Not-all

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (227)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.42

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is not located beyond causal determination but emerges precisely within it, at the point where the causal chain fails to close on itself—a "crack in the Other"—and that this structure mirrors Lacan's move of introducing the subject as correlative to the lack in the Other, making guilt (not moral conscience) the paradoxical mode of the subject's participation in freedom.

   The 'I' is the element of language that disables the battery of signifiers, makes it 'in-complete' [pas-toute]

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.77

   From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > The 'stonny ocean' of illusion

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's transcendental dialectic (the 'logic of illusion') structurally anticipates a Lacanian conception of truth and illusion: truth is not correspondence to an external object but conformity of knowledge with itself (a formal criterion), while dialectical illusion is not a false representation of a real object but an 'object in the place of the lack of an object' — a structure that aligns Kantian transcendental illusion with the Lacanian concept of le semblant.

   truth has, as Lacan insists, the structure of fiction, and that it is 'not-whole' [pas-toute].

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.119

   The Act and Evil in Literature

   Theoretical move: The passage constructs two paradigmatic figures of ethical failure — the 'Sadeian' (infinite approach to the object of desire, part-by-part) and the 'Don Juanian' (overhasty pursuit, one-by-one) — as the two faces of Kant's theory of the act, using Lacan's reading of Zeno's paradox to show that both fail to close the gap between will and jouissance and thus enter the territory of 'diabolical evil'.

   'She', each one of them, is essentially One-less-than: That's why, in any relationship of man with a woman - she who is in question [en cause] - it is from the perspective of the One-less [Une-en-moins] that she must be taken up.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.135

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Molière's Don Juan as an embodiment of "diabolical evil" in the Kantian sense—not as transgression or atheism, but as a principled refusal to repent despite full knowledge of God's existence, which paradoxically hystericizes the big Other (Heaven) and exposes the breakdown of its authority, while also linking Don Juan's logic of conquest to Lacan's not-all (pas-toute).

   it perhaps becomes possible to link the effect of such numbers to what Lacan designates with the term pas-toute [the in-complete, the not-all]

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.145

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Don Juan's serial seduction is not about variety but about repetition compulsion aimed at extracting Woman-as-such beyond her symbolic roles — a structural impossibility (since 'Woman doesn't exist') whose failure produces the myth's composite shape and reveals that patriarchal society is itself a reaction-formation to the non-existence of Woman, not its cause.

   What Lacan aims at with this statement is even more so ... the dictum 'woman is not-all' is most unbearable not for women but for men, since it calls into question a portion of their own being, invested as it is in the symbolic roles of the woman.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.149

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural distinction between desire and the drive by reading Valmont (desire) against Don Juan (drive): Valmont perpetually defers satisfaction to maintain the gap of desire, while Don Juan attains satisfaction in each object yet is propelled by the irreducible hole constitutive of the drive itself, which Zupančič links to the not-all and objet petit a.

   Don Juan maintains this same gap by declaring these objects 'very satisfying', but 'not-all', pas-tout.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.159

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's attempt to supplement the moral law with voice and gaze transforms respect (an a priori, non-pathological feeling) into the superego's law, installing an absolute Other that forecloses the act and pacifies the subject by guaranteeing an inexhaustible lack on the subject's side—a shift that also governs the dialectic of the sublime across the three Critiques.

   the lack of which makes the Other 'not-whole'

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.267

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "realization of desire" operates through an infinite measure (the logic of negative magnitude and endless metonymy) that can only be articulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement, and she uses the parallel between Kant's postulates and Lacan's ethics to show that the Act (as in Antigone) dissolves the divided subject by transposing it wholly to the side of the object—thereby distinguishing desire from jouissance and opening onto a "modern" ethics adequate to a symbolic order in which the Other's non-existence is itself known.

   Antigone is whole or 'all' in her act; she is not 'divided' or 'barred.' This means that she passes over entirely to the side of the object.

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.270

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

   Theoretical move: Zupančič distinguishes two modes of "realizing desire" - Antigone's sublimation through which she becomes the phallic signifier of desire (the Φ), and Sygne de Coufontaine's drive-logic that short-circuits the infinite/finite opposition by sacrificing even the absolute condition itself, rendering the finite not-whole and making visible the Real of desire (the real residue of castration) rather than the Symbolic/Imaginary phallus.

   suspends the infinite as an exception, and thus renders the finite not-whole - that is, contaminates it with the infinite.

10. #10

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.107

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers > Woman as Symptom

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Greek misogyny was structurally bound to the archaic experience of the sacred as abyssal and terrifying: woman functioned as the privileged symptom of the unmastered Real—simultaneously origin of life and index of death—such that masculine heroic identity constituted itself precisely through the attempt to dominate and exclude the feminine as the embodiment of formless, unlimited, natural force.

    woman is herself not a bounded whole... the feminine is essentially tied to the false and deceitful, the crooked and perverse.

11. #11

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.204

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the two sides of the religious phenomenon—opening onto das Ding versus symptomatic defense—are gender-relative, mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation: the masculine logic of exception underwrites phallic jouissance and doctrinal/hierarchical religion, while the feminine logic of the non-all underwrites Other jouissance and a radical, kenotic Christianity; this allows a gendered re-reading of das Ding and a reinterpretation of divinity as unknowing, loving, and structurally aligned with the feminine.

    The feminine position, by contrast, asserts the totality of the universal without reference to the exception, but with the crucial proviso that the whole is internally incomplete, or non-all (pas-tout).

12. #12

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.172

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > Th e Two Forms of the Social Bond

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the social bond has two simultaneous logics derived from Lacanian sexuation: a foundational female logic of not-having (universalized exception, shared loss) that underlies every social order, and a male logic of exception/exclusion (friend/enemy distinction) that societies adopt to obscure the traumatic ground of collective sacrifice—with the former constituting the only real enjoyment of the social bond, and the latter generating mere pleasure through the illusion of having.

    the underlying logic of the not-all is the one that societies find themselves unable to avow.

13. #13

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.173

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > From Enjoyment to Pleasure

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social bond is constituted through the enjoyment of traumatic loss rather than through pleasure, and that every social project (war, monument-building, political identification) uses pleasure as an alibi for this foundational enjoyment—while the structure of the signifier itself generates paranoia about the Other's enjoyment, rendering utopian equality impossible.

    The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable.

14. #14

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.208

    I > Against Knowledge > Too Much Democracy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy must be reconceived not as a social good but as a lost object—a groundless, excessive enjoyment beyond the capitalist order—so that it can mobilize subjects through sacrifice of interest rather than through rational self-interest, reversing the domestication of democracy by capitalism and aligning it with psychoanalytic emancipation via enjoyment.

    an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole.

15. #15

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.283

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > What's Missing in *Th e Da Vinci Code*

    Theoretical move: The passage uses *The Da Vinci Code* as a cultural case study to map two symmetrical ideological failures—fundamentalism and positivism—both of which refuse to sustain the constitutive gap in signification (the missing binary signifier of the feminine), whereas psychoanalysis insists this gap is ontological and irreparable, underwriting the nonexistence of the sexual relationship and the subject's enjoyment.

    the woman enjoys unaccountably, the mother enjoys reproducing the social order through her children... the mother is fully there as a signifier — she is Woman as a present identity — rather than existing as an absence within the chain of signifiers.

16. #16

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.293

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Feminine Signifi er Isn't

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "missing signifier" of the feminine is not an external absence to be filled but an internal torsion within the signifying structure itself; authentic psychoanalytic politics consists not in expanding inclusion but in male subjects identifying with this internal void, thereby revealing that the divide between male and female subjectivity is a division within the subject rather than between subjects.

    Th e missing signifi er indicates the failure of any set to close itself as a whole.

17. #17

    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_181"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0205"></span>**sexual difference**

    Theoretical move: Sexual difference cannot be grounded in anatomy or biology but is constituted by a fundamental dissymmetry in the signifier: the phallus is the only sexual signifier with no feminine equivalent, so sexual positions (masculine/feminine) are symbolic constructions determined by one's relation to the phallus and formalised through the formulae of sexuation, with the result that no fully 'finished' sexual identity is achievable and the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

    The last formula illustrates the relationship of WOMAN to the logic of the not-all.

18. #18

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_ncx_214"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_page_0245"></span>***W***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the concept of "woman" across Freud and Lacan, arguing that Lacan's key move is to displace the question of femininity from a biological or universal essence to a structural position in the symbolic order defined by the logic of the not-all, feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, and woman as symptom of man.

    Lacan speaks of woman as 'not-all' (pas-toute; S20, 13); unlike masculinity, which is a universal function founded upon the phallic exception (castration), woman is a non-universal which admits of no exception.

19. #19

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

    Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Buddhist iconography (the Kanzeon/Avalokitesvara/Guanyin statues), Lacan argues that the object of desire (objet petit a) emerges precisely at the limit of the three stages (oral, anal, phallic-castration) as something radically separated off, and that castration's function in the object is illuminated by a culturally specific figure that appears as desire's object while remaining indeterminate with respect to sex—thus the mirror, as field of the Other, is the site where the place of the a first appears.

    the question of whether a statue of this ilk is male or female has never arisen for them

20. #20

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be grasped topologically—not as a mere metaphorical "hole in the real" but as constituted through the cut on a surface, whereby the fall of the objet petit a is structurally inseparable from the division of the subject; two-dimensional topology (rather than three-dimensional intuition) is proposed as the privileged formal apparatus for capturing the impossible structure of the subject.

    when it can no longer be true that the phallus is the attribute of all living beings

21. #21

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan, rereading Jones on female homosexuality, argues that the phallus functions as a signifier of loss at the level of jouissance, and that femininity is constituted precisely through the "unmarked" position — not-having the phallus — which raises the function of signifiance to its highest point and equates the word phallus with castration itself.

    if the woman keeps, retains, raised to a higher power what is given to her by not having the phallus, it is precisely by being able to make of this function of the phallus the perfect completion of what is at the heart of castration

22. #22

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.169

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual act is not a secret but an open cry of the unconscious, and develops this through the mathematical-logical structure of Objet petit a as the "golden number" — showing that in the sexual dyad, the difference (small o) cannot resolve into a dyad but rather loops back to produce o itself, thereby formalizing why a third term (the phallus/partial object) is always required and the sexual act structurally fails to unite the sexed subjects.

    Contraries and this is what gives rise to the logical question of whether, yes or no, the particular proposition implies existence … the universal proposition does not imply it!

23. #23

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.154

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

    Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act produces the divided subject ($) as its truth-effect, with the analyst serving as support for the objet petit a that causes this division; Lacan then pivots to argue that the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is itself grounded in — and displaced from — the objet petit a, making undecidability (Gödel-style incompleteness) a structural consequence of the subject's relation to the not-all, rather than a technical curiosity.

    sex is not an all (pas tout), for this is the discovery of psychoanalysis.

24. #24

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.158

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the not-all logic of the unconscious prevents any totalisation of psychoanalytic knowledge, and that the psychoanalyst's proper position is defined not by mastery-knowledge but by occupying the place of the objet petit a — cause of desire and object of demand — a position exemplified through the Gaze as the most occluded partial drive in clinical practice.

    If the not all that we put in the not all knowledge is conscious, represents the non-constitution of all knowledge, and this at the very level at which knowledge is required, it is not true that there necessarily exists unconscious knowledge that we can theorise in accordance with just any logical model.

25. #25

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's Begriffschrift to ground the logical function of "the all" (universal quantification) in the structure of the subject constituted by the lost object and repetition, arguing that the psychoanalytic myth of primal fusion with the mother (via Rank's birth trauma) is a symptomatic misrecognition of the subject's constitutive relation to the all, which is itself an effect of the o-object mediating between the original repressed signifier and its substitutive repetition.

    it is not true that for every man we can state that man is not wise... there are some who are not so

26. #26

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.126

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical distinction between universal and particular propositions—demonstrated through French/English linguistic examples and the Aristotelian square of opposition—to argue that the introduction of quantifiers reveals a fundamental structural asymmetry in the relation between universal and particular, which he frames as the key logical tool for psychoanalytic thinking about the subject.

