Nonsense

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (41)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.12

   **The Satisfaction Understanding Brings**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that understanding in psychoanalysis primarily satisfies the ego rather than the unconscious, and that the unconscious is better gratified by nonsense, puns, and condensations than by logically well-formed statements — making ego-satisfying understanding a clinical danger that short-circuits treatment.

   The unconscious seems to delight far more in nonsense than in sense, to rejoice in enigmas, rebuses, and condensations rather than in comprehensible propositions.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.29

   **The Symbolic Is Centered on Nonmeaning and Nonsense**

   Theoretical move: Operating in the symbolic register means attending to the letter of the analysand's discourse rather than filtering speech through imaginary, me-centered understanding; this distinction—between hearing what is actually said (including nonsense and ambiguity) versus grasping pragmatic meaning-for-us—is the clinical foundation of free-floating attention and the analyst's capacity to catch material that would otherwise slip by.

   We are trained all our lives to find meaning in what people say, to fill in the gaps in what people say and find meaning when there is really none or only nonsense to be found (from a strictly semantic or syntactic standpoint)

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.33

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the clinical aim is not understanding but exhaustive articulation: affects must be spoken in all their variations, incomplete utterances (aposiopesis) must be completed, and verbal compromise formations must be heard and unpacked — all of which reveals meaning as overdetermined, multilayered, and never fully masterable.

   one cannot even begin to unpack a piece of 'nonsense' like this unless one first hears it and notices that there is something out of joint in the formulation

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.43

   **Notes**

   Theoretical move: These endnotes elaborate several key Lacanian theoretical pivots: the primacy of symbolization over conscious realization in symptom resolution, the shift from intersubjectivity to méconnaissance and nonsense as the telos of language, the structural independence of signifier from signified, the irrelevance of speaker-confirmation in interpretation due to split subjectivity, the analyst's resistance as the true locus of analytic resistance, and jouissance as a pain-pleasure satisfaction structurally tied to symptoms.

   He turned his focus away from meaning-making to what is nonsensical in the analysand's speech (see, for example, Lacan, 1978, where nonsense or nonmeaning is discussed at considerable length)

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.131

   **The Limits of Meaning**

   Theoretical move: Interpretation in psychoanalysis aims not at producing meaning but at reducing signifiers to their nonsensicality, as demonstrated by the Rat Man case where symptomatic formations are generated by letter-based (non-semantic) relations among signifiers—it is the signifier itself, not meaning, that subjugates the subject.

   Interpretation aims not so much at meaning as at reducing signifiers to their nonsensicality [or: nonmeaning] so that we can locate the determinants of all of the subject's behavior.

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.273

   **Two-person psychology.** > **Four-person (or more).** > CRITIQUE

   Theoretical move: This is an index (back-matter) chunk from Bruce Fink's *Against Understanding*, listing key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as theoretical prose but its entries map the deployment of canonical Lacanian concepts throughout the book.

   symbolic dimension: centered on nonmeaning and nonsense [11–16, 20–1]

7. #07

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_198"></span>**Suggestion**

   Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion/hypnosis by arguing that psychoanalysis operates precisely where suggestion fails: by maintaining the distance between identification (I/ego-ideal) and objet petit a, rather than collapsing them as hypnosis does, and by directing the treatment rather than the patient, embracing nonsense over signification, and holding the analyst's knowledge as merely presumed rather than real.

   the analyst orientates his interpretations around meaning (sens) and its correlate, nonsense. Thus whereas in psychotherapy there is an attempt to avoid the ambiguity and equivocation of discourse, it is precisely this ambiguity which psychoanalysis thrives on.

