaks of as the foundation of the thing is his neighbor.

71. #71

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

    **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

    Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

    every time that Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one's neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. But if that is the case, then it also dwells within me.

72. #72

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.199

    **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

    Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Kant's moral calculus collapses once jouissance—understood as implicitly bound to evil and death—is substituted for pleasure in the ethical equation: the moral law then serves as a support for jouissance rather than its constraint, revealing that the law of the good can only operate through evil, and that the ethical subject is torn between a duty of truth that preserves the place of jouissance and a resignation to the good that extinguishes it.

    This Law makes my neighbor's jouissance the point on which, in bearing witness in this case, the meaning of my duty is balanced.

73. #73

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.412

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire is structured around a fundamental mourning — the recognition that no object (objet petit a) is of greater value than any other — and that this insight, shared with Socrates, connects melancholia, fantasy, the ego-ideal, and the ethics of love into a single topological point where desire meets its limit.

    Oddly enough… people do not seem to have realized that this is what is meant by 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'

74. #74

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.169

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.

    Nothing is further from Socrates' message than 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' a formulation whose dimension is remarkably absent from everything he says.

75. #75

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.39

    II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's investigation of narcissism and the mirror stage reveals that self-love is always love of an imaginary other, and that the unconscious—structured like language—marks the place where the subject is split from the Thing (Das Ding), making any ethics grounded in ego-psychology or object relations insufficient for the demands of scientific modernity.

    Freud is far closer than he allows to the Christian commandment 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' He does not allow it; he repudiates it for being excessive as an imperative.

76. #76

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

    This is the place where we have to love the neighbor as ourselves, because in him this place is the same.

77. #77

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    Lecture Announcement

    Theoretical move: This lecture announcement frames Lacan's ethics seminars as a challenge to normalization in analytic practice and to religious monopoly on morality, positioning Freud's articulation of the unconscious as capable of grounding an ethics that goes beyond hedonism, altruism, and phenomenological critique — centering Das Ding and the Name of the Father as the structural pivots of desire and moral law.

    involving the primacy of love and awareness of the neighbor

78. #78

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.78

    <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society > Negative Social Cognitive Neuroscience

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical pivot: it mobilises social cognitive neuroscience (Bowlby, Winnicott, Lieberman) to displace individualism and then radicalises those findings through a psychoanalytic-pessimist lens, arguing that what neuroscience calls "social need" is better understood as constitutive, unfillable lack—a traumatic social pain that is not a need to be satisfied but the very substance of subjectivity and sociality.

    The other is our pain, not our need… The other is what hurts in us, what resonates with our pain.

79. #79

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.142

    <span id="page-138-0"></span>Epilogue: No Salvation

    Theoretical move: The epilogue proposes "negative psychoanalysis" as a practice that refuses salvation, expertise, and positive consolation, remaining faithful to the negative insight that nothing can save us—a self-cancelling praxis that mirrors the constitutive rupture of the subject and the social bond itself.

    The painless unity with the other is impossible. The pain of the impossibility of this unity is the only possible and most genuine link with the other.

80. #80

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.148

    Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > Breast-Feeding and Freedom

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject's definition as free necessarily generates anxiety by including the Real within the Symbolic as a negation (the indestructible double), and that the proper response is not to interpret anxiety as demand but to sustain the object a as the unspeakable support of freedom—illustrated negatively by Frankenstein's reduction of the monster's desire to a demand.

    With the Kantian revolution, some have argued, this question was determined 'horizontally'; it was assumed that the rights of one individual were only curtailed by those of another. This made one subject the limit of his neighbor.