    J'connais pas tout with pas tout together, would be the non-separability of negation... the result of this statement depended, for example, on the fact that we can group together the pas tout

27. #27

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of double negation and quantification theory to locate the divided subject—the gap between the stating subject and the subject of the statement—as the irreducible structural core of every universal proposition, thereby grounding logical form in a psychoanalytic (rather than ontological) subject.

    there is a man who does not rule out the woman... (the state of exception and no longer of contradiction)

28. #28

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's Begriffsschrift to formalize the logical function of "all" (the universal affirmative) and then pivots to argue that the lost object (objet petit a) occupies the structural position of Frege's "argument," grounding the subject's illusion of totality—while exposing the Rankian myth of primal fusion with the mother as a symptomatic misrecognition of this originary loss.

    to say in this way... we are saying that it is not true that for every man we can state that man is not wise. We obtain by these two negations, the manifestation of the particular universal.

29. #29

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.157

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "not-all" logic of quantification—applied to the proposition "not all knowledge is conscious"—does not entail the existence of a positive unconscious knowledge; instead, the analyst's proper position is determined by their identification with the objet petit a (as cause of desire and object of demand), and each register of this object (gaze, voice, breast, anal) carries an immunity to negation that grounds the psychoanalytic act.

    If the not all that we put in the not all knowledge is conscious, represents the non-constitution of all knowledge, and this at the very level at which knowledge is required, it is not true that there necessarily exists unconscious knowledge that we can theorise in accordance with just any logical model.

30. #30

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.131

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close logical analysis of double negation in quantification theory to argue that the universal affirmative is not a simple double-negative cancellation but rather the site where the split between the stating subject and the subject of the statement is constitutively installed—the "fissure" that formal logic tends to mask but which psychoanalysis must keep in view.

    there is a man who does not rule out the woman... (the state of exception and no longer of contradiction)

31. #31

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.154

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

    Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act constitutes the subject as divided ($) through the transference-function of objet petit a, and this structural division is analogous to the tragic schize between spectator/chorus and hero; furthermore, the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is grounded not in totality but in the cause effected by objet petit a, making undecidability an intrinsic feature of any subject-indexed logic.

    sex is not an all (pas tout), for this is the discovery of psychoanalysis.

32. #32

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.125

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of French and English negation ('pas tout' / 'anything') to motivate a transition from Aristotelian syllogistic (subalternation from universal to particular) to the logic of quantifiers, arguing that the latter—by expressing the universal affirmative through double negation ('there is no man who is not wise')—better captures the structural relationship between universal and particular that psychoanalytic theory of the subject requires.

    the mystery of the relations between the universal and the particular... what is involved in the mystery of the relations between the universal and the particular.

33. #33

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.100

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act forces a return to the foundational problem of logic — the status of the subject — and that his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier" re-opens what mathematical logic elides: the initiating positing of any signifier. Using Peirce's schema of the empty box, he demonstrates that the subject is constituted as nothing (no stroke), an effect of discourse rather than a bearer of being (ousia), and that psychoanalysis uniquely ties together the history of logic's ambiguities about the subject by revealing desire as the hidden stake behind logical debates.

    the universal affirmative and the universal negative in no way contradict one another, that they are both acceptable on condition that we are in this top right hand box

34. #34

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.217

    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)?

    It is a question that would involve the following: does all the non-males, mean the females? The abysses opened up by such a confident recourse to the principle of contradiction might perhaps also be taken in the other sense.

35. #35

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.265

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan stages a confrontation between Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein and the Freudian unconscious to argue that thinking is constitutively a censorship of an originary "I do not know," and that desire (to know) is born from this nodal failure of knowledge — a topology illustrated via the Klein bottle and Möbius strip, and clinically anchored in free association and the objet petit a.

    In the foreground first of all, the notion of 'all' (tous)... The uncertainty of this 'all' will be put in question not at all simply from the fact that concretely the unanimity of the 'all' is the most difficult thing to obtain, but that the logical expression of the 'all' proves to be very precarious

36. #36

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    **ANALYTICON** > **X:** You mean a relative deafness.

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Vincennes "Analyticon" confrontation to demonstrate in vivo how the Four Discourses operate: the University discourse produces students as surplus-value/Objet petit a, the Hysteric's discourse enabled the Marxian discovery of historical symptoms, and the gap/incompleteness structurally irreducible to each discourse refutes any totality ("nothing is all").

    nothing is all (rien n'est tout). Whatever way you come at things, whatever way you turn them, the property of each of these little four legged schémas is to leave to each its own gap.

37. #37

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.168

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the hysteric's desire—structurally unsatisfied because it emphasises the invariance of the unknown—functions as a formal schema for the logic of the Not-all (pas-toute), such that 'a woman' can only emerge by sliding beyond the hysteric's phallic semblance; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis in the irreducible division between jouissance and semblance, and links truth to half-saying rather than full articulation.

    it is not of every woman that it can be said that she is a function of the phallus (ce n'est pas de toute femme que se peut dire qu'elle soit fonction du phallus). That this is the case with every woman is what constructs her desire

38. #38

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.69

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language occupies the gap left open by the phallus in the place of the sexual relationship, substituting a law of desire/prohibition for any mathematical relation between the sexes; this move is theoretically grounded in Peirce's logical schema to establish that there is no universal of Woman (not-all), while the phallus-as-instrument is posited as the "cause" (not origin) of language, and the truth—like the unconscious—sustains contradictory positions that only become paradoxical when written.

    What the myth of the enjoyment of all the women designates, is that there are not all the women. There is no universal of the woman.

39. #39

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth operates structurally through its refusal—when truth "chains itself" it yields nothing to the analyst, and this impasse is indexed to the non-existence of the sexual relationship, which forecloses any natural or destined union between man and woman, leaving desire and demand irreducibly open.

    The woman does not exist - that she exists is the dream of a woman

40. #40

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.156

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

    Theoretical move: Language has only one Bedeutung — the phallus — because it is constituted from the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship; writing provides the "bone" that jouissance lacks, and the semblance that structures discourse is irreducibly phallic, meaning sexual enjoyment forever remains barred from the field of truth.

    the function of x cannot be written about every x, and that it is from this is not all that the woman establishes herself.

41. #41

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.109

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance cannot be written (inscribed in the symbolic), and that this unwriteability is the structural condition from which both the Oedipus complex and the formulas of sexuation derive — specifically: "the woman" does not exist because the universal affirmative ("all women") is impossible, while the prohibition on jouissance (pleasure principle as "not too much enjoyment") and the maternal body supply the only available symbolic scaffolding for the sexual relationship.

    One cannot say all the women because it is only introduced into the myth because of the fact that the Father possesses all the women, which is manifestly a sign of an impossibility.

42. #42

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.149

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the failure of symbolic logic to ground itself reflexively as a demonstration that the sexual relationship cannot be written, then traces the passage from Aristotelian syllogistic to quantifier logic to show how the letter—by replacing terms with holes—is the condition for any logical articulation, ultimately linking this to the function of the master signifier and the structure of discourse.

    it is not true that for any x, namely, any root of a second-degree equation, one can say that every root of a second-degree equation satisfies the function on which real numbers are founded.

43. #43

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.192

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex and the Name-of-the-Father function as logical zero-points (analogous to Peano's axiom of zero) that ground the series of natural numbers, and that the "murder of the Father" is the hysterical substitute for rejected castration; he then pivots to show that the superego — originating from the mythical primordial father of *Totem and Taboo* — issues the paradoxical impossible command "Enjoy!", which is the hidden motor of moral conscience.

    if I made the little schema which is supposed to correspond to the pas tous or the pas toutes, as designating a certain type of the relation to the φ of x

44. #44

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.152

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that the logic of quantification (universal/particular, affirmative/negative) is not merely a formal apparatus but carries the mark of the sexual impasse: the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship without a third term (the phallus), and the asymmetry between the masculine "all" (grounded in a mythical exception) and the feminine "not-all" (sustained only as a discordant statement, as 'a-woman' rather than 'every woman'), with Hysteria named as the neurosis that articulates this truth of failure.

    the woman, the woman can only fill her place in the sexual relationship, she can only be it under the heading of a woman, d'une-femme. As I strongly emphasised, there is no every woman.

45. #45

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.152

    accommodate yourselves.

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.

    He unifies them certainly, but precisely not all (pas toutes). Here we touch at once on what is not...

46. #46

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972 > *the law of retaliation.*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's derivation of number from the concept of inexistence to ground the signifier "1" as essentially the signifier of inexistence, and links this logical-arithmetic operation to the foundations of repetition and to his own formulas of sexuation (all/not-all), arguing that logical necessity—not empirical counting—is what underpins both number and the meaning of the phallus.

    either the all, or the not-all.

47. #47

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.103

    Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972 > Seminar 7: Wednesday IS March 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan traces the problem of the One through Parmenides, Plato, Hegel, Frege, and Aristotle to argue that the One is not univocal and cannot be deduced from logic alone—its emergence from the empty set (zero) inaugurates both the arithmetic series and the question of existence, which always rests on a foundation of inexistence; this re-reading of the Platonic Parmenides positions Plato as proto-Lacanian insofar as the Real is approached through the gap in what can be said.

    Aristotle imagines that it is enough to say that some, only some, not all, are like this or like that for them to be distinguished.

48. #48

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.150

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two modes of the One — the One of attribute (defining a class) and the One of pure difference (defining a set element) — and uses this distinction to ground the sexuation formula: the existence of an exception (∃x.Φ̄x) is what counts the One "in addition," grounding the masculine "all" (tout homme), while the question of what constitutes an "all" is deferred to the logic of the y'a d'lun.

    What is this all (tout) or this all (tous)? What is meant by all men in so far as they ground one side of this articulation of supplying?

49. #49

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.134

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the sexual non-relation and the logic of sexuation in the mathematical real, arguing that the One (Y a d'l'un) does not found a binary complementarity between man and woman because the not-all prevents any consistent application of the principle of contradiction to gender; simultaneously, he insists that the analyst must hold the position of the little o-object as semblance, and that the mathematical real—which resists both truth and meaning—is the proper anchor for analytic discourse.

    since the woman is not all, why would everything that is not woman be man? This bipartition, this impossibility of applying, in this matter of gender, something that is supposed to be the principle of contradiction

50. #50

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    J Lacan - Start that again.

    Theoretical move: The passage turns on the structural homology between the logical form of double negation (as deployed in the fixed-point theorem and Lacan's own formulas), Peirce's distinction between the field of the potential (pure zero) and the field of the impossible (zero of repetition), and an empiricist prehistory of this distinction traced through Locke and Condillac — arguing that the "point that escapes" distortion in topology mirrors the logical and ontological status of the non-inscribed, which is the condition of possibility for any inscription at all.

    there does not exist an x which satisfies this... there exists an x such that no ^A... one could have affirmed it. Here, that is why I cited at the beginning the critique of the universal quantor

51. #51

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus is the signified of sexual discourse (not the signifier), that transsexualism and the common error both mistake the signifier for the organ, and that the non-existence of the sexual relationship requires a new logic built on the 'not-all', existence/quantification, and modality rather than naturalist or Aristotelian categories.

    I have only encountered the statement of not-all (pas-tout). Already last year I believe I have isolated this very precisely for you as V* . with respect to the function itself

52. #52

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    accommodate yourselves.

    Theoretical move: Through Recanati's intervention on Peirce, the passage argues that the universal quantifier cannot stand alone but requires a prior inscription of inexistence (negation as function), and that the repetition of inscribed inexistence—not bare inexistence—grounds logical and mathematical structures; this move aligns Peirce's logic of the continuous with Lacan's concerns about the Not-all and the grounding of the universal.

    What grounds this quantor, is the previous and inscribed annihilation of variables which contradicted it.

53. #53

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan develops the formulas of sexuation—specifically the not-all (pas toute) and the logic of the at-least-one exception—to articulate woman's mode of presence as "between centre and absence," a jouissance that exceeds the phallic function without negating it, while diagnosing Hegelian dialectics and Marxist discourse as structurally blind to the surplus-jouissance drawn from the real of the Master's discourse.

    this second bar that I was only able to write by defining it as not all (pas toute). She who is not contained in the phallic function without nevertheless being its negation.

54. #54

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the formulas of sexuation through a quasi-mathematical notation, arguing that sexual enjoyment constitutes the obstacle to the sexual relationship, that every sexed signifier falls under the castration function (ΦΧ), and that the logic of quantifiers—specifically the 'not-all'—is the proper instrument for writing what cannot be said in classical predicate logic.

    this articulation of quantifiers allows us...the function of the not all (pas-tout). There is a set of these signifiers that supplies for the function of the sexed...at a place where it is the not all that functions in the function of castration.

