Overdetermination

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (48)

1. #01

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

   <span id="page-10-0"></span>[PREFACE](#page-7-0)

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic practice requires navigating between premature understanding and total incomprehension, and that this same dialectic applies to analysands who must accept partial, provisional formulations rather than seeking definitive answers—a position grounded in the overdetermined, fractal nature of human experience.

   Life is multileveled and virtually every facet of it is overdetermined.

2. #02

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

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

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

   Meaning is thus seen here not to be irrelevant but to be multilayered, ambivalent, and far too complex and overdetermined to ever be completely mastered.

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.37

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that intellectual "understanding" is always partial, provisional, and imaginary, and that genuine analytic transformation operates at the level of jouissance (the Real, libidinal economy) rather than conscious comprehension — making jouissance, not meaning, the proper lodestar of analytic work.

   given the overdetermined nature of human experience partial, that is, only part of the story. Latching onto any one particular understanding as totalizing or all-encompassing is dangerous

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.157

   *Signifying Contributions*

   Theoretical move: Through detailed clinical reconstruction of a boot fetish, Fink demonstrates that the fetish object is constituted through a dense web of overdetermined signifiers that simultaneously mark and collapse sexual difference, functioning as a condensation of ambiguous sexual meaning rather than a simple substitute for a missing object.

   It is rare to find a symptom that is not overdetermined—that is not the result of a multitude of signifiers and events—and there are a number of other linguistic and historical connections that I would like to mention here.

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.160

   *Life Events and the "Primal Scene"*

   Theoretical move: Through the extended clinical case of W, Fink demonstrates how a fetish object (the boot) condenses and organizes questions of sexual identity, castration anxiety, racial identity-crisis, and the primal scene into a singular signifying structure, showing how homophony and 'verbal bridges' operate as the unconscious logic linking disparate symptomatic formations.

   The violent quality of certain of his boot fantasies involving policemen or Nazi soldiers often led him to thoughts of suicide... He himself mentioned that he found it easier to entertain the idea that he might want, at some level, to kill his mother than to talk about his boot collection.

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.260

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

   Theoretical move: Fink's comparative table critiques contemporary relational/intersubjective psychologies by contrasting them with both a caricature of Freud and a proposed Lacanian approach, arguing that the Lacanian framework—grounded in Saussurean linguistics, the topology of the Klein bottle/cross-cap, and the structure of the unconscious as the Other's discourse—supersedes ego-psychology and object-relations models that reduce treatment to behavioral reconditioning or perspectivist reality-testing.

   Structural model of diagnosis, emphasis on unconscious desire, unconscious identifications, symptoms overdetermined by fundamental fantasy.

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.30

   <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **Three Clinical Vignettes** > COMMENTARY

   Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates clinically how a subject's symptom (failing as a writer, being "silenced") is libidinally maintained because its very persistence sustains a grievance against the parents—yielding a "miserable satisfaction"—so that improvement would entail surrendering the primary source of jouissance the symptom provides.

   Patients' problems are determined at multiple levels, there virtually always being numerous factors holding any one symptom in place.

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.93

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Title of the Seminar** > COMMENTARY

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's seminar title "A discourse that would not be of semblance" operates as an overdetermined hypothesis rather than a testable proposition: semblance and truth are not opposites but strictly correlated dimensions, so any discourse aspiring to bypass semblance risks the illusion of unmediated access to truth—a move Lacan's own framework forecloses.

   with Lacan, accretion is the name of the game—titles are overdetermined, being chosen precisely because they allow for multiple readings!

9. #09

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.37

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

   Theoretical move: The passage develops a Marxist theory of the mode of production as a formal-structural concept that determines culture through overdetermination and relative autonomy, arguing that naming capitalism as one contingent "mode" opens cognitive and political space for imagining alternative modes of social organization.

   Overdetermination for Althusser indicates limits, or 'causes,' that exceed any effect; there are too many causes for an effect to be said to issue directly.

10. #10

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.102

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Some motifs in Marxist film analysis**

    Theoretical move: Marxist film analysis requires a dialectical articulation of economic/industrial context with formal analysis, insisting that mediation—not context alone—is the indispensable category, because it is in filmic form itself that social contradictions are materialized and ideology exposed from within.

    A more dialectical Marxism, by contrast, wants to take account of the overdetermination of a film's meanings, and of the ways that cultural production exceeds its immediate context.

11. #11

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.184

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Periodizing Fight Club** > **Whence we write**

    Theoretical move: Dialectical film criticism must reflexively account for its own conditions of production, and ideology critique is properly understood not as the condemnation of art for functioning ideologically but as the mapping—with the art object's help—of ideological social relations toward their transformation; Marxist film theory thereby links form, context, and utopian projection into an engaged, emancipatory practice.

    critique is a practice of drawing connections between the overdeterminations of text and context and the utopian projection of alternatives.