81. #81

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.108

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis corrects both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism by reinstating the superego as the hidden enunciator of the moral law, thereby restoring the division of the subject that Kant's erasure of the enunciating instance threatens to abolish—and exposing how the disavowal of this division underwrites the violence latent in utilitarian happiness-maximization.

    it is also responsible for some of the most violent aggressions against our neighbors

82. #82

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.125

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion (specifically fetishism) inverts the structure of fantasy: where the neurotic subject constitutes itself in relation to the object a as an externalized image of loss, the pervert positions himself as the object a in its real form, becoming the instrument of the Other's enjoyment rather than a desiring subject—and Clerambault's fetishistic photographs thereby expose, rather than obscure, the utilitarian fantasy's dependence on the supposition of an obscene Other jouissance.

    the useless pleasure of our neighbor, which enables, at the same time as it is neglected by, the fantasy.

83. #83

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.102

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis fundamentally opposes utilitarianism's ethics by grounding moral law not in reciprocity and shared pleasure but in the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its inaccessible Thing—demonstrating that repressed desire is the cause, not the consequence, of the law, and that true freedom consists in acting contrary to self-interest, even unto death.

    it is filled out with a shocking, a scandalous, image-that of a malign, noxious neighbor who will spare us no cruelty in the accrual of its own pleasure.

84. #84

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.109

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

    Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

    the failed-and forbidden-relation of the individual subject to its terrifying, superegoic Other-its Neighbor

85. #85

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Corpus Christi*

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological move that displaces propositional truth (orthodoxy) in favour of transformative, relational truth (orthopraxis), arguing that the encounter with God occurs in and through the body of the neighbour—a claim enacted liturgically through parable, Sufi poetry, and Holocaust testimony, all of which converge on the Lacanian-resonant dissolution of a self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter.

    Tonight we wish to reflect upon how to offer our bodies to one another as Christ offers his body for us.

86. #86

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prosperity*

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

    reads our tradition with an eye towards one's neighbour, offering love, liberation and healing to the other

87. #87

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Being evangelized*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine theological dialogue requires a posture of receptive powerlessness rather than monological self-assertion, reframing Christian mission as a mutual transformation in which the missionary is evangelized by the Other rather than simply transmitting God to the unreached.

    treating everyone we meet as individuals who we can learn from and perhaps teach, rather than reducing people to the same massive and clumsy categories

88. #88

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Infinite readings and transfinite readings*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that biblical interpretation is bounded by a "transfinite" rather than infinite range of legitimate readings, and that this hermeneutics must be governed by a "prejudice of love" oriented toward the singular other — a "double hermeneutic" that reads both tradition and the encountered situation, and which may demand the paradoxical abandonment of one's tradition in order to remain faithful to it.

    The slave was experienced as one to whom we were obliged; their suffering impinged upon us, requiring that the existing interpretations of the law be reinterpreted for the sake of justice.

89. #89

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Service description*

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-liturgical argument that genuine faith requires dwelling in radical uncertainty (Holy Saturday) rather than instrumentalizing God for existential security — faith forged in the void of divine absence transcends reward/punishment logic, enacting a form of desire that is unconditional and non-transactional.

    Our beloved is absent to everyone in the room but we are the only one who feels it.

90. #90

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Letting go*

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a theological argument that authentic Christian practice requires ego-dissolution rather than correct belief or moral effort, drawing on Eckhart's mystical kenosis to argue that the subject must empty itself so that divine love can flow through it — positioning self-surrender as the condition of possibility for ethical transformation.

    Not an inauthentic love which only embraces those who embrace us, but the love that emanates from our beloved, the love that would embrace our enemies

91. #91

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.210

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

    Being-neighbor in this sense does not imply resemblance, familiarity, or likeness, but rather a kind of shared resoluteness sustained, in large measure, by certain kinds of linguistic and social practices.

92. #92

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.207

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

    Theoretical move: Post-Lacanian ethics, drawing on the Real dimension of the other, mounts a structural critique of multiculturalism: far from respecting genuine difference, multiculturalism tolerates only a domesticated version of the other, thereby serving the logic of global capitalism and repeating a colonial imperative to assimilate.

    It serves as yet another convenient means of keeping the neighbor at a tolerable distance, of defending against the other's jouissance by placing the other within the relatively superficial network of 'compassionate' relationality.