55. #55

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the title "...Ou pire" as a vehicle for the claim that "there is no sexual relationship" — a truth that can only be half-said, such that any attempt to escape it produces something worse — and grounds this in a logical analysis of the empty place in language, the impossibility of metalanguage, and the introduction of the "not-all" as what exceeds Aristotelian quantification, thereby linking the structure of language to castration and sexuation.

    the not-all (pas-tout) which is, very precisely and very curiously what eludes Aristotelian logic in the measure that it put forward and separated out the function of prosdiorisms

56. #56

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 April 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces 'Yad'lun' (there is something of the One) as the foundational concept linking set theory's existential quantifier to the analytic discourse's production term (S1), arguing that the Real One—distinct from natural individual existence and from reality—is accessible only through the Symbolic, and that this re-reading of Plato's Parmenides confirms the analytic discourse's priority over scientific discourse.

    there are some horses, at least one that is not so, in Aristotelian logic this is a contradiction. What I am putting forward is designed to make you grasp that precisely if I can...put forward two terms, those on the right of my group of four terms

57. #57

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the unary trait (support of imaginary identification via the mirror stage) from the *Yad'lun* (there-is-One), while arguing that the Not-all grounds both the crowd and the question of Woman; he then re-situates the Subject Supposed to Know as a pleonasm pointing to the analyst's legitimate occupation of the position of semblance with respect to jouissance.

    the nature of the *not all* that grounds it, the nature which is precisely that of the *woman,* to be put in inverted commas, who for father Freud constituted up to the end the problem

58. #58

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.34

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of quantifiers (∃x and its negations) to ground sexuation and castration in a structural-logical necessity rather than anecdote, positioning the Real as that which affirms itself through the irreducible impasses of logic (Gödel), and insisting that castration cannot be reduced to myth or trauma but constitutes the impossible foundation of any articulation of sexual bipolarity in language.

    They only exist there as all (toutes), because this is applied to women, the not-all, but anyway, I will give a further commentary on that soon.

59. #59

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two forms of negation—foreclosure and discordance (not-all)—arguing that foreclosure operates at the level of the said (the unsayable), while the not-all is a form of discordance; the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship is the real ground that determines discourse as structurally broken.

    what goes against it, is precisely, our pas tous (not all). Our not-all is discordance.

60. #60

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the formulas of sexuation by deploying predicate logic's quantifiers (the universal, the particular, the existential, and their negations) to give castration a non-anecdotal, strictly logical articulation: the masculine side is defined by the universal phallic function grounded by the exception ('at least one' who is not subject to it), while the feminine side is defined by the 'not-all' — a contingent rather than particular negation — showing that the sexual relation is irreducibly non-complementary.

    I put forward the essential feature of the *not all,* Vx. , as being that from which there can be articulated a fundamental statement as regards the possibility of the denotation that a variable takes on in function of argument.

61. #61

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the Other (as heteros) from the sexual relationship is not gendered but structural, grounded in the logic of Zero and One; the sexuation formulas are then developed through a critique of Aristotelian universals and quantification, establishing that the Universal (phallic function) requires the exception ('at-least-one') as its foundation, and that Eros as fusion toward the One is a dangerous mythological delusion with no analytic warrant.

    on the other side a contingent relationship because the woman is 'not all'.

62. #62

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.148

    The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the necessity of the paternal exception (the One who is not castrated) as the logical precondition for all thought about human relations, then maps the modal square (necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility) onto the sexuation formulas, arguing that the Real occupies the place of the impossible and that the 'Not-all' expresses contingency—reordering Aristotle's modal logic through the lens of the analytic discourse.

    it goes then to existence. And then afterwards it goes there...the Woman is distinguished by not being unifying...the 'Not all' (Pas toutes), which in short is nothing other than the expression of contingency.

63. #63

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.141

    The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the sexuation formulas by mapping the masculine side (universal castration grounded by the exceptional father who says-no) against the feminine side (not-all, grounded not by an exception but by the absence/void of any denial of the phallic function), and identifies the four logical relations between the quadrant terms as existence, contradiction, undecidable, and lack/desire/objet a, while equating the mathematical notion of the set with the barred subject and the non-numerable with feminine not-all.

    nowhere, up to the present, in logic, has there been put, promoted, put forward the fonction of not all as such... the not all, if I may say... is that contrary to the inclusion in.. . of x 'there exists the father whose nay-saying situates himself with respect to the phallic function', inversely it is in as far as there is the void, the lack, the absence of anything whatsoever that denies the phallic function at the level of the woman

64. #64

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys set theory and the logic of the 'yad'l'un' (there is One) to ground the four formulas of sexuation, arguing that existence is constituted through a "saying not" (the exception that founds the universal), and that psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which blackguardism (corruption of desire) necessarily produces stupidity—making the mathème the privileged vehicle for approaching knowledge about truth.

    we ought to write the function of 'not all' as being essential for a certain type of relationship to the phallic function inasmuch as it grounds the sexual relationship.

65. #65

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formulas of sexuation cannot be read through standard propositional logic (negation, conjunction, disjunction) because the phallic function governs both sexes asymmetrically: the masculine side is structured by a universal ('All x') grounded in an exception ('there exists an x that negates φx'), while the feminine side is 'not-all' within the phallic function, which opens onto a dual, properly feminine jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance—and it is precisely this asymmetry that marks the non-existence of the sexual relationship.

    the difference of the position of the argument in the phallic function, is very precisely that it is 'not every' woman that is inscribed in it.

66. #66

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.106

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > **4 1 \* May 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual relationship is grounded not in biological or metaphysical mythology (Eros-as-fusion) but in the formal structure of the sexuation formulae and set theory: the One emerges from a foundational lack (the empty set), which means sex as the dual-real can never produce a relationship, only two irreducible ones.

    and of this 'not all' - which is a new formula 'not all' - and nothing more - 'is able' - in the right hand column - 'to satisfy the function described as phallic'

67. #67

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine universality (the "not-all") is structured by the *absence* of exception rather than by a grounding exception, and that this absence of exception does not consolidate but rather further undermines any universal — making the feminine position irreducibly non-universal and essentially dual, in contrast to the masculine universal which rests on a (gratuitous) founding exception.

    the contrary of the limit, namely, that there is none, that there is no exception... naturally gives still less to what is defined as 'not all' as essentially dual.

68. #68

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the ground from which its supplements (love, phallic jouissance, courtly love) must be theorised, and uses the distinction between reading and understanding—illustrated by commentary on *Le titre de la lettre*—to reframe the Subject Supposed to Know as the very structure of love/transference.

    even all of you - as numerous as you are here, assuredly forming a multitude - not only do not make one, but have no chance of pulling that off

69. #69

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.108

    **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.

    At the level of this not-everything (pas-tout), only the Other doesn't know. It is the Other who constitutes the not-everything, precisely in that the Other is the part of the not-at-all-knowledgeable in the not-everything.

70. #70

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine sexuality is constituted by a logical "one by one" (une par une) structure that derives from the Other rather than from bodily substance, making sexual jouissance "compact" and the feminine sexed being "not-whole"—a claim illustrated through the Don Juan myth and grounded in a topology that refuses any reference to being or substance.

    The sexed being of these not-whole women does not involve the body but what results from a logical exigency in speech.

71. #71

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance is structurally defined by an impasse—the impossibility of the sexual relationship—and uses topological concepts (compactness, open sets, finity) to articulate how phallic jouissance constitutes an obstacle to jouissance of the Other, while the Not-all marks the female pole's irreducible remainder. Love is revealed as narcissistic, and its object-like substance is in fact the objet petit a as remainder in desire.

    woman is defined by a position that I have indicated as 'not whole' (pas-tout) with respect to phallic jouissance.

72. #72

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.111

    **VII** > 92 Complement

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the distinction between the infinite and the finite to recast the logic of the not-all (pas-toute): in the finite, not-all implies a particular exception, but in the infinite the not-all produces only an indeterminate existence that cannot be constructed—grounding his claim that Woman cannot be written (barred) and that feminine jouissance exceeds the phallic function.

    this not-whole (pas-toute), in classical logic, seems to imply the existence of the One that constitutes (fait) an exception

73. #73

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.124

    **IX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every wisdom tradition—Taoism, Buddhism, mythology, Christianity—fails to satisfy the "thought of being" except at the price of castration, positioning psychoanalytic discourse as a contingent, non-mathematical pathway toward an economy of jouissance that science and religion alike cannot reach.

    The une chacune is perhaps Lacan's way of insisting that women cannot be taken as a whole or set (that is, as Woman), but only one by one.

74. #74

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes a feminine jouissance that is "beyond the phallus" — experienced but unknowable even to women themselves — and uses mystical testimony (St. Teresa, Hadewijch) as its privileged witness, then links this Other jouissance to the God-face of the big Other and the paternal/castration function, arguing these do not resolve into either one God or two.

    It's not because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there at all. She is not not at all there.

75. #75

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan defines the signifier as both the cause of jouissance (its material and efficient cause, enabling access to a part of the Other's body) and simultaneously what brings jouissance to a halt (its final cause), thereby grounding the signifier not in Aristotelian physics or Cartesian extended substance but in a new ontological category: 'enjoying substance' (la substance jouissante).

    what I, strictly speaking, call 'jouissance of the Other,' insofar as it is merely symbolized here, is something else altogether - namely, the notwhole that I will have to articulate.

76. #76

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.98

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes analytic discourse from both Aristotelian cosmology and scientific discourse by locating the speaking being's reality at the level of fantasy and the unconscious, then pivots to the question of feminine jouissance and its relation to the Other, arguing that woman—like man—is subjected to an Other that may or may not "know" the jouissance she experiences beyond the phallic game.

    whether a woman can say anything about it, whether she can say what she knows about it

77. #77

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the sexuation formulas by arguing that woman's structural not-wholeness with respect to the phallic function entails a supplementary jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance, while simultaneously grounding 'being' not in ontology but in the jouissance of the body marked by signifierness—thereby opposing his project to both philosophical idealism and vulgar materialism.

    she is not-whole.

78. #78

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.89

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the formulas of sexuation by showing how masculine and feminine sides of speaking beings relate differently to phallic jouissance, fantasy, and the barred Other — culminating in the claim that the dissociation of *a* (imaginary) from S(Ⱥ) (symbolic) is the task of psychoanalysis, distinguishing it from psychology, and that woman's radical Other jouissance places her in closer proximity to God than any ancient speculation on the Good could reach.

    it will not allow for any universality it will be a not-whole, insofar as it has the choice of positing itself in Ox or of not being there

79. #79

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.42

    **II** > **The function of the written¹**

    Theoretical move: There is no prediscursive reality — every reality is founded by discourse — and the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the negative foundation on which all writing (and analytic discourse specifically) rests; the bar in the Saussurean formula is the graphic index of this impossibility, marking that the written is precisely what cannot be understood, while man and woman exist only as signifiers articulated through the phallic and not-all positions respectively.

    A man seeks out a woman qua - and this will strike you as odd - that which can only be situated through discourse, since, if what I claim is true - namely, that woman is not-whole - there is always something in her that escapes discourse.

80. #80

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    **II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual relationship necessarily fails, and that this failure is not incidental but constitutive—the object itself is failure—and uses modal logic (the necessary as "what doesn't stop being written") to show that phallic jouissance is the only jouissance, with the 'other' (feminine) jouissance marking the not-whole that cannot be fully articulated.

    the not-whole has not been amply explored, it's obviously giving me a hard time.

81. #81

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    J.Lacan-... of this?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'not-all' logic governing Woman cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity (which would imply an exceptional existence), but only through the infinite—where no determinate exception can be constructed—grounding Lacan's claim that Woman is properly half-said, and that her enjoyment is of the order of the infinite rather than the phallic universal.

    When I say that /he woman is not-all and that it is for that reason that I cannot say the woman, it is precisely because this is what I am putting in to question, namely, an enjoyment which, with respect to everything that can be used in the function of x, is of the order of the infinite.

82. #82

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys topological concepts of compactness and open sets to demonstrate that the impossibility of the sexual relationship is what structures all discourse, and that feminine sexuality is characterized by the 'not-all'—women taken 'une par une'—rather than by phallic jouissance or universal fusion, grounding sexuation in a logical rather than anatomical requirement.

    These not-all women as they are isolated in their sexual being, which then does not pass by way of the body but through what results from a requirement in the word, from a logical requirement

83. #83

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier cannot be collectivised through semantic or lexical predication alone, and that its proper "substance" is Jouissance — the body enjoys itself only by corporalising itself in a signifying way, making enjoyment-substance the third term beyond thinking substance and extended substance, and reframing the subject of the unconscious as the one who speaks stupidities rather than thinks.

    if I speak about the not-all, which worries a lot of people, if I put it in the foreground as the aim of my discourse this year

84. #84

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: Recanati uses Cantorian set-theoretic ordinals to formalise the logic of repetition: each ordinal both records and reproduces the gap (hole) it cannot close, so that the limit insists as an absolute, unreachable frontier — a structure Recanati explicitly maps onto the psychoanalytic dynamics of desire, interpretation, and the entrance into analysis.