12. #12

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream formation operates through condensation, whereby each dream element is overdetermined—functioning as a nodal point that concentrates multiple dream thoughts—and conversely, each dream thought is represented by multiple dream elements, making condensation an irreducible structural principle rather than mere ellipsis.

    Every element of the dream content turns out to be over-determined that is, it is a nodal point, enjoying a manifold representation in the dream thoughts.

13. #13

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) EXAMPLES-ARITHMETIC SPEECHES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates that dream-work does not calculate or compose new speeches but instead recombines fragments from waking life—numerals, words, and speech fragments—to serve the dream's expressive purposes, with over-determination and wish-fulfillment structuring even the most apparently logical dream content; through the "Non vixit" dream, Freud further shows how condensation fuses hostile and friendly trains of thought into a single formation.

    a dream distinguished by its obvious determination, or rather over-determination

14. #14

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.122

    **6** > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**Resistance to the Resisters** > Te ffth paragraph continues:

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology rests on the mirror stage's constitution of the ego as a misrecognizing object rather than a transparent subject, making any therapeutic strategy that mobilizes the ego's self-observation self-defeating; the alternative is a speech directed not at the ego's self-report but at "the thing that speaks" (the subject of the unconscious), whose truth is returned to the analysand in inverted form.

    analysts who expect and demand of an overdetermined object (i.e., the ego)

15. #15

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.176

    **10** > <span id="page-170-0"></span>**Analytic Action**

    Theoretical move: The L Schema is deployed to argue that genuine analytic action operates along the Symbolic axis (between speaking subjectivities) rather than the Imaginary axis (between egos), and that the analyst's ethical responsibility is to keep this distinction operative — thereby reframing non-Lacanian notions like "timing, tact, and dosage" within a register-theoretic framework where the unconscious speaks between analyst and analysand as a "pact" grounded in the big Other.

    an ensemble of overdetermined compromise-formations in which unconscious influences are encrypted (and await being deciphered)

16. #16

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.208

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's appeal to Freudian guilt in "The Locus of Speech" serves to establish the primacy of the Symbolic unconscious over Imaginary affect, and that post-Freudian analysts (ego psychologists, object-relations theorists) reverse this priority by reducing analysis to imaginary-affective phenomena, producing "general infantilization" and ideological distortion—culminating in analysts misidentifying themselves with the Subject Supposed to Know.

    conscious phenomena (such as feelings of culpability) are overdetermined residues controlled and manipulated, pushed and pulled about hither and thither, by the machinations of unconscious structures

17. #17

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.240

    **13** > <span id="page-236-0"></span>**The Training of Analysts to Come**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is reframed as an institutional and pedagogical program: analysts must be trained across linguistics, history, mathematics, and the structuralized human sciences in order to resist the "social-psychological objectification" that degrades psychoanalytic knowledge into ideological conformism, with the structural properties of the unconscious demanding mathematical-style formalization to achieve scientificity.

    the discourse of the little-o-other me/ego is shot through with and overdetermined by cross-resonances and interconnections inscribed within the networks of the big-O-Other

18. #18

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.56

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite* > *Introduction*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is not speculative excess but the rigorous re-grounding of psychoanalysis in symbolic repetition: the fort/da game demonstrates that the human subject is constituted by the signifier's syntactic determinations, and the combinatorial network of symbols shows that overdetermination is always *symbolic* overdetermination, never real, grounding subjectivity in the interplay of memory, law, and absence.

    there is no other link [lien] than that of this symbolic determination in which the signifying overdetermination, the notion of which Freud brings us, can be situated, and which was never able to be conceived of as a real overdetermination

19. #19

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.63

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite* > *Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966)*

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the L schema through a parenthetical chain structure, mapping the subject (S/Es), the imaginary relation (a/a'), and the field of the Other (A) onto a combinatorial notation, while demonstrating that purely dyadic (imaginary) intersubjectivity is structurally insufficient and must be superseded by symbolic determination—a point illustrated through Poe's game of even or odd and culminating in the claim that the signifier dominates the subject.

    nothing has taught them to leave behind everyday opinion by distinguishing what it neglects: namely, the nature of Freudian overdetermination—in other words, the nature of symbolic determination such as I promote it here.

20. #20

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.240

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

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

    Freud insists on the minimum of overdetermination constituted by a double meaning—symbol of a defunct conflict beyond its function in a no less symbolic present conflict

21. #21

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.258

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic technique must return to speech and language as its foundations, demonstrating through the Rat Man case that Freud's success lay in mobilizing the symbolic resonances of speech rather than analyzing resistances objectively; interpretation operates through a "primary language" of symbols whose effects work without the subject's knowledge, and this symbolic operation must be grounded in the dialectic of self-consciousness (Socrates to Hegel) while decentering the subject from self-consciousness itself.

    analysis consists in playing on the multiple staves of the score that speech constitutes in the registers of language—which is where overdetermination comes in, the latter having no meaning except in this order.