93. #93

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.190

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Narcissism as an Ethical Failure*

    Theoretical move: Narcissistic desire constitutes an ethical failure precisely because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, which Lacanian ethics requires one to confront as the Real dimension of the other — including its traumatic jouissance — rather than reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness.

    Lacanian ethics moves from the other as a reassuring 'face' (or 'neighbor') to the much more difficult matter of the other as uncompromisingly 'other'

94. #94

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.253

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Conclusion: The Other as Face*

    Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical apparatus of the chapter's argument about the neighbor/Other, drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Badiou to negotiate the tension between singularity, universality, and the traumatic jouissance of the Other as the ethical crux of love and politics.

    My neighbor possesses all the evil Freud speaks about, but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself, is necessarily to move toward some cruelty.

95. #95

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

    Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible

96. #96

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.213

    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.

    When justice prevails, everyone is equally my neighbor so that my 'actual' neighbor is no more important to me than my 'universal' neighbor.

97. #97

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.220

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Victim vs. the Immortal*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the universalist rhetoric of Badiou and Žižek fails on its own terms: by privileging a disembodied "immortal subject" over the material realities of social victimization, it covertly re-instates a hierarchy of humanness that blames the victimized for their condition, thereby enacting the very hegemonic power it purports to oppose.

    I understand the connection between Saint Paul and God's 'universal' command to love one's neighbor, but this hardly justifies the valorization of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the linchpin of universalist ethics.

98. #98

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.244

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

    Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

    if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone)

99. #99

    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.

    One of the dangers of the post-Lacanian insistence on the 'monstrous' aspects of the other is that it can eclipse the realization that, ultimately, we have a great deal in common with each other

100. #100

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.201

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     when Lacan revisited Freud's famous critique of the Judeo-Christian injunction to 'love thy neighbor,' he stressed that the neighbor, the Nebenmensch, is 'by its very nature alien, Fremde'

101. #101

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.204

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Other as "Evil"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly Lacanian ethics requires risking one's symbolic and imaginary supports to endure the other's singular, potentially "evil" jouissance — a demand that goes beyond inter-subjective empathy or moral prudence, and that finds partial (but insufficient) precedent in Levinas's notion of the face as absolute singularity.

     'Every time that Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one's neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor'

102. #102

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: Copjec inverts Ferguson's reading by arguing that utilitarianism does not flee *toward* the sublime but rather *from* the superego's obscene law; the utilitarian erasure of interior lack and repressed desire produces claustrophobia, decays the symbolic/auratic relation, and necessarily generates a fantasmatic colonial Other (the veiled subject) as its symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the jouissance it structurally denies.

     the failed—and forbidden—relation of the individual subject to its terrifying, superegoic Other—its Neighbor.

103. #103

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: By tracing French psychiatry's concept of mental automatism through the mind/machine boundary problem, Copjec argues that the structural gap in utilitarian self-definition reveals why the psychoanalytic ethics of the Superego and the Lost Object—premised on non-reciprocal, unconditional prohibition—must replace the utilitarian model of reciprocity, pleasure-reward, and intersubjective exchange as the foundation of moral law.

     Confronted with utilitarianism's moral command 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,' Freud reacts with undisguised and unabashed incomprehension … This neighbor, Freud tells us, is our superego.

104. #104

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

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis radicalizes Kant's ethical subject by insisting that the moral law is always enunciated by a superegoic Other whose sadistic enjoyment is concealed when the marks of enunciation are erased; restoring this division of the subject is itself an ethical necessity, and its disavowal generates the violent aggressions disguised as utilitarian benevolence.

     The principle of the maximization of happiness on which the ethics of utilitarianism is based is a product of this disavowal; it is also responsible for some of the most violent aggressions against our neighbors.

105. #105

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.

     This must not be interpreted in a psychologistic sense as an instance of empathy or compassion for one's neighbor… this Moroccan neighbor is a structural supposition, not a reasonable or compassionate presumption.