    There is no all that cannot be eroded, be exploded into the rank of elementary singularity in something that is presented as a larger set.

85. #85

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.127

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bentham's utilitarianism and Stoic logic (material implication) to articulate the modal structure of jouissance—that enjoyment 'does not cease not to be written' (the impossible)—and to show that repression is secondary to a primal non-suitability of jouissance for the sexual relationship, with metaphor as repression's first effect; he then aligns this with Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (sight, smell, hearing) to locate the objet petit a as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

    That which makes her not-all in any case.

86. #86

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.209

    J.Lacan-... of this?

    Theoretical move: Recanati's intervention uses Berkeley's semiotics and Kierkegaard's relation to Régine to interrogate whether 'supplementary feminine jouissance' can be anything other than the signifier of masculine quest/fatum, deploying the not-all and the barred Other to show that the Woman's relationship to the big Other resists masculine perspectival capture, while the Kierkegaard example maps the masculine dilemma (exclusion vs. mediated relation to God) onto the Splitting of the Subject, from which the woman is structurally exempt.

    The woman as *not-all,* as we have seen, is the signifier of the complex existence One Other, barred Other of course, for man.

87. #87

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.158

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural connection between the barred Woman (not-all), the barred Other S(Ø), and Other jouissance, arguing that what ancient metaphysics designated as the Supreme Good (Aristotle's unmoved mover) is in fact a mythical placeholder for the enjoyment of the Other—and that psychoanalysis must dissociate the imaginary small o from the symbolic barred O to accomplish what psychology has failed to do: the splitting that reveals the sexual non-relationship at the foundation of all knowledge.

    this barred /he, explicitly, is related... to this signifier of O qua barred - 0 - in so far as this locus of the Other itself... this The of The woman from the moment that it is stated only from a not-all, cannot be written

88. #88

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that linguistics is in a state of epistemic crisis because its foundational model of the symmetrical locutor/interlocutor subject (shared from Saussure through Chomsky) is being dissolved by linguistics' own positive syntactical exploration, which encounters phenomena (heterogeneous subjects, power relations) it cannot account for — ultimately forcing linguistics toward psychoanalysis, and opening onto Lacan's logic of the not-all and feminine jouissance.

    this will be related to everything that Lacan has developed recently in connection with the *not-all (pastoute)* and feminine enjoyment

89. #89

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

    Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural asymmetry between the masculine (phallic) universal—grounded in the paternal exception (∃x.¬Φx)—and the feminine not-all (∄x.¬Φx), arguing that both the father function and the "virgin function" constitute existence in an eccentric, decoupled position with respect to the phallic function Φ, such that their radical incommensurability is what grounds the inexistence of the sexual relationship.

    once there is question of the not-all, I think there are two ways of envisaging it... the woman being fully into the function, she only signalises herself by whatever it is that goes beyond this function in terms of something supplementary

90. #90

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.169

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual non-relationship is irreducible: love operates in a 'hommosexual' (soul-to-soul) register that bypasses sex, courtly love was a historically singular meteor rather than a dialectical synthesis, and the question of woman's enjoyment opens onto whether the barred Other itself knows — with the conclusion that attributing omniscience to the Other (or to God/woman) actually diminishes rather than enriches love.

    in what constitutes feminine enjoyment, in so far as it is not-all occupied by man

91. #91

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.186

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's discourse is uniquely positioned to examine the truth of knowledge by placing the objet petit a in the place of semblance; he then develops a theory of knowledge as grounded in the Other (as locus of the signifier), where knowledge must be 'paid for' through use/enjoyment rather than exchange, and where the Letter reproduces without reproducing the same being—culminating in the claim that the Other's structural not-knowing constitutes the not-all, linking feminine sexuality, unconscious, and castration.

    At the level of this not-all, there is only the Other who does not know. It is the Other who makes the not-all, precisely in that he is the part of not knowing at all in this not-all.

92. #92

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.147

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that feminine sexuality is constituted by the not-all (pas-toute) in relation to the phallic function, producing a supplementary jouissance beyond the phallus, while grounding this in the claim that castration is the condition of possibility for male enjoyment of the woman's body, and opposing an ontology of 'being of significance' (signifiance) to any ontology grounded in thinking or enjoyment of being.

    she is only grounded by being not-all, and as such, ranked with the phallic function. This is what defines the...the woman precisely.

93. #93

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine sides of sexuation means that woman is neither One nor Other but occupies an undecidable relation to the barred Other, grounding man's imaginary construction of woman as the signifier of the barred Other through the procession of objet petit a objects—making the sexual relation structurally impossible.

    The not-all is supported by the not-One. Since 3x . does not mean anything other than not-One.

94. #94

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.152

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that feminine (Other) jouissance is an enjoyment that is experienced but known nothing about, linking mystical experience to the structural position of the not-all and to the impossibility of the sexual relationship; he then introduces the sexuation formulas and explains how the barred subject's only access to the Other is via the fantasy ($ ◇ a), which also constitutes the reality principle.

    One can also put oneself on the side of the not-all. There are men who are just as good as women. That happens! And who at the same time find themselves just as happy about it.

95. #95

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XX by grounding the impossibility of the sexual relation in the structural gap between jouissance (phallic enjoyissance) and love: love aims at making One but can only produce narcissistic identification, while enjoyment of the Other's body is neither necessary nor sufficient as a response to love, with the Not-all (pas-toute) marking woman's asymmetrical position relative to phallic jouissance.

    the woman is defined by a position that I highlighted as not all (pas-toute) with respect to phallic enjoyment.

96. #96

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.39

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility of totalisation (the set of all sets is impossible) is structurally homologous to the impossibility of fully encircling rupture, and that this logic governs both unconscious formations (dream, desire) and predication/substance — showing that what sustains a set or subject is always absent from what it designates, making interpretation the act of recovering the missing bracket/support.

    the impossibility of the totalisation cannot for its part be .totalised.. Because if one takes the set of all these wholes of which the totalisation is broken by their fractioning into the set of their parts…it undergoes the same destiny

97. #97

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.134

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that what supplements the absent sexual relationship is not a dyadic fusion but a singular "there is something of the One" — irreducibly solitary — and that love (including transference as love) is the operative name for this supplement; the big Other, far from being abolished, must be reckoned with precisely as the site that mediates between the sexes in the absence of a sexual relationship, a point that also grounds his endorsement of courtly love as a "feint" for the missing relation.

    when I introduced this all which is in the just barely (tout juste), that I took a roundabout path... to avoid the word prosdiorism, which designates precisely this all, this some on occasion, which no tongue lacks.

98. #98

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

    Theoretical move: The signifier is repositioned as a fourfold Aristotelian cause of jouissance: it is simultaneously the material cause (it centres and signifies the body-part that is the material cause of enjoyment), the final cause (it brings enjoyment to a halt, as its limit), and the efficient cause (it limits enjoyment's trajectory); this reframes the signifier not as a bearer of meaning but as the very operator that produces, bounds, and divides the enjoying subject — culminating in the claim that love, not sex, is at stake when one loves.

    what I am properly calling the enjoyment of the Other, in so far as here it is only symbolised, is again something quite different, namely, this *not-all* that I will have to articulate

99. #99

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.123

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that reality is approached through "systems of enjoyment" coextensive with language, that the sexual relationship fails in two ways (male/all and female/not-all), and that the object (objet petit a) is constitutively defined by failure — failure being the essence of the object and the only way the sexual relationship is "realized."

    the Universe is where, by saying all, succeeds... Succeeds in making the sexual relationship fail in the male way... the other that I am not designating otherwise... how that is elaborated in the female way, from the not-all.

100. #100

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.87

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ontology is a product of the accentuation of the copula "to be" within philosophical/master discourse, that there is no pre-discursive reality (all reality is grounded in discourse), and that the sexual relationship cannot be written — a claim sustained by the bar in the Saussurean algorithm and the letter as a radical effect of discourse.

     if what I am tackling is true, namely, that the woman is not-all, there is always something that in her escapes discourse. [...] she will find in this enjoyment that she is not all, namely, that somewhere, makes her absent from herself

101. #101

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes that for the obsessional, death is a 'parapraxis' (failed act), linking the structure of obsession to the impossibility of grasping death as a genuine act; simultaneously, he pivots to the problem of feminine ek-sistence, arguing that women exist not under a universal 'The' but as numerable ones — a move that articulates the Not-all against any totalizing universal.

     women ek-sist, and not in the state of *The*.

102. #102

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an anecdotal tour through Nice, Strasbourg, London, and his reading of Strachey's *Queen Victoria* to advance the theoretical claim that the sexual non-relationship is confirmed by historical-biographical evidence, while elaborating the resistance of different *lalangues* to the unconscious and reiterating that "The woman does not exist" but that women (as not-all) have a privileged, unmeasured relation to liberty and to the unconscious.

     A woman, not obligatorily anyone whatsoever, because they are not-all and the anyone whatsoever slides towards the all

103. #103

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

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

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

     supplying for the woman who does not ek-sist as *The*, to the woman about whom I said in short that she was the very type of wandering (*l'errance*)

104. #104

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 4: Tuesday 21 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that "a woman is a symptom" for a man, grounding this in the structure of phallic jouissance, the non-existence of The woman (not-all), and the logic of belief — distinguishing believing-in (the symptom/neurosis) from believing-her (love/psychosis) — while also reformulating the paternal function as père-version and redefining the symptom as an untamed form of writing from the unconscious.

     I also say that women are notall so then that creates a little objection, does it not! But The woman is, let us say that it is all the women, but then it is an empty set.

105. #105

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.114

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the Real is defined by its ek-sistence *outside* meaning—as the impossible, the expelled, the anti-meaning—and that the Borromean knot of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary is the structural form of the Name-of-the-Father, with feminine ek-sistence (as symptom) arising where the Symbolic circles an inviolable hole and the not-all resists phallic universality.

     this nevertheless not-all, does not mean that any one of them say the contrary, that there exists an x of the woman who formulates the 'do not protect it'…They simply say nothing.

106. #106

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* and the sinthome to distinguish the unanalysable from what analysis can address, then pivots to the Phallus as a "phunction of phonation" substitutive for man, contrasting it with S(Ⓞ) — the signifier of the non-existence of the Other of the Other — which Lacan identifies with "The woman" as the only candidate for an Other of the Other, thereby articulating the impossibility of the sexual relation through the bar that no Other can cross.

     the only thing which allows the woman to be supposed, is that, like God, she is a layer (pondeuse). Only this is the progress that analysis has made us make, it is to make us aware that... there are only particular layers.

107. #107

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar XXIII by introducing the *sinthome* as a new spelling/concept that bridges symptom, sin, and the Joycean art of lalangue-injection, arguing that Joyce's literary practice offers a privileged case for understanding how the sinthome functions as a logical-phallic supplement that can reach the Real — and that this case illuminates the structural necessity of castration, the not-all, and the inexistence of the Woman.

     the woman is not all except in the form whose equivocation takes on a piquant quality from the equivocation in our lalangue in the form of mais pas ça, as one says anything, but not that!

108. #108

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean chain's topological manipulability (turning inside-out, colouring, orientation) to argue that the Real is not a single ring but is constituted by the knot-relation itself, and that the circle's hole—not its closure—is what founds both set theory's not-all and the chain's supple geometry as opposed to rigid, formal demonstration.

     We rediscover there, in short, something for which I put forward that concerning what I called by the name of the woman: she is not-all (pas-toute).

109. #109

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot's essential property is the "false hole" produced when two circles conjoin, and that it is the Phallus—as the verifier of this false hole—that constitutes the Real; he then extends this topological claim to the sinthome (specifically Joyce's), lalangue, and the relation between the sexes, positioning the phallus as the sole signifier that creates every signified and thereby verifies the Real.

     Hence the illumination that results from it about what a woman is: not-all here, by not being grasped, by remaining to Joyce, specifically, foreign, by not having a meaning (sens) for him.

110. #110

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates the Real, the Sinthome, and the Unconscious through a meditation on undecidability, negation, and the sign: the Real is defined by what does not cease not to be written (impossibility), the Unconscious is recast as 'bévue' (the structural stumbling of language), and the sinthome is identified with the mental as such — the upshot being that psychoanalysis produces only a 'semblance' of truth, not truth itself, because S1 never fully represents the subject for S2.