22. #22

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.293

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "turning point" of circa 1920 in analytic technique—the shift from interpretation of meaning to analysis of resistance via the ego—constitutes a fundamental deviation that inverts the correct relationship between the constituting subject of speech and the constituted ego, thereby degrading psychoanalysis into a routinized, ego-psychological ideology grounded in bad faith and countertransference as alibi.

    The analyst thus widens the gap that places at his mercy the subject's overdetermination in the ambiguity of constituting speech and constituted discourse, as if he hoped that the extremes would meet up by a revelation that brings them together.

23. #23

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.446

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > *II. The Letter in the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dream-work's two fundamental mechanisms—condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung)—are structurally identical to metaphor and metonymy respectively, establishing that the unconscious is governed by the laws of the signifier, and that the failure of post-Freudian analysts to recognize this constitutive role of the signifier led to a degeneration of technique toward imaginary forms and object-relations, necessitating a return to Freud.

    It is on the basis of the copresence in the signified not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain but also of its vertical dependencies, that I have demonstrated the effects, distributed in accordance with two fundamental structures, in metonymy and metaphor.

24. #24

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.464

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > /. *Toward Freud*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that verbal hallucination cannot be explained by appeal to a unifying percipiens, because the signifying chain imposes itself on the subject in its own right; the hallucination must therefore be understood structurally—at the level of the signifier itself—rather than psychologically, and this structural approach is what distinguishes a genuinely Freudian reconceptualization of psychosis from all prior frameworks.

    its overdetermination at each instant by the deferred action [après-coup] of its sequence

25. #25

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.549

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being* > 9. Let us nevertheless articulate what structures desire.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively beyond demand and irreducible to need, and that the failure of contemporary analysts lies in collapsing this distinction—reducing transference to suggestion, fantasy to imagination, and ending analysis in imaginary identification rather than traversing desire's metonymic structure. The subject's split ($) and the metonymic character of desire are presented as the structural conditions that properly orient analytic practice.

    Freud... stressed again and again that symptoms are overdetermined. To the foolish acolyte engaged in the daily drumbeating that promises the imminent reduction of analysis to its biological bases, this is obvious enough

26. #26

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.553

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being* > 9. Let us nevertheless articulate what structures desire.

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes that psychoanalytic direction operates through speech, brackets demand, and channels the subject toward the avowal of desire, while simultaneously locating desire's ultimate incompatibility with speech in the subject's constitutive Spaltung—a split that is sealed by the phallus as the unparalleled signifier, making the analyst's own desire (modelled on Freud's) the condition of possibility for interpretation.

    it is the letter's snare that determines, nay overdetermines, its place as a heavenly bird

27. #27

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.729

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

    Theoretical move: The passage articulates the subject's constitution through two fundamental operations—alienation and the split produced by the signifier—demonstrating that the subject is an effect of language rather than its cause, while simultaneously theorising the topology of the unconscious (its closing/opening structure) and the temporal logic of retroaction (Nachträglichkeit) as the ground for psychoanalytic causality.

    They would have the benefit of being able to use the Freudian term 'overdetermination' as something other than an evasive answer.

28. #28

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.871

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts

    Theoretical move: This passage is the prefatory apparatus and classified index of major concepts from Lacan's Écrits, compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller with a brief note by Lacan himself; it organizes the theoretical architecture of the Écrits as a system around the Symbolic Order, the Signifier, the subject, and their clinical and epistemological ramifications, while asserting that Lacanian discourse constitutes a closed, coherent formalization.

    Overdetermination and logical time (anticipation and retroaction; chance, encounter, and fate): 51-52, 197-213 (211-213), 256-57...

29. #29

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > C. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SUBJECT

    Theoretical move: This classified index passage organizes Lacan's key theoretical concepts around the structure of the subject and intersubjective communication, mapping page references across the Écrits to show how concepts such as splitting of the subject, topology, the Other, and the unconscious-as-Other's-discourse form an articulated theoretical architecture.

    2. The function of the 'I' and the subject of enunciation: 117-18, 207-8, 251-52, 299-300, 411, 517, 535-41, 616, 663-67, 800-802 (see: Overdetermination).