106. #106

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.132

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The end of religion as its beginning

     Theoretical move: Christianity's internal self-critique is constitutive of authentic faith: the passage argues that true fidelity to Christianity requires betraying its institutional/systematic form, such that Christianity is structurally "ir/religious" — a religion that negates itself as religion, making the authentic believer a "non-Christian in the Christian sense."

     Christianity operates within all worldviews, at least in those places where people's lives reflect love, hope, and passionate commitment to one's neighbor.

107. #107

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <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 argues that the "Word of God" is not a textual object but an incarnated act: meaning is constituted only in its performance by a subject, not in its propositional affirmation. This logic is then extended in a parabolic reversal where the oppressed become the living Word directed at the powerful, inverting the usual subject/addressee of ethical command.

     the words *love your neighbor* should not be thought of as sacred or divine. These words are no more than words. They take on a revelatory role only when they are lived

108. #108

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.14

     <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 performs a theological-ethical pivot: by collapsing the distinction between Christ and his corporate body (the Church), it makes the community of believers the site where Christ is either manifested or distorted; then, through a parable, it argues that embodied acts of love and solidarity *are* the translation of the Word—that is, that ethical praxis precedes and exceeds textual transmission as a mode of signification.

     she gathered up what she had raised and spent it on food for the hungry, material to help rebuild lost homes, and basic provisions for the dispossessed.

109. #109

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.24

     <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.

     Each stranger was, to the priest, a neighbor in need and thus the incoming of Christ.

110. #110

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.98

     <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 develops a theological argument that the ethical demand of God is immanent to worldly acts of love and solidarity with the suffering—not transcendent authority—and then enacts this via the parable of Judas, whose betrayal is reframed as a destined, self-sacrificial mission necessary for redemption, inverting the usual moral condemnation of the act.

     a love that embraces the stranger, the outsider, the enemy

111. #111

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.29

     <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 advances two interlocking theoretical moves: first, it articulates an "impossible hospitality" as an unconditional gift that structurally exceeds every conditional exchange, using the figure of the welcomed demon to mark the limit-point of the ethical; second, it re-reads the parable of the Pearl of Great Price to argue that the object's "true value" is only accessible through a renunciation of value-logic itself — i.e., desire must give up its attachment to the object's exchange-value in order to encounter the object as such.

     we may come to realize that it was not really a demon at all, but just a broken, damaged person like ourselves.

112. #112

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.97

     <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 deploys a parable to argue that authentic faith requires active defiance of divine command when that command contradicts the ethical demand already inscribed in the Other's face — staging the paradox that fidelity to God is achieved through disobedience to God, and that lukewarm compliance is the real heresy.

     You have already written that I must protect him at all costs. Your words of love have been spelled out by the lines of this man's face.

113. #113

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.143

     <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 argues that the divine logic of the kingdom of God inverts worldly power structures: God is encountered not at the apex of a celestial hierarchy but in weakness and lowliness (the Incarnation, the hungry stranger, the imprisoned), and this paradoxical powerlessness constitutes a revolutionary force more potent than worldly strength. A retelling of the Prodigal Son is introduced as a narrative vehicle for this theological inversion.

     not in the well dressed and the well fed, but in the outstretched hand of a hungry stranger, in the naked flesh of a tortured body, in the figure of the thirsty, the homeless, the imprisoned

114. #114

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.312

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_31_the_ethical_mobius_strip.xhtml_IDX-326"></span>The Ethical <span id="scholium_31_the_ethical_mobius_strip.xhtml_IDX-606"></span>Möbius Strip

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip structure of the ethical-political—where opposites coincide such that following either liberal humanism or emancipatory engagement to its conclusion reverses into the other—reveals that contemporary ideology presents oppressive unfreedom as freedom and destruction as remedy, making the Heydrich example the paradigm case where "universal" ethical action requires overcoming immediate compassion toward the neighbor.

     Was it a simple half-automatic reaction of human compassion, of helping a neighbor in distress no matter who he or she (or ze, as we will soon be forced to add) is?