     I put forward also this something which is enunciated about the universal, and this to deny it; I said that there is no all (tous). This indeed is why women, are more man than men. They are not-all (pas-toutes), as I said.

111. #111

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.422

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that being is co-extensive with the cut/gap in the signifying chain, and that the subject, constituted as "not one" (barred, split), appears precisely at those gaps in desire — a structural account that displaces both ego-psychological notions of genital maturity and religious/moral frameworks for desire's satisfaction, while insisting on desire as the irreducible proof of the subject's presence.

     every subject is not one [tout sujet est pas un]

112. #112

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 8*: *Wednesday 17 January 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close analysis of French negation (ne/pas) and Aristotelian propositional logic (AEIO) to argue that the grammatical subject is constitutively tied to the logic of negation, and that the classical categories of privation, frustration, and castration are the psychoanalytic 'matrix entries' that enrich the philosophical treatment of negation—pointing toward a theory of the subject as defined through its position in affirmation/negation rather than through extension or collection.

     if here I have introduced for you the non omnis homo mendax: the not all, the term not being brought to bear on the notion of the all as defining the particular

113. #113

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

     it is absolutely the same thing to speak without any precision for example of that which is not-man or of that which is not-man within the animal world.

114. #114

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 8*: *Wednesday 17 January 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a visual "dial" apparatus to reframe the classical logic of universal/particular propositions, distinguishing *lexis* (the selection/extraction of the signifier) from *phasis* (existential engagement/assertion), and deploys this distinction to argue that the Name-of-the-Father functions as a universal *lexis* whose validity does not depend on any empirical instantiation—the empty sector (void) confirms rather than refutes the universal, grounding the paternal function structurally rather than existentially.

     Here there are non-vertical traits '*non nullus, etc...*. Just as earlier, we were suspended for an instant at the ambiguity of this repetition of negation, *not not* is very far from being necessarily the equivalent of *yes*

115. #115

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.87

     VII. Not Phtlosophizing

     Theoretical move: Lacan distances his concept of the Real from both ontological metaphysics and Kantian epistemology, insisting instead that the Real is irreducibly non-whole, non-transcendent, and open to future formalization — a methodological wager that refuses premature systematization while holding open the possibility of an evolving law of the real.

     it is not graspable in a way that would constitute a whole

116. #116

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant resolves the first two cosmological antinomies by converting the dialectical (constitutive) principle of reason into a regulative one: the empirical regress in the series of conditions proceeds not in infinitum (which would presuppose a given infinite totality) but in indefinitum, because the world of sense is never given as a complete whole but only through the regress itself.

     we cannot regard the world as either finite or infinite, because the regress, which gives us the representation of the world, is neither finite nor infinite.

117. #117

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.204

     Notes > Chapter 2 The Metaphysics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations, clarificatory remarks, and brief theoretical asides for Chapter 2 on the metaphysics of the voice; substantive theoretical content is minimal and mostly cross-referential, touching on the mirror stage/objet a distinction, the voice-castration structural tie, and the voice's role in jouissance and sexuation.

     The woman relates to S(A/), which means that she is already doubled, and is not all

118. #118

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.13

     Read My Desire

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's reduction of society to immanent relations of power and knowledge constitutes a historicism that undermines his own best insights about a 'surplus existence' that escapes predication—an insight whose Lacanian inflection (the non-existence of 'The' woman, the 'il y a') Copjec identifies and defends against Foucault's own anti-linguistic turn.

     Can you not hear the murmur of the famous Lacanian formulations "'The' woman does not exist [La femme n'existe pas)" and "There is some of One [Il y a d'l'Un)" behind Foucault's phrases?

119. #119

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.247

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamical sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share the same logic of the limit/exception (foreclosure of existential judgment), and uses this alignment to call for a new, alternative ethics proper to women—an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited"—beyond the superego's logic of exception.

     It is now time to devote some thought to developing an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman. Another logic of the superego must commence.

120. #120

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.226

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Phallic Function

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the Lacanian formulas of sexuation theorize sexual difference not as a positive attribute of the subject but as two distinct modes of failure of the phallic function—mapped onto Kant's mathematical and dynamical antinomies—thereby grounding a necessarily sexed universal subject and distinguishing psychoanalysis from deconstruction's collapse of difference into indistinctness.

     Not only is the notorious 'not-all' of the female side-not all are submitted to the phallic function-defined by a fundamental undecidability regarding the placement of woman within the class of things submitted to phallic rule

121. #121

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.214

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex is not an incomplete or unstable meaning (as Butler's historicist/deconstructionist position holds) but the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the internal failure of signification itself—and that this makes sexual difference a Real rather than Symbolic difference, unlike race or class, while grounding a conception of the subject as radically unknowable and thus the only guarantee against racism.

     Why can't feminism forge a unity—an all-of women?

122. #122

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.187

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "gap" internal to the symbolic—the absence of a final signifier—is what makes interpretation (which Lacan identifies with desire) both necessary and quasi-transcendental: the detective's desire is not a subjective bias but the structural principle that bridges irreducible evidence to its reading, and this same missing signifier (the signifier for woman) structurally forbids the sexual relation within detective fiction.

     The full details of this bounded yet abyssal space can never be enumerated; their list will never be countable as long as language depends for its meaning on the interpretation of language, on a supplement of meaning.

123. #123

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.235

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" formula for woman functions as an indefinite judgment in the Kantian sense — affirming a negative predicate rather than negating a copula — which means woman's ex-sistence is neither denied nor confirmed, her non-collectibility into a whole stems from an internal limit (the failure of castration's "no"), and she is ultimately the product of lalangue, a symbolic without the guarantee of the Other.

     When he says "The Woman is not all," he demands that we read this statement as an indefinite judgment.

124. #124

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.231

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

     Theoretical move: By mapping Kant's first mathematical antinomy (the "not-all" structure of phenomena) onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation for the female side, the passage argues that "the woman does not exist" is a rigorously Kantian thesis about the internal limit of reason—not a historicist claim about particular, discursively constructed women—thereby distinguishing Lacanian universality from both Aristotelian particularity and Butler-style anti-universalism.

     Not all phenomena are a possible object of experience: Vx ct>x. [...] what limits reason is a lack of limit. This insight is compromised—not confirmed—whenever we conceive the not all on the side of extension

125. #125

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.240

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure > The Male Side: Dynamical Failure

     Theoretical move: The male/dynamical side of the sexuation formulas resolves the antinomial impasse not by finding a metalanguage but by subtracting being from the universe it forms: existence is posited as the limit-concept that closes the set, yet being as such escapes the concept, rendering the universe complete but ontologically incomplete. This structural move is shown to parallel both Kant's dynamical antinomies and Freud's account of negation and reality-testing, where a negative judgment anchors perception to a lost real object.

     Since the existence of the universe was regarded in the case of the woman as impossible because no limit could be found to the chain of signifiers, it would be smart to assume that the formation of the all on the male side depends on the positing of a limit.

126. #126

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.245

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure > The Male Side: Dynamical Failure

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation desubstantialize sex entirely: masculinity is an imposture and femininity a masquerade, because being escapes the symbolic for men just as universality is impossible for women—the sexual relation fails doubly (prohibition for men, impossibility for women), meaning no complementary universe of the sexes can be constructed.

     While the universe of women is, as we have argued at length, simply impossible, a universe of men is possible only on the condition that we except something from this universe.

127. #127

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

     Predestination as Emancipation > Religion as Capitalism versus Subtractive Theology

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Erasmus's "religion as capitalism" (free will as cultivable capacity, cooperative salvation) with Luther's subtractive theology (predestination, inexistence, excremental subjectivity), the passage argues that genuine emancipation requires abandoning freedom as a capacity and learning to "inexist" — a Kantian-flavored rationalist move that limits reason to make room for the impossible event of grace.

     he contends that not-all are condemned because God elects some of them through elections that from our perspective are necessarily contingent.

128. #128

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

     <span id="unp-ruda-0011.xhtml_p2" class="page"></span><span id="unp-ruda-0011.xhtml_p3" class="page"></span><a href="#unp-ruda-0009.xhtml_toc" class="xref">Provocations</a>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in a historical conjuncture where freedom has become a signifier of oppression, "comic fatalism" is the only stance that can think freedom non-indifferently — operationalized through a series of imperative paradoxes that negate the subject's existence, freedom, and survival as a precondition for genuine action.

     Act as if you were an inexistent woman!

129. #129

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny II: Male Illusions and Female Choices

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" through the asymmetry between male and female developmental logics, Ruda argues that the female logic—as a forced choice of one's own unconscious that precedes and exceeds the Oedipus complex—reveals a non-arbitrary, non-conscious freedom irreducible to the male totalizing illusion, making "woman" the name for an emancipatory act rather than a fixed entity.

     Woman does not exist because all women are only castrated men. Man totalizes.

130. #130

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.164

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Beyond the Reality Principle*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation constitutes an ethics grounded in fidelity to das Ding rather than the reality principle: by admitting traces of the real into the symbolic, sublimation punctures the seamlessness of social reality and opens a space for the reinvention of values beyond the hegemonic 'common good', a move Badiou's truth-event is shown to parallel.

     It creates a space for the luster of the real within reality (thereby making the symbolic 'not-all')

131. #131

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.260

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 8**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 8, listing scholarly references (Kant, Butler, Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Lyotard, etc.) without advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

     It is not on the side of extension that we must take the not-all.

132. #132

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.224

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Female Side: Mathematical Failure**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" with respect to Woman must be read as an indefinite judgment (following Kant's mathematical antinomies), not as an external limitation: Woman's non-existence within the symbolic is not a denial of her ex-sistence but an internal limit constitutive of reason itself, and this structure—where no metalanguage can anchor a judgment of existence—culminates in Woman as the product of lalangue, a symbolic without an Other.

     When he says 'The Woman is not-all,' he demands that we read this statement as an indefinite judgment.

133. #133

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Butler's critique of sex-as-substance illegitimately slides into a voluntarist constructivism by treating the instability of signification as evidence for the incompleteness of sexual being itself; against this, Copjec advances the Lacanian/Freudian thesis that sex is produced not by the success but by the *internal limit* of signification—its constitutive failure—and that the antinomy this generates cannot be resolved by either the dogmatic-structuralist or the skeptical-constructivist solution.

     Why can't feminism forge a unity—an all—of women?

134. #134

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.179

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "locked-room paradox" in detective fiction is the structural equivalent of language's internal limit: the excess element is not a hidden surplus beneath the structure but the limit immanent to it, which is why the detective's interpretive act is constitutively desire—the quasi-transcendental principle that posits a gap irreducible to evidence—and why the sexual relation is structurally foreclosed from the genre by the absence of the final, woman-signifier.

     the absence of this signifier is evident in detective fiction not only in the nontotalizable space that produces the paradox of the locked room but also in the unfailing exclusion of the sexual relation.

135. #135

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.173

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group**

     Theoretical move: Copjec uses Miller's reading of Frege via Lacan to argue that the locked-room paradox in detective fiction is the literary form of the suture operation: the corpse functions as objet petit a—the non-empirical, interior limit of the series—without which neither counting nor the modern social group is possible, thereby countering Foucauldian/historicist accounts that reduce concealment to a fiction of panoptic power.

     numbers or signifiers can no longer be thought to subsume the entire universe of objects. For the performative does not, in fact, resolve the problem we cited … the set of numbers remains open.

136. #136

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.229

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Male Side: Dynamical Failure**

     Theoretical move: The male side of Lacan's sexuation formulas repeats the logic of Kant's dynamical antinomies: by subtracting being/existence as a constitutive limit, a closed universal set (the universe of men) becomes possible—not through metalanguage but through incompleteness—while the female side's open inconsistency is resolved only by installing a limit that simultaneously marks what is missing from the all.

     the existence of the universe was regarded in the case of the woman as impossible because no limit could be found to the chain of signifiers

137. #137

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.221

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Female Side: Mathematical Failure**

     Theoretical move: By mapping Kant's first mathematical antinomy onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation for the female side, Copjec argues that "the woman does not exist" follows the same logic by which the world cannot be constructed as a totality: both the universal and the not-all formulas arise not from empirical limitation but from the constitutive impossibility of an unconditioned whole, a logic irreducible to Aristotelian particularity or historicist critique.

     Not-all phenomena are a possible object of experience: [formula image]. The solution offered by Kant's critical philosophy must be stated twice so as to guard against any possible misunderstanding.