8. #08

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_95"></span>**interpretation**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's renewed theory of interpretation displaces the classical model (which unmasks hidden meaning via symbolism/decoding) in favour of a technique that disrupts meaning altogether, reducing signifiers to non-sense so that irreducible, determinant signifiers emerge — thereby inverting the signifier/signified relation and returning the analysand's message to him in its true, inverted form.

   interpretation causes 'irreducible signifiers' to arise, which are 'non-sensical' (S11, 250)

9. #09

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_185"></span>**Signification**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'signification' undergoes a trajectory from a vague association with meaningfulness to a precise, imaginary-order process in which the play of signifiers produces the illusion of the signified through metonymy and metaphor, with the bar in the Saussurean algorithm marking not a bond but a rupture—a theoretical move that radically inverts Saussure's stable sign relation.

   Psychoanalytic interpretations go against signification and bear on meaning and its correlate, non-meaning (non-sens).

10. #10

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

    <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses hauntology as the organising framework to read a cluster of experimental/electronic artists (Richter, Position Normal, Mordant Music, John Foxx) as staging temporal dislocation, entropic memory, and a ghostly relation to lost modernist futures, arguing that sound-recording, photography, and Surrealism share an inherently hauntological dimension that these artists collectively exploit.

    Position Normal can be fitted into the venerable English tradition of Nonsense.

11. #11

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.231

    **12**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis works not by destroying the ego but by attuning consciousness to the Symbolic rather than the Imaginary register, such that the truth of the unconscious is revealed not as profound meaning but as opaque, material, contingent nonsense—an anti-hermeneutical conclusion where analytic endings are reductions to absurdity rather than arrivals at depth, grounded in the pure materiality of the signifier.

    such analytic ends are reductions to the absurd, to the subjective destitution entailed by running up against the contingent, factical nonsense underpinning the (apparent) sense of oneself and one's universe

12. #12

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.154

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > /. *Critique of an Organicist Theory of Madness, Henri Ey's Organo-Dynamism* > *2. The Essential Causality of Madness*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that madness must be understood as a phenomenon of meaning and signification—not organic deficit or error—by grounding its essential causality in the structure of language, misrecognition, and the subject's relation to truth, thereby positioning psychoanalytic psychopathology as irreducibly tied to the problem of language for man.

    one could concretely define psychology as the domain of nonsense [I'insense], in other words, of everything that forms a knot in discourse—as is clearly indicated by the 'words' of passion.

13. #13

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.243

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language—that symptoms, dreams, jokes, and slips are all linguistic phenomena governed by the same rhetorical operations (condensation/metaphor, displacement/metonymy)—and that psychoanalytic experience must be re-grounded in the primacy of the signifier and symbolic exchange, against the post-Freudian drift toward adaptive/communicational models.

    the passwords that give them their salutary nonmeaning... language's creative activity unveils its absolute gratuitousness, in which its domination of reality is expressed in the challenge of nonmeaning

14. #14

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.496

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 557 *IK Schreber's Way*

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys the I Schema (as a distortion of the R Schema) to map the final state of Schreber's psychosis, arguing that psychosis reveals—rather than obscures—the structural efficiency of the signifier's alienating impact on the imaginary; and concludes that madness is not an accident but the constitutive limit of man's being as a speaking subject.

    'Aller Unsinn hebt sich auf!' 'All nonsense cancels itself out!'

15. #15

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.676

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > SCHEMA I

    Theoretical move: Through a reading of the Schema I graph applied to Sade's work, Lacan demonstrates that the Kantian moral will and Sadean will-to-jouissance are structurally identical: both produce the barred subject ($) through alienation, both operate across the between-two-deaths, and the moral law itself represents desire in the case where the object (rather than the subject) is missing—thereby grounding a rapprochement between Law and desire via the objet petit a as cause.

    the subject—alone remaining present, in the form of the voice within, speaking nonsensically most of the time

16. #16

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.732

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > Position of the Unconscious ⁸²⁹

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of the subject's constitution through two dialectical operations—alienation (vel of meaning) and separation (intersection/splitting)—culminating in the myth of the lamella as a symbolic articulation of libido as an organ tied to the loss produced by sexuation and death, while also grounding the unconscious in the Other's field rather than in subjective consciousness.

    the nonmeaning produced by his change into a signifier will encroach on this field (of meaning). This nonmeaning clearly falls within the Other's field, although it is produced as an eclipse of the subject.