115. #115

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.115

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**The Freudian Thing**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's object (a) is a direct theoretical translation of Freud's *das Ding*: by rendering Freudian neurons as signifiers and facilitations as signifying links, Lacan shows that the Thing is what remains isolated from the signifying chain yet is circled by it — the unsignifiable kernel within the Other that constitutes the subject as a defense against it, and whose differing primal affects (disgust vs. being-overwhelmed) provide structural diagnostic criteria distinguishing hysteria from obsession.

     Freud extends his description to the other: the fellow human being, fellow creature, or neighbor (Nebenmensch) who first cares for the infant in its helpless state.

116. #116

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.346

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

     The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: we behave as if we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrement, and so on—a minimum of idealization, of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis of our coexistence.

117. #117

     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 way this disgust arises... as a displacement from another traumatic experience... in our hatred of the racial Other we aggressively 'act out' and cover up our social impotence

118. #118

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.115

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Odradek as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Levinas and Adorno fail to account for the truly "inhuman" dimension of subjectivity—exemplified by the Muselmann—which cannot be subsumed under any ethical or normative frame; Žižek uses Agamben's Muselmann, the L Schema, and Kafka's Odradek to articulate a "neighbor" as monstrous, impenetrable Thing that exceeds Levinasian face-ethics and demands a radically different conceptualization of the human/inhuman boundary.

     what about bringing together Levinas's face and the topic of the 'neighbor' in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous, impenetrable Thing that is the Nebenmensch, the Thing that hystericizes and provokes me?

119. #119

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.72

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Bobby Peru scene from Lynch's *Wild at Heart* as a pivot to theorize the structure of the empty gesture, desire vs. want, and the "wild analyst" figure, then extends the analysis through Heidegger's reading of Trakl to argue that sexual difference is not between two sexes but between the asexual and the sexual — with the discordant *Geschlecht* being irreducibly feminine, not neutral — making the presexual "undead boy" a figure of Evil and the Real of antagonism.

     What if Bobby Peru, in his (mis)treatment of Dern, provides an exemplary case of practicing the love of one's neighbor, of what Christians call the 'work of love'?

120. #120

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.50

     **Natural Consciousness (Hegel)**

     Theoretical move: The passage develops three interlocking theoretical moves: (1) Natural Consciousness as the unreflective, common-sense baseline of the Hegelian dialectic; (2) Negation as productive/determinate — preserving what it cancels and driving Spirit forward through Aufhebung; and (3) the Neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the site where the Other's jouissance threatens the subject, and where true universality is recast as a universality of alienated, inhuman strangers rather than humanist commonality.

     Key here is the concept of the neighbor, of how the other as neighbor...is fundamentally different, that this real difference is itself inhuman, and that our only solution to such difference is the true universality of alienation, of indifference–which is our own inhumanity.

121. #121

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.86

     **Transference** > **Unconscious**

     Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-layered theoretical account of the Unconscious by moving from Freud's topographical and economic descriptions (timelessness, exemption from contradiction, primary process) through Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as structured by and dependent on the Other/language, to contemporary arguments (McGowan, Zupančič) that the unconscious is the site of ontological negativity, genuine freedom, and desire that exceeds conscious will.

     Most likely, however, I use the banal comment as a way of navigating the trauma of the encounter with the neighbor. I say something meaningless rather than reveal that I have nothing to say in the confrontation with the alienating force of the neighbor's subjectivity.

122. #122

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek and Derrida converge on the ethical injunction to love the "real" neighbor (the refugee as monstrous, anxiety-producing other), while Žižek's Marxist critique surpasses liberal-deconstructive approaches by insisting that capitalism's malfunctions (including refugee crises) are structurally necessary rather than accidental disturbances amenable to cosmetic reform.

     Both would agree that the injunction 'Love thy neighbor' is about loving the real neighbor, not the decaffeinated other of liberal multiculturalism.

123. #123

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

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

     Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.

     Slavoj Žižek, 'Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.'

124. #124

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

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     he cuts through the fantasy image of a 'friendly neighbor' who can simply be integrated into an autoimmune Europe

125. #125

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.187

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     the neighbor 'remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes.'