138. #138

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.215

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c08_r1.htm_page212"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c08_r1.htm_pg212" class="pagebreak" title="212"></span></span>**The Phallic Function**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sexual difference is not a positive characteristic but a modality of reason's failure, and that Lacan's formulas of sexuation map onto Kant's mathematical/dynamical antinomies—making the "universal" subject necessarily sexed rather than neuter, and distinguishing psychoanalysis from deconstruction by insisting that bisexuality (undecidability of sexual signifiers) does not collapse sexual difference into indistinction.

     Not only is the notorious 'not-all' of the female side—not all are submitted to the phallic function—defined by a fundamental undecidability regarding the placement of woman within the class of things submitted to phallic rule

139. #139

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.235

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Male Side: Dynamical Failure**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's sexuation formulas desubstantialize sex by showing that masculine existence is grounded in a negative judgment that excludes the real object (guaranteeing objectivity while keeping being inaccessible), and that the sexual relation fails doubly—by prohibition (masculine side) and impossibility (feminine side)—so that men and women cannot form complementary universes and every claim to positive sexual identity is imposture or masquerade.

     a universe of men is possible only on the condition that we except something from this universe. The universe of men is, then, an illusion fomented by a prohibition: do not include everything in your all!

140. #140

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **Sexual Difference and the Superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamically sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share a common logic of the limit/exception—wherein a terrifying force is posited as possible but not existent, converting the father into an impossible Real—and concludes by calling for a new ethics grounded in the "not-all" logic proper to feminine sexuation, rather than the superegoic logic of exception.

     an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman. Another logic of the superego must commence.

141. #141

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets**

     Theoretical move: Copjec's introduction argues that Foucault's post-1968 historicism—his reduction of society to immanent relations of power—undermines his own most productive insight (the desubstantialized 'plebness' as an existence without predicate), and that Lacanian theory preserves what Foucault's genealogical turn abandons: a surplus existence that exceeds the positivity of the social.

     'The' pleb does not exist; but there is 'plebness.' … 'The' woman does not exist [La femme n'existe pas]

142. #142

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.141

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter03.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx through Hegelian dialectics, Platonic anamnesis, and Lacanian subjectivity reveals: (1) capitalism's internal contradictions become visible only at its full realization; (2) liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such; and (3) Hegel's theory of labor as negativity corrects both workerist and OOO misreadings of the subject.

     OOO (qua the feminine side of non-all). In the latter, all things exist as objects on the same ontological level.

143. #143

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.59

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **The Phenomenal In-Itself**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian/OOO framework for accessing the In-itself remains trapped in a masculine (phallic) logic of exception, while a Hegelian-Lacanian "feminine" (not-all) logic reveals the In-itself not as a transcendent beyond but as the very cuts and inconsistencies within phenomena—cuts that mark the inscription of a desubstantialized, non-actant subject defined as "that which in the Real suffers from the signifier."

     From the Hegelian 'feminine' position, the field of phenomena is non-all. It has no exception, there is no In-itself outside, but this field is at the same time inconsistent, cut through by antagonisms.

144. #144

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.117

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

     from the feminine standpoint, it is the difference between (feminine) non-all and (masculine) no-exception

145. #145

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.320

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Badiou's "positivism of Truth-Event" by insisting that the Death Drive—understood as radical (self-relating) negativity rather than any ontic positivity—is the primordial opening that makes an Event possible, and that sexuality (as the site of this void) cannot be reduced to the order of Being but is already a "brush with the Absolute" that love merely supplements, not elevates.

     a category that points towards the fatal limitation of every ontological edifice, towards the impossibility that lies at its foundation, rendering it "non-all," incomplete

146. #146

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.254

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference (and analogous structures like class antagonism) cannot be resolved by nominalist multiplication of categories, because the "+" remainder in any classificatory series is not an epistemological gap but a positive ontological entity—the very embodiment of antagonism—homologous to objet a as the reflexive stand-in for surplus desire itself; fetishistic multiplication of identities/modernities is thus a disavowal of castration.

     the list is never complete, so that in describing the scope of our desire, one should always be cautious and add a + for the new objects that may arise

147. #147

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.375

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian subject's fear of the In-itself as external/transcendent must be displaced by the Hegelian move of internalizing that exteriority: Absolute Knowing is not omniscience but the transposition of the obstacle to knowing into the heart of the subject itself, and this shift is isomorphic with the move from the masculine (exception-based) to the feminine (non-all) position in Lacan's formulas of sexuation, where the In-itself is legible only as the cut or stain inscribed within phenomenal reality rather than beyond it.

     From the Hegelian 'feminine' position, the field of phenomena is non-all. It has no exception, there is no In-itself outside, but this field is at the same time inconsistent, cut through by antagonisms.

148. #148

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.84

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus*](#contents.xhtml_ahd6)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's speculative identity of thinking and being is not a pre-reflexive intuitive unity but a unity mediated by gap — the Absolute itself must be understood as internally split, with "thinking" being the activation of the hole within Being rather than the transcendence of it.

     The domain of Being is in itself non-All, thwarted, and 'thinking' is the activation of this hole in the order of being.

149. #149

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.135

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference as Real is not the difference between two positive entities but an immanent antagonism that precedes and constitutes both terms; the 'third element' (transgender, chimney sweep, objet a) does not supplement the binary but materialises the pure difference/antagonism itself, and the Other sex is merely the reflexive determination of the impossibility of the One.

     all grounded in exception and non-all with no exception, a redoubled logical deadlock contingently attached to biological sexes

150. #150

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Mathematical Antinomies

     Theoretical move: This passage presents Kant's first two Mathematical Antinomies (of space/time and of atomism) as raw theoretical material, establishing the antinomial structure that Žižek will map onto his account of sexuation as a "brush with the Absolute."

     No composite thing in the world is made up of simple parts, and nowhere in the world does anything simple exist.

151. #151

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.121

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel is not a return to pre-critical ontology but a move that inscribes epistemological antinomies into the Real itself, making "subjective distortion" the very mode of contact with the Absolute—and that sexuality, as the impossible-real Absolute, is accessible only through the detours and gaps of the symbolic order, with Lacan's formulas of sexuation homologous to Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

     reality itself" is non-all, antinomic. One should be careful not to miss the point of Kant's philosophical revolution

152. #152

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.124

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts the Hegelian move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, arguing that the subject's constitutive failure to symbolize itself, the Other's opacity to itself, and sexuality's irreducible excess all converge on the same structure: reality is non-all, and the obstacle to knowledge IS the thing-in-itself. The enigma OF the other must become the enigma IN the other, grounding universality not in shared content but in shared failure.

     it means that reality is in itself non-all, antagonistic, marked by a constitutive impossibility—to put it pointedly, there are things because they cannot fully exist.

153. #153

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.256

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via a dialectical reading of the Universal/Particular relation, that sexual difference is not a difference between two species-identities but a constitutive antagonism that cuts within each sex, making every particular sexual identity a failed attempt to resolve an irreducible deadlock—and that ideologies of gender fluidity or "unlearning gender" evade rather than confront this constitutive impossibility captured in Lacan's "there is no sexual relationship."

     humanity is not a genus with two species (men and women, which could then be pulverized into a series of species): sexual difference is ultimately the difference between man as a species and woman as a +, the element which stands for the universality of being-human

154. #154

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.142

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not a binary opposition between two self-identical terms but a "crumbled" asymmetry in which one signifier (the masculine/phallic Master-Signifier S1) lacks its binary counterpart, so that the feminine position is pure difference/excess (M+) rather than a second species; this generates a double transcendental genesis in which S1 and the chain of S2 each retroactively posit the other as what fills its own constitutive lack.

     So woman is not just more than man, woman as a + is this 'more' itself, what Lacan called encore (the title of his seminar on feminine sexuality).

155. #155

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The third antinomy (of spontaneity and causal determinism)

     Theoretical move: The passage presents Kant's third antinomy as a structural opposition between natural causality and spontaneity, deployed within Žižek's broader framework mapping Kantian antinomies onto the logic of sexuation.

     There is no spontaneity; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.

156. #156

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.299

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

     Theoretical move: Žižek deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

     there is an exception, a species in which the genus encounters itself in its oppositional determination … the difference between species (masculine) and the universality of genus embodied in an unlocatable excess (feminine).

157. #157

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.201

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

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

     the Left should… fight for its own Möbius strip reversal in which the universality of egalitarian human rights implies its own exception, its own reversal—the domain of sexuality which should by definition remain 'unjust,' resisting the egalitarian logic of human rights

158. #158

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.227

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality](#contents.xhtml_ahd13)

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip serves as the topological model for dialectical "coincidence of opposites," showing how a line brought to its extreme intersects with its opposite — a structure that governs politics (Fascism), sexuation (universality/exception), the psychoanalytic relation of contingency to symbolization, and the Signifier/Signified relation in language, with the quilting point as the element of contingent Real that concludes the symbolic process by throwing it back to its origin.

     then, we have a non-all (inconsistent, antagonist) series with no exception.

159. #159

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.325

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Badiou's Being/Event duality must be supplemented by a third term—the Death Drive—which names the immanent distortion of Being that precedes and enables the subject's fidelity to an Event; against Badiou's residually Kantian finitude, a properly Hegelian-materialist move problematizes the very positivity of finite reality (the "human animal") rather than accepting it as given.

     one can and should fully assert creation ex nihilo in a materialist (non-obscurantist) way, if one asserts the non-All (ontological incompleteness) of reality.

160. #160

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.115

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" reverses the common reading: Sade is the closet Kantian, not vice versa, because jouissance—like the moral law—operates beyond the pleasure principle and beyond pathological self-interest. This homology between drive/desire and the ethical act grounds a "critique of pure desire" that re-reads the Kantian sublime as immanent to sexuality itself, identifying feminine jouissance with the mathematical sublime's non-all structure and masculine sexuality with the dynamic sublime's constitutive exception.

     the gap that we encounter here is immanent to the sensuous and fits what Lacan formulated as the antinomy of the non-all: there is no exception to the sensuous order, but we nonetheless cannot totalize it, i.e., this order remains non-all.

161. #161

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.108

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7)

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Copjec, argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation structurally reproduce Kant's antinomies of pure reason, such that the masculine/feminine opposition (universal+exception vs. non-all) maps onto the Kantian problem of reason entangling itself in irresolvable contradictions when it attempts to think reality as a totality — thereby grounding sexuality in the transcendental dimension.

     the feminine side by the paradox of 'non-all' (pas-tout) (there is no exception, and for that very reason, the set is non-all, non-totalized).

162. #162

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.136

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for a structural primacy of the "feminine" (mathematical) antinomy over the "masculine" (dynamical) antinomy: the dynamical antinomy is a secondary, derivative operation that resolves the mathematical deadlock by constituting a Whole/universality through the exclusion of a founding exception from the non-All field.

     constitutes a Whole, a universality, by way of excluding the One, the exception, from the open field of the non-All

163. #163

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.52

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

     reality is in itself cracked, incomplete, non-all, traversed by radical antagonism

164. #164

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.109

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's mathematical/dynamic antinomies and the two modes of the Sublime (mathematical/dynamic) structurally mirror Lacan's formulas of sexuation, and proposes correcting Kant by relocating sexual difference *inside* the Sublime itself rather than between the Sublime and the Beautiful — sex is constitutively sublime because failure and attachment to an impossible-real Thing are definitive of human sexual experience.

     if there is no exception, the order is non-all (since only an exception can totalize it)

165. #165

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.29

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement](#contents.xhtml_ahd2)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the gap between naive reality and its transcendental horizon is not to be overcome by synthesis (German Idealism) nor dissolved by scientific realism, but must be grounded in a primordial ontological cleft—a "pure difference" or crack in Being itself—which is precisely what both transcendentalism and contemporary analytic-Continental hybrids (Sellars/McDowell/Brandom) systematically evade, thereby remaining trapped in a Kantian empirico-transcendental doublet.

     the primordial gap that cuts from within into the order of being making it non-all and inconsistent

166. #166

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.238

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kant-to-Hegel move requires understanding the form/content gap as itself reflected back into content as "primordial repression," and maps this onto Lacan's sexuation formulas (form = non-all, matter = universal with exception), ultimately driving toward the cross-cap as the topological figure adequate to a radical antagonism irreducible to the Möbius strip.

     form is non-all while matter is universal with an exception (of form).