17. #17

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.11

    http://www.lacaninireland.com

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is irreducible to the sign and to meaning, and that language's attempt to account for itself necessarily produces a loss that cannot be recuperated—a "non-sense" that is the face the signifier presents to the signified side; against Hegelian dialectics and developmental psychology (Piaget), this loss grounds the subject's relation to the signifier and is the proper pivot of analytic praxis.

    what is explored is not the ocean, the infinite sea of meanings, it is what happens in the very measure that it reveals to us this barrier of 'non-sense'. Which does not mean without meaning, which is the face of refusal that sense presents on the side of the signifier.

18. #18

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.22

    All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility of metalanguage (demonstrated through Russell's own reductio) grounds the irreducibly precarious position of the subject in language, and that this same impossibility produces the structural incommunicability of psychoanalytic experience—communicable only through non-sense rather than master-words or codified sense.

    I called, which I evoked, which I highlighted the last time under the term of *non-sense*, as being the icy face, the sheer one, where there is marked this limit between the effect of the signifier and what returns to it by reflection of signified facts

19. #19

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.23

    All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Russell's *Principia Mathematica* and the theory of metalanguages as a foil to assert the foundational thesis that there is no metalanguage—every logical or structural discourse presupposes the primary use of language—and situates this thesis as the precondition for psychoanalytic practice, positioning the analyst not as a subject supposed to know but as one who risks themselves at the place of the subject's lack.

    The maintaining of nonsense as signifier of the presence of the subject, the Socratic atopia, is essential for this very search.

20. #20

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.11

    http://www.lacaninireland.com

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier's essential function is to represent the subject for another signifier, not to produce meaning through a signifier/signified relation alone; and that "non-sense" (the face sense presents on the side of the signifier) is the operative barrier that psychoanalytic experience explores, distinguishing this from any philosophical or developmental-psychological recuperation of loss through meaning.

    the face it presents on the side of the signified, is properly what is not 'unmeaning', non-signifiant, but 'meaningless'... it is not possible to properly punctuate what is involved in our analytic experience, except by seeing that what is explored is not the ocean, the infinite sea of meanings, it is what happens in the very measure that it reveals to us this barrier of 'non-sense'.

21. #21

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.158

    A month later: > Lalangue

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

    Even with pure nonsense poetry, it is very difficult not to see sense in it… proving that nonsense makes more sense than normal sense; it is far from absent; rather, there is too much of it.

22. #22

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.151

    A month later: > Lalangue

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.

    The nonsense emerges from contingent sound encounters, and with it another sense, which can manifest itself only for a moment because of that co-sonance, through the momentary resounding, then it is gone.

23. #23

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.52

    chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

    Theoretical move: Against Derrida's phonocentric thesis, Dolar demonstrates that metaphysics harbors a counter-tradition in which the voice—specifically the voice unmoored from logos/text—is figured as dangerous, seductive, and ruinous, establishing a persistent dichotomy of voice and logos that runs from ancient Chinese precepts through Plato and Augustine, and which Lacan inherits rather than invents.

    as soon as it departs from its textual anchorage, the voice becomes senseless and threatening—all the more so because of its seductive and intoxicating powers

24. #24

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.81

    The voice and the drive

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as objet petit a, occupies the paradoxical topological intersection of language and the body that belongs to neither, and that this position is what makes the voice the object of the drive rather than of desire — the drive's "aim" (the voice as by-product) is satisfied on the way to the "goal" (meaning), precisely because the voice is a non-dialectical, aphonic remainder that resists signification.

    where the 'nonsense' of dreams lays bare the signifying mechanism.

25. #25

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.17

    The Similar and the Dissimilar > Unlikely Couples

    Theoretical move: Comedy's defining structure is the conjunction of disparate elements in an unexpected, non-normalized way; this immediacy makes comedy resistant to reflection, universal theorization, and temporal translation, yet that same structure (unlikely connection) constitutes the universal formal condition for the comic effect.