126. #126

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's position on the refugee crisis is best understood not as Eurocentric conditional hospitality but as a resistance to the "double blackmail" of pure heterophilia vs. pure heterophobia, and that Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics of alterity actually converges with Derrida's own deconstruction of pure alterity as ideological fantasy—though Žižek misses this convergence by lumping Derrida with Levinas.

     Against widespread European "'autoimmune' responses" to the threat of racial and racialized refugees, Žižek turns to the biblical injunction "Love thy neighbor."

127. #127

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.196

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

     Theoretical move: The passage defends Žižek's concept of "Zionist anti-Semitism" against Chaouat's critique by arguing that it is Chaouat who performs an ideological splitting, and that Žižek's position is grounded not in anti-Semitism but in a universalist commitment to égaliberté — the claim that anti-Zionist Jews are themselves victimized by recycled anti-Semitic topoi.

     De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

128. #128

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Zalloua](#contents.xhtml_ch8a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "dislocation" — the radical re-contextualization of an element into a new symbolic space that confers an entirely new meaning — is the key dialectical concept that corrects misreadings of Hegelian Sublation: in genuine dialectical passage, Universality itself is dislocated and a predicate becomes a new Subject, so that no single overarching Substance persists through history.

     the injunction 'Love thy neighbor' is about loving the real neighbor, not the decaffeinated other of liberal multiculturalism.

129. #129

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.223

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     Žižek resorts to a Christian ethics of neighborliness as what is capable of suspending the disavowal of monstrosity in the subject.

130. #130

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Žižek's account of sexuation, arguing that while sexual difference names the incompleteness/trauma constitutive of the subject, Žižek's formalism fails to theorize the body as the extimate site where the signifier's cut produces a split—a gap Butler exploits via social constructivism and which Tomsič's account of the signifier as bodily cut helps to address. The central theoretical pivot is whether the antinomies of sexuation, as the Real of the subject's incompleteness, can ground emancipatory politics without presupposing a binary heterosexual structure.

     Žižek's resort to Christian theology and to love of the neighbor does not provide us with a sustained engagement with the question of how the problem of sexuation relates to the real abstractions of capitalist society.

131. #131

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Israeli refuseniks' refusal to treat Palestinians as racialized others constitutes a genuine ethical act that de-racializes Palestinians (transforming them from homines sacri into neighbors), exposes the lack in the Symbolic order of Zionism, and embodies a universalist "part of no-part" position that decompletes Zionist ideology—against both liberal humanist inclusion and nationalist organicism.

     What the refuseniks have achieved is the passage from Homo sacer to 'neighbour': they treat Palestinians not as 'equal full citizens,' but as neighbours in the strict Judeo-Christian sense.

132. #132

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.190

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Racializing the Palestinian Other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Levinas's ethics of the face substantializes the Other in a way that, when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, ideologically neutralizes concrete racialized suffering; Žižek's counter-move is to insist that true emancipatory ethics must pass through "objective violence" and structural analysis, suspending the dyadic face-to-face encounter in favor of attending to the other's others.

     The other is the neighbor [prochain], who is not necessarily my kin [proche] but who may be. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor, or treats him unjustly, what can you do?

133. #133

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

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

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

     'What if the ultimate function of the Law is not to […] retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?'

134. #134

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.201

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: By threading Derrida's concept of autoimmunity through Žižek's critique of the refugee crisis, the passage argues that genuine political engagement requires acknowledging the constitutive non-coincidence of the self (autoimmunity), which simultaneously grounds the impossibility of pure identity/community and enables the global class solidarity that must replace both liberal humanitarianism and right-wing nativism.

     "Love thy neighbor" means acknowledging the radical alterity of the neighbor, the refugee's singular form of jouissance, accepting that "most of the refugees are not 'people like us.'"

135. #135

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.93

     [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.

     We must take refuge in the ethical treatment of the other in order to avoid political violence toward this other.