167. #167

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.434

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Milner's symmetrical opposition between language and lalangue by reordering their relationship: language is primary (constituted by a traumatic "wound" or symbolic castration), while lalangue is secondary—a defense that attempts to fill or obfuscate the constitutive lack of language through homophonic enjoyment. The subject of the signifier belongs to the death drive, while lalangue aligns with life and pleasure.

     lalangue follows the feminine logic of non-all … Lalangue is integrally positive and affirmative … lalangue is not a whole, it is pastout.

168. #168

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.329

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real harbours a constitutive self-blockage that generates appearing from within, against Badiou's presupposition of appearing as given and his masculine-exceptional logic of Truth-Event; the Death Drive and the feminine Not-all formula are mobilised to articulate this as the properly Lacanian (and Hegelian) alternative to Badiou's ontology.

     the difference between universality grounded in its exception and the non-All with no exception… there is no exception to pleasure principle, every single psychic event can be accounted for in its terms, but it cannot be totalized

169. #169

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.291

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

     Theoretical move: Žižek applies the Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment, mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation, to argue that true materialism is expressed not by "material reality is all there is" (which requires a constitutive exception) but by "material reality is non-all" (which asserts the non-All without implying any exception).

     if we assert a non-predicate and say 'material reality is non-all,' this merely asserts the non-All of reality without implying any exception

170. #170

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.284

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues for a three-level ontological triad (pre-ontological quantum proto-reality, ordinary physical reality, and the symbolic universe) in which Lack/absence must be primordial rather than emergent, and where the logic of retroactivity, the quilting-point, and the Not-all operate homologously across quantum physics, Hegel's Logic, and the Lacanian symbolic order—displacing both evolutionary materialism and standard idealism.

     The basic feature of symbolic reality is its ontological incompleteness, its 'non-all': it has no immanent consistency, it is a multiplicity of 'floating signifiers'

171. #171

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.137

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constitutively sexed by mapping the Kantian mathematical/dynamic antinomy onto Hegel's logic of Being/Essence, and then showing that each domain, when carried to its limit (via differential calculus as the paradigm case), self-sublates into a void that constitutes a distinct sexed subject: "feminine" subjectivity emerges from the self-sublation of the mathematical/Being domain, while "masculine" subjectivity emerges from the dynamic/Essence domain.

     la femme n'existe pas: existence is being 'sublated' into the appearance of an essence, and woman is not yet caught in the tension between essence and appearance.

172. #172

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'feminine' formula of sexuation (non-All, multiplicity filling in the void of the missing binary signifier) has logical priority over the 'masculine' formula (All-with-exception), and that this asymmetry reveals feminine subjectivity as a more radical negativity — not determinate negation but pure 'without,' i.e., the barred subject ($) as such — making the feminine the constitutive operator of reality's inconsistency rather than its exception.

     the explosion of the inconsistent multitude of the feminine non-All… first multiplicity arises out of pure antagonism (filling in the gap opened up by the missing binary signifier), and then this multiplicity is totalized by the exception of the One

173. #173

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the irreducible antagonism at the heart of social life (sexuality, ecology, democracy, culture) cannot be dissolved but only acknowledged, and that Hegelian dialectics—properly understood as a systematic notation of the failure of totalization rather than its achievement—provides the most consistent model for this acknowledgement; 'absolute knowledge' is reread through a Lacanian lens as acceptance that the Concept itself is 'not-all'.

     a final consent to the fact that the Concept itself is 'not-all' (to use this Lacanian term)

174. #174

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegelian externalization must be dissociated from alienation: the dialectical process concludes not with reappropriation of the excremented Other but with a sovereign 'letting go,' and Nature marks the non-All of the Idea's totality rather than functioning as a constitutive exception that closes the Idea's self-mediation — which also means there is no mega-Subject piloting the Hegelian System.

     Nature is, rather, the mark of the non-All of the Idea's totality.

175. #175

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: By reading Hegel through the Lacanian "non-All," Žižek argues that Hegelian totality is itself non-All: material reality is a sign of the Notion's imperfection, truth is self-measuring rather than correspondence-based, and Badiou's undecidable Truth-Event is structurally homologous to this immanent dialectical logic—making Hegel the philosopher of the non-All rather than of closed totality.

     in Lacanian terms, there is a non-All (p£l.f-tou� of truth… the Hegelian 'totality' is also 'non-All'.

176. #176

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.33

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section anchors several key theoretical moves in the introduction: the non-substantial, beingless subject (manque à être), the relationship between subject and objet petit a as a cut/gap structured like a Möbius strip (fantasy formula), the critique of neovitalist/object-oriented ontology via Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism, and Lacan's alignment of his project with dialectical materialism against nominalism.

     aligning his object-oriented onticology with the feminine side of non-all without exception (there is no transcendent exception, reality is composed of objects that are all on the same ontological level, and there is no way to totalize this multiverse of objects)

177. #177

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.162

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that while Deleuze and Lacan share a tripartite topology grounded in an originary negativity (crack/hole/Real) around which the drives congregate, Deleuze ultimately "liquefies" this topological rift into a pure dynamic movement of Difference, thereby obliterating the Lacanian Real as a third term irreducible to both the signifying chain and surplus-enjoyment.

     The much-criticized psychoanalytic 'predilection' for the two (also when it takes the form of the 'not-two') comes not from the biology (or anatomy) of sexual reproduction, but from that which, in this reproduction, is missing in biology, as well as in culture.

178. #178

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.127

     From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's critique of Kant does not represent a regression to pre-critical metaphysics but instead transposes the gap between thinking and being, the subjective and the Absolute, into the Absolute itself—so that contradiction, antinomy, and the 'falling asunder' of moments are ontological features of reality, not merely epistemological limitations. Hegel's speculative identity is a unity mediated by gap, not an intuitive immediacy.

     The domain of Being is in itself non-All, thwarted, and 'thinking' is the activation of this hole in the order of being

179. #179

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.134

     Adrian Johnston > Žižek continues:

     Theoretical move: Johnston defends Žižek's materialist position against Harman's idealist misreading by arguing that the denial of the world-as-whole is not anti-realism but a Hegelian move to include subjectivity within substance; simultaneously, Johnston defends his own neuro-psychoanalytic project against critics (Chiesa, Pluth) who wrongly cast interdisciplinary exchange as a zero-sum contest, and clarifies that positing continuity between the barred Real and the barred Symbolic does not collapse their distinction but reflects a dialectical identity-in-difference.

     the world does not exist—in the Kantian sense of the term, as a self-enclosed whole . . . the barred real is just as differential as the barred symbolic

180. #180

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.269

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     non-all, 9, 25n34

181. #181

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.16

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: Against new materialisms and realist ontologies, the passage argues for a Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism in which the subject—understood as the void of absolute negativity and identified with the Lacanian objet petit a—is not one object among others but constitutes the very hole in reality, such that "the hole in reality is the subject," and material reality is properly characterized as "non-all" rather than a fully constituted whole.

     the minimal definition of materialism hinges on the admission of a gap between what Schelling called Existence and the Ground of Existence… a chaotic 'non-all' (pastout) proto-reality

182. #182

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.131

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

     Theoretical move: Fink expounds Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, arguing that masculine structure is constituted by universal phallic determination grounded in the exception of a foreclosed primal father, while feminine structure is constituted by the 'not-all' — an incompleteness with respect to the phallic function that opens onto an Other jouissance whose status is ex-sistence rather than existence within the symbolic order.

     not all of a person who, regardless of anatomy, falls under the psychoanalytic category of 'Women' is defined by the phallic function (Vx<l>x): not all of a woman comes under the law of the signifier

183. #183

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.133

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that S(A)—the signifier of the lack in the Other—functions as Woman's second "partner" in the sexuation table, and that its meaning has shifted in Lacan's work from a symbolic designator of the Other's desire to a real-register signifier of a primordial loss; this asymmetry grounds two distinct paths beyond neurosis (desire/masculine vs. sublimation/feminine) and implies that feminine subjectivity is constituted through an encounter with jouissance rather than through subjection to a master signifier.

     the crossed-out La symbolizing, in one sense, that woman is not whole

184. #184

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.193

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_

     Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

     it means "not the whole of x" (a woman, for example) or "not all of x," as well as "not all x's."

185. #185

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.144

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-141-0"></span>**A New Metaphor for Sexual Difference**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's account of sexual difference introduces a genuinely new topological metaphor—grounded in the cross-cap and set-theoretic distinctions between open and closed sets—that replaces the classical Western model of concentric spheres and recasts masculine/feminine structure as closed/open sets respectively; this is further characterised as a "Gödelian structuralism" that systematically points to incompleteness and undecidability within any formal system.

     the opposition between inside and outside is inapplicable. Just so, the surface of the cross-cap does not constitute a hermetic boundary, and there is but a locally valid notion of inside and outside, not a definitive one.

186. #186

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.211

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

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

     Lacan does in many places talk about the nonexistence of the set of all women, the fact that women can only be considered one by one, not as a class

187. #187

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.127

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan's formula "there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" is grounded in the claim that masculinity and femininity are defined separately and differently with respect to the symbolic order—not in relation to each other—such that each sex has a distinct mode of alienation by language and a distinct form of jouissance, making any direct complementary relation between them structurally impossible.

     While men are defined as being wholly hemmed in by the phallic function, wholly under the sway of the signifier, women... are defined as not being wholly hemmed in. A woman is not split in the same way as a man.

188. #188

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.170

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

     from the Lacanian perspective, the notions of parallax gap and of 'minimal difference' obey the logic of the non-All.

189. #189

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.42

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

     the first version—the multitude emerges in order to fill in the void of the binary signifier—which is 'feminine,' that is, which accounts for the explosion of the inconsistent multitude of the feminine non-All

190. #190

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.26

     The Kantian Parallax

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via Karatani's reading of Kant, that the "parallax view" names an irreducible structural gap between positions that cannot be synthesized or reduced; he then radicalises this by showing that transcendental subjectivity, freedom, and ontological difference all inhabit precisely this "third space" between phenomenal and noumenal—a space structurally homologous to the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism and to the Not-all logic of sexuation.

     ontological difference is not the 'mega-difference' between the All of beings and something more fundamental, it is always also that which makes the domain of beings itself 'non-all.'

191. #191

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.39

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegelian concrete universality is not a peaceful synthesis of particularities but is itself the site of an irreducible antagonism or "inherent gap of the One," such that particular forms are failed attempts to resolve the universal's self-contradiction — a logic that surpasses both Kantian moral abstraction and Laclau's externally opposed logics of difference and antagonism.

     the differential multitude is 'masculine,' while the antagonism is 'feminine.' The primordial gap is thus not the polar opposition of two principles ... but the minimal gap between an element and itself

192. #192

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.311

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary politics is fundamentally a biopolitical regulation of jouissance rather than emancipatory politics proper, tracing this through liberal ideology's fantasmatic disgust, the symmetry between fundamentalism and liberal hedonism, and the paradox of the superego imperative to enjoy—where permitted jouissance becomes obligatory jouissance—culminating in a reading of The Matrix as staging the co-dependence of the big Other (Symbolic) and the Real.

     Perhaps the way to distinguish the constitutive ontological excess from the obscene excess supplement is, again, by means of the logic of non-All, that is, with regard to its relationship to presupposed 'normality'

193. #193

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.27

     The Kantian Parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian parallax — the gap between phenomenal and noumenal — must be re-read as constitutive of reality itself rather than merely epistemological, which is the precise move Hegel makes: not overcoming the Kantian division but asserting it "as such," thereby revealing that the Real is not a substantial hard core but a purely parallactic gap between perspectives whose "substance" is the antagonism that distorts every symbolization.

     ontological difference is that which makes a totalization of the 'All of beings' impossible ontological difference means that the field of reality is finite.

194. #194

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.382

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

     reducing the difference between material reality and another, 'higher' reality to the immanent difference, gap, between this reality and its own void; that is, to discern the void that separates material reality from itself, that makes it 'non-all'

195. #195

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Danger? What Danger?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the emergence of genuine novelty (New Order from Chaos) requires a structural-dialectical account that cannot be reduced to adaptation logic, and that Varela's "feminine ontology" of aleatory possibility maps precisely onto the Lacanian logic of the Not-all — necessity is not-all, yet nothing escapes it.

     This notion of 'feminine ontology,' far from relying on a vague metaphor, fits perfectly the coordinates of the Lacanian logic of non-All: necessity is 'not all,' yet nothing escapes it.