    G. W. F. Hegel contends, for example, that comedy emerges with the conjunction of nonsense and self-assurance.

26. #26

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.41

    Lack and Excess > Not Enough Signifiers in the World

    Theoretical move: The structural absence of a final signifier in language produces not resignation but an excess of signifiers and meanings; lack and excess are thus revealed as strictly co-extensive, and the pun is theorised as the primordial comedic form precisely because it renders this coincidence visible.

    The pun shows that words can have opposed significations and nonetheless remain comprehensible. The pun unites the lack of an unambiguous meaning of a word with its excess of meanings.

27. #27

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.43

    Lack and Excess > Living with Contradiction

    Theoretical move: Russell's paradox is not merely a logical curiosity but the structural condition of comedy itself: because the signifying order necessarily harbours an irresolvable contradiction (lack), it generates an excess of compensatory signifiers, and it is precisely this coincidence of lack and excess that produces comic effects.

    No amount of logical computation or deduction can eliminate this point where there is no sense.

28. #28

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.49

    Lack and Excess > A Trip to the Grocery and the Golf Course

    Theoretical move: Comedy is theorized as the structural moment in which lack and excess are revealed to be identical — a coincidence ordinarily repressed by signifying social existence; the joke functions as the return of this repressed identity, making visible the contradiction that defines the subject of the signifier.

    this misinterpretation on the part of the boys was not completely nonsensical

29. #29

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.61

    Theory and Opposition > The Preference for Tragedy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy has been theoretically neglected—not because it resists theorization per se, but because thinkers have been wary of developing comic theory at length—and that the three dominant modern theories (Bergson, Freud, Zupančič) converge on a "short-circuit" logic (coincidence of lack and excess) that the author identifies as the proper foundation for a theory of comedy.

    Comedy appears to slip through the theoretical grasp just as it escapes from the clutches of everyday life.

30. #30

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.113

    Philosophy and the Finite > Trying to Laugh at Existentialism

    Theoretical move: Comedy requires the intersection of finitude and transcendence: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are comic philosophers because they retain a form of transcendence (God/Übermensch) alongside their critique of finitude, while Sartre and Camus, by confining the subject entirely to finitude and rejecting any avenue toward the infinite, structurally preclude comedy from their philosophies.

    We often think of comedy as absurdity. We laugh at what is nonsensical. But the relationship that existentialist philosophers have to comedy reveals that absurdity itself is not funny.

31. #31

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.126

    Signification and Desire > From Needs to Desires

    Theoretical move: Language transforms biological need into insatiable desire through the mediation of the signifier, introducing a foundational alienation; this structural excess over meaning is the ontological ground of comedy, wherein the signifier's capacity to produce nonsense reveals that its structure exceeds its capacity for sense.

    the humor for the boy was rooted in the signifier itself and its capacity for producing nonsense at the precise point where we expect sense

32. #32

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.138

    Signification and Desire > Linguistic Maladaptation

    Theoretical move: Language is constitutively comic because it is both lacking (it cannot fully describe the world) and excessive (it performatively over-compensates for that lack); the comic effect emerges precisely at the point where sense meets the nonsense intrinsic to signification, so comedy is not incidental to language but reveals its essential structure.

    Subjects enjoy the moment when sense meets the nonsense of signification, the point where the form of the signifier outstrips the content.

33. #33

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.198

    Notes > Chapter 1

    Theoretical move: These endnotes to Chapter 1 elaborate the theoretical architecture of the main text: desire perpetuates rather than remedies incompleteness; the subject of the signifier is structurally distinct from the animal in its relation to excess and jouissance; contemporary capitalism commands enjoyment while punishing its excess; and the signifier's inherent excessiveness resists all attempts at logical or linguistic containment.

    Enjoyment is inseparable from inutility, even in the domain of signification.

34. #34

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.201

    Notes > Chapter 2

    Theoretical move: This notes section advances the theoretical argument that comedy structurally requires nonsense as the condition of all sense, that the big Other (rather than an embodied third party) is the invisible witness constitutive of every comic moment, and that comedy operates through form rather than content—using Kant, Bergson, Freud, Lacan, Badiou, and Zupančič as interlocutors.

    What he fails to see is that one understands comedy— and all other utterances not in spite of this kernel of nonsense but because of it. All sense must involve nonsense, and comedy simply brings this to the fore.

35. #35

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.211

    Notes > Chapter 5

    Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus for Chapter 5 does substantive theoretical work in three areas: (1) critiquing evolutionary reductions of comedy and language to advantage/sense; (2) elaborating the Lacanian thesis that the signifier murders the thing, making desire born from impossibility; and (3) developing the claim that the phallus is the singular Bedeutung of signification itself—not potency but imposture.

    his humor became more sophisticated but thankfully retained its connection to nonsense.

36. #36

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.38

    POWERS OF HORROR > CATHARSIS AND ANALYSIS

    Theoretical move: Kristeva uses the Lacanian linkage of abjection to the saintliness of the analyst as a pivot to genealogize 'catharsis' through Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Aristotelian poetic catharsis—unlike Platonic purification—works by immersion in and repetition of the abject rather than its elimination, and that this rhythm-based discourse of the body is the only viable analogue to analytic practice.

    It is a repetition through rhythm and song, therefore through what is not yet, or no longer is 'meaning,' but arranges, defers, differentiates and organizes, harmonizes pathos, bile, warmth, and enthusiasm.

37. #37

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.144

    POWERS OF HORROR > CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary style operates as a site of abjection that cannot be reduced to thematic content, biography, or politics: through rhythm, carnivalesque polyphony, and an apocalyptic style that hovers between disgust and laughter, Céline transforms the abject into a writing practice that both enacts and momentarily stabilizes the dissolution of the subject — his anti-Semitism being readable as a symptomatic counterweight (a delirium) against the very identity-dissolution that his scription unleashes.

    Not even the worship of Death . . . The three dots . . . Less than nothing, or more . . . Something else . . . The consuming of Everything, of Nothing, through style

38. #38

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.86

    POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT?

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that defilement rites function as a "scription without signs"—a translinguistic inscription of the archaic border between the semiotic (maternal authority) and the symbolic (paternal law), and that the ambivalent remainder in Brahmanism exposes a non-totalizing logic that challenges mono-logical symbolics by perpetually positing a non-object at once polluting and generative.

    nothing is exhaustive, there is a residue in every system... always posit a non-object as polluting as it is reviving—defilement and genesis.

39. #39

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.168

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that affects are irreducibly entangled with signifying systems (primal and secondary repression both involve displacement of affect), such that the discourse of the analyst produces a single affect—anxiety about one's status as object—by hystericizing the parlêtre, while lalangue names the pre-syntactic, libidinal substrate of language that persists into analytic free association and reveals the unconscious's private, nonsensical play with the mother tongue.

    Like the nonsense-murmuring infant, the unconscious plays with the mother tongue heedless of whether or not the products of this playful process 'make sense.'

40. #40

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.185

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the trauma of the Shoah forces theology through a dialectical succession of positions—from sovereign to finite to suffering God—and that only the theological frame can adequately register the scope of such catastrophe; this dialectic mirrors the Universal-Particular-Singular triad of Christian confessions (Orthodoxy-Catholicism-Protestantism), culminating in a Protestant God of arbitrary, Law-suspending cruelty whose dark underside is the necessary correlate of the excess of Christian love over Jewish Law.

    after all common measure between shoah and its meaning breaks down: (3) the divine mystery theory

41. #41

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.87

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

    pure, unconditional Meaning can appear (and it has to appear) only as nonsense. The content of pure Meaning can only be negative: the Void, the absence of Meaning.