196. #196

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.82

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Kierkegaard's theology as the limit-point of idealism to stage a materialist inversion: whereas idealism projects closure onto a transcendent God correlative to an "open" ontology, materialism holds that the "All" is itself non-All and contingent; Kierkegaard's desubstantialized God and his structure of "infinite resignation" (Versagung) are then read as a secretly Lacanian operation in which the sacrificial loss of everything yields not a reward but the loss of the Cause-Thing itself.

     necessity is not the underlying universal law that secretly regulates the chaotic interplay of appearances—it is the 'All' itself which is non-All, inconsistent, marked by an irreducible contingency.

197. #197

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.169

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.

     An Event is thus 'non-All' in the precise Lacanian sense of the term: it is never fully verified precisely because it is infinite/illimited—because there is no external limit to it. And the conclusion to be drawn here is that, for the very same reason, the Hegelian 'totality' is also 'non-All.'

198. #198

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian subject is not a substantial self that undergoes dispossession but IS the void that emerges through that dispossession—a retroactive, self-positing structure—and uses this to mediate between Kantian autonomy and Hegelian ethical substance via the Lacanian logic of the Not-all, showing that irreducible contingency in ethics is the very condition of genuine responsibility and act.

     We should refer here to Lacan's logic of 'non-All': the position of true autonomy is not 'I am responsible for everything,' but, rather, 'there is nothing for which I am not responsible,' the counterpart of which is 'I am not responsible for All'

199. #199

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.200

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Danger? What Danger?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard warnings about biogenetic/technological "danger" (Heidegger, Fukuyama, Habermas) are caught in a perspective fallacy—measuring the posthuman future by present standards of meaning—while a Lacanian inversion reveals that cognitivist self-objectivization causes anxiety not by foreclosing freedom but by confronting us with the abyss of our freedom and the radical contingency of consciousness.

     There must be a non-All, a gap, a hole, in reality itself, filled in by phenomenal experience.

200. #200

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.259

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

     Lacan's logic of pastout finds its proper function: significantly, although Milner points out that the thesis 'everything is political' belongs to pastout … he deploys the social dimension of the pastout only in the guise of inconsistent/unlimited All, not in the guise of the antagonism that cuts across the entire social body

201. #201

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.388

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

     Theoretical move: This notes section makes several concentrated theoretical moves: it maps the three meanings of "subject" onto the RSI triad; it redefines Lacan's anti-philosophy as an infinite (Kantian) judgment rather than a simple negation of philosophy; it traces the shift in Lacan's conception of the Real from extimate Thing to inherent inconsistency of the Symbolic; and it reads Messiaen's musical structure as isomorphic with Lacan's four discourse-elements, thereby illustrating the elementary signifying structure.

     Cannot 'multitude,' in its opposition to crowd, also be conceived along the lines of the Lacanian non-All? Is multitude non-all, while there is nothing outside it

202. #202

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides, including a key note on Lacan's self-critical shift in conceiving the analyst's position from a stand-in for the big Other to an embodiment of objet petit a, and scattered remarks on perversion, sexuation, the four discourses, and Badiouian politics.

     a more radical 'ontological' division of the feminine subjective position between what Lacan called the phallic order and the signifier of the lack of the Other

203. #203

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.152

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

     relating to it from the initially double or split standpoint of the Other (i.e. from the standpoint where 'woman' is already and initially not-whole, where she is the Other as the irreducible difference of the same)

204. #204

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.146

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth is structurally "not-whole" not because of lack but because of an irreducible surplus—an auto-referential doubling where the level of enunciation always sticks to what is enunciated—and that this same structure (the Real as the gap between knowledge and jouissance, between the Symbolic and Imaginary) underlies the Nietzschean "double affirmation," the Lacanian not-all, and the ontological status of Woman/Truth as irreducible to objet petit a.

     What makes the truth not-whole is precisely this autoreferential moment on account of which a truth is always also a truth about itself.

205. #205

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.124

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.

     Truth is woman on account of the fact that it is not-whole, that it is impossible to say it 'all.'

206. #206

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.142

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's theory of double affirmation—where negation/lack is inscribed only as minimal difference or interval rather than as a direct object—parallels Lacan's logic of the not-all and the inclusion of the "Other of the Other," both of which resist the nihilistic move of transforming Nothing into a positive object; the Lacanian distinction between enunciation and statement, and the thesis that there is no meta-language, are shown to be structural instances of this same "inclusion of the third possibility."

     the Lacanian notion of 'not-all' is a notion that is itself based on nothing other than what we have called the 'inclusion of the third possibility.'

207. #207

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.196

     <span id="page-186-0"></span>Notes > Part I: Nietzsche the Metapsychologist > Part II: Noon

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Parts I and II of the book), providing citations to Nietzsche, Lacan, Badiou, Deleuze, and others. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument in itself, though several quoted passages gesture at key conceptual nodes (truth, jouissance, the not-all, analytical discourse).

     Woman has a relation with S(A⁄ ), and it is already in that respect that she is doubled, that she is not-whole, since she can also have a relation with Φ.

208. #208

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.110

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental problem of knowledge and perspectivity is not the subject's partial point of view but the structural disjunction between the gaze (as object inscribed within the thing itself) and the viewpoint, such that the subject is constitutively 'ex-centered' — a part of the subject always already falls out onto the side of objects — and subjectivization is the possible (not necessary) consequence of encountering this expelled, fallen part.

     If we take the thesis that the subjective gaze is inscribed in the object seriously, then it follows from this that the object is necessarily not-whole. This does not mean that it always lacks the one thing that would make it complete; it means that it is constitutively not-whole.

209. #209

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

     he opposes it to the 'feminine' mode of non-all field with no exception. So why two modes—or, to quote Bou Ali: 'If the masculine and feminine are indeed disrupted internally by their own difference to themselves, why do we need to maintain them as opposite poles of the antinomy of sex?'

210. #210

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.311

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against reducing the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Western cancel culture to psychotic foreclosure or clashing paranoiac singularities, instead mapping both phenomena onto Lacan's University Discourse and formulas of sexuation, while insisting that symbolic communication (the inverted message) and fetishistic disavowal—not psychosis—are the operative mechanisms.

     in the Western cancel culture not all are cancelled but there is no exception (everybody is under suspicion)

211. #211

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.159

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

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

     Knowledge is non-all in the Lacanian sense: it is not that something a priori eludes it, there is nothing that eludes it, but for this very reason it cannot be totalized.

212. #212

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.189

     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.

     Singularity comes about through history (through history as 'non-all,' in Žižek's terms)

213. #213

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Nobus](#contents.xhtml_ch10a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kant's ethical ambiguity—between freedom as traumatic Real and freedom as asymptotically unattainable—mirrors the Sadean confusion about "second death," and both are resolved by the Hegelian-Lacanian move of grasping Substance as Subject (i.e., recognising that radical negativity/death drive is already the zero-level of reality, not a terminal destruction to be achieved).

     I can know not-all in the Lacanian sense (which is different from Kant's limitation to phenomenal reality): there is no external limit to our knowledge, and for this very reason it remains not-all.

214. #214

     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.

     a universality that is 'non-all,' incomplete and irremediably at odds with the sovereignty and self-transparency of the subject

215. #215

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.173

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Irony

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that effective ideological critique (exemplified by Laibach's overidentification) requires an ironic, estranged subjectivity—not as a safe external standpoint but as an immanent undermining of a form of life—and that distinguishing productive estrangement from mere cynical distancing cannot be resolved theoretically in abstracto but only through concrete situational analysis; Žižek's reading of Zhuang Zi is used to show that critique opens a sense of the 'not-all' of one's condition rather than providing certified knowledge.

     It adds a lack of certainty (a lack, which the butterfly does not possess), which consists in a kind of awareness of the not-all of the '(non-)wakeful' condition itself.

216. #216

     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.

     Sublimation is our way of making sense of the not-all of sex and ontology: Reality is not-One, which doesn't simply mean that it is multiple

217. #217

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.217

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

     Theoretical move: Bou Ali reconstructs Žižek's theory of the subject as a non-ontological point of negativity that is extimate to symbolic structure, correlative to the objet a as object-cause of desire, and grounded in the retroactive (Nachträglichkeit) constitution of the Real as cause—arguing further that this account of subjectivity is inseparable from Lacanian sexuation, read against both Hegelian dialectics and Kantian antinomies.

     Lacan maintains a universality (the problem of sex) as a non-All that has no exception … 'There is no exception to the sensuous order, but we nonetheless cannot totalize it, i.e., this order remains non-all.'

218. #218

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.113

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Pippin](#contents.xhtml_ch4a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends his thesis of ontological incompleteness against Pippin's transcendental-apperception alternative, arguing that (1) Kantian freedom itself implies a "hole" in phenomenal reality, (2) truly autonomous acts retroactively posit their own reasons rather than applying pre-given norms, and (3) every particular social form is structurally self-contradictory in a Hegelian sense, making Pippin's reformist social-democratic horizon abstractly incomplete.

     natural causality doesn't cover all there is but only the phenomenal reality... Phenomenal reality is thus incomplete, non-all

219. #219

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.50

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **ADDING UP TO ALL**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality cannot be reached by aggregating particulars, because any totality of inclusion structurally requires a constitutive exclusion; genuine universality must therefore be posited as an absent starting point (following Plato over Aristotle), not constructed by additive belonging.

     The cumulative whole that is never whole becomes the only form of universality that appears as a possibility, which exposes the poverty of this starting point.

220. #220

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.62

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

     there is no x which does not fall under the phallic function… And it is precisely this that makes any universal statement impossible… not all x are Φx.

221. #221

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.139

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's position is stronger than Badiou's: whereas for Badiou the impossibility of the Event is a consequence of the law of ontological discourse, for Lacan being itself is inseparable from its constitutive gap/impossibility (the "minus-one"), so that the wandering excess is not the Real of being but its symptom—a distinction that grounds a non-romantic, formalizing ethics of the Real and a specific theory of the subject as the name of the gap in discourse.

     all being is discursive, but at the same time the discursive is not-all.

222. #222

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacan's Real is irreducible to Butler's performative ontology because the emergence of the signifying order is coextensive with a constitutive gap (a "minus one"), and it is precisely at this place of the missing signifier that surplus-enjoyment arises — making sexuality not a being beyond the symbolic but the contradictory effect of the symbolic's own structural impossibility, which is what is lost when "sex" is translated into "gender."

     the symbolic field, or the field of the Other, is never neutral…but conflictual, asymmetrical, 'not-all,' ridden with a fundamental antagonism.

223. #223

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.156

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 3

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (Chapter 3 footnotes) containing bibliographic references and brief theoretical glosses; it is not a substantive theoretical argument in its own right.

     "bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies, it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings"

224. #224

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.55

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via a close reading of Freud and Lacan, that sexual difference does not arise from the existence of two sexes but from the non-existence of the "second sex"—a constitutive ontological deficit—and traces Lacan's shift from locating "pure loss" on the side of the body (early work) to locating it within the signifying order itself (late work), showing that surplus-enjoyment emerges at the place of a missing signifier ("with-without"), which is also the origin of sexual division.

     What splits into two is the very nonexistence of the one (that is, of the one which, if it existed, would be the Other).

225. #225

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.64

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

     she can also have a relation with Φ" (Lacan 1999, 81). The relation with Φ—that is to say, the relation with the signifier—is the relation on which existence is founded…whereas the relation with S(Ⱥ) puts us on the path of 'ex-sistence.'

226. #226

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.125

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze converge in treating the death drive as a foundational "crack" around which drives congregate, but diverge crucially: where Deleuze collapses the tripartite topology (original negativity / surplus-enjoyment / signifiers) into a single dynamic movement of pure Difference, Lacan preserves the Real as an irreducible third term whose effect is the subject itself — making subjectivation the very index of an irreducible Real rather than an obstacle to realism.

     it would be wrong to think that the crack that in-forms human sexuality could simply disappear if we accepted the idea that there is a colorful multiplicity of sexual identities. From the Lacanian perspective, 'sexual identity' is a contradiction in terms. The much-criticized psychoanalytic 'predilection' for the two (also when it takes the form of the 'not-two')

227. #227

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.92

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-81-0"></span>Realism in Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian Real resolves the correlationist dilemma (Meillassoux) not by absolutizing contingency but by positing a speculative identity of the absolute and becoming: through a contingent but real cut/break (the emergence of the signifier), physical reality becomes independent and timeless, while the subject names the discontinuity at the core of every scientific breakthrough—a dimension of truth that science forgets but psychoanalysis keeps alive via the unconscious.

     Lacan's axiom could be written as 'the necessary is not-all.' It does not absolutize contingency, but suggests that contradiction is the point of truth of the absolute necessity