30. #30

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > B. ANALYTIC EXPERIENCE

    Theoretical move: This is a classified index entry (table of concepts) organizing references to analytic experience across the Écrits — it is a navigational/bibliographic apparatus, not a substantive theoretical argument.

    b. Free association: *52,*60,81-82, *471,* 514 (see: *Overdetermination).*

31. #31

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.875

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > B. TH E THEOR Y OF IDEOLOGY

    Theoretical move: This passage, drawn from a classified index of major concepts in Lacan's Écrits, demonstrates how topology supersedes analogical/imaginary schemas by tracing the theoretical work of the L Schema, the Optical Model, and the R Schema — arguing that topology is the only adequate representation of the subject's logical relations, precisely because it eliminates the imaginary occultation inherent in any intuitive, spatial schema.

    with the exception of the networks of overdetermination which function in the signifier's order

32. #32

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.880

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > *2, Schreber's schema*

    Theoretical move: This passage deploys Lacan's major schemas (Schreber's psychotic schema, Sade's fantasy schemas, networks of overdetermination, and the Graphs of Desire) as a classified index, showing how foreclosure, fading of the subject, overdetermination, and the logic of anticipation/retroaction structure the subject across psychotic, perverse, and neurotic clinical fields.

    The progressive construction of the networks brings out certain properties of overdetermination

33. #33

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.333

    Introduction to Jean Hyppolite s Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that resistance in analysis belongs to the analyst's dialectical bias rather than the patient's ill will, and uses Freud's examples of dream-elaboration and name-forgetting to show that the unconscious is structured as the Other's discourse—culminating in the question of how negation, death, and nonbeing found the symbolic order, setting the stage for Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung."

    I can, of course, assure you that repression is at work here thanks to the overdeterminations Freud himself supplies us with regarding the phenomenon

34. #34

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.383

    The Freudian Thing > *How to Teach It*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structure of analysis can be formalized through three symbolic dimensions (history, language, intersubjectivity), while critiquing ego psychology's reduction of analysis to an imaginary dyadic relation; it then articulates the distinction between the small other and the big Other as the locus of the unconscious, grounding the subject's discourse in truth rather than suggestion.

    subjection to the laws of language, which alone are capable of overdetermination

35. #35

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.393

    The Freudian Thing > *The talk given was couched in the following terms:*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is structured by the primacy of the signifier over signification, such that symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, and jokes are all instances of the signifier's irreducible dominance—and that psychoanalytic practice degenerates precisely when analysts abandon this linguistic-symbolic dimension in favour of ego-adaptation and object-relational corrective experience.

    the work was already prepared by Freud, simply by his having said that it is overdetermined, but who considers this term long enough to realize that it pertains only to the order of language?

36. #36

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.409

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language—governed by the primacy of the signifier over the signified and by overdetermination as syntax—and that this symbolic order, which is extimate to man (outside him yet constituting him), cannot be reduced to naturalist materialism, neurological automatism, or Jungian archetype; only psychoanalysis, properly grounded in linguistics, can force recognition of this primacy.

    symbolic determination, which Freud calls overdetermination, must be considered first as a product of syntax, if one wishes to grasp its analogical effects. For these effects occur from the text to meaning, rather than imposing their meaning on the text.

37. #37

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.175

    J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

    Theoretical move: In this closing session of Seminar XIX, Lacan condenses the year's argument: the *Yadl'un* (the One makes Being) is not ontology but the structural ground of analytic discourse, and Freud's essential contribution—overdetermination—is precisely the irreducible relation of the signifying chain to the body as the site of jouissance, a jouissance that is always "hand to hand" and never attributable to a single body.

    He contributed the dimension of over determination. Over determination is exactly what I image with my way of formalising in the most radical fashion the essence of discourse, in so far as it is in a turning position with what I have just called a support.

38. #38

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.147

    A month later:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.

    The true sense, the proper sense, is always preceded by the fantasmatic sense which sets the stage... when the supposed lead actor finally appears, he is framed: no matter what he says, the stage has been set and the setting overdetermines his words.

39. #39

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.49

    POWERS OF HORROR > PASSIVATION

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the phobic object is constituted through a specific logical sequence—passivation, sign-inversion, then metaphorization—that parallels the setting up of the signifying function, and that phobia represents the failure of drive introjection that would normally accompany the constitution of the object, making the phobic object a hallucinatory elaboration rather than a proper symbolic one.

    Overdetermined like all metaphors, this 'horse,' this 'dog' also contain speed, racing, flight, motion, the street, traffic, cars, walking an entire world of others towards which they escape.

40. #40

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.69

    POWERS OF HORROR > PROHIBITED INCEST VS. COMING FACE TO FACE WITH THE UNNAMABLE

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the "feminine" as unnamable otherness is not a primeval essence but a pre-verbal border zone—coextensive with primary narcissism—that precedes the paternal prohibition and the advent of language; poetic language is theorized as an attempt to re-symbolize this archaic, pre-verbal jouissance, while the failure to traverse it opens onto psychosis or perversion.

    Freud had strongly emphasized, at the outset of Totem and Taboo, 'man's deep aversion to his former incest wishes'... The two structures cause the threat that would be hovering over the subject to converge on the paternal apex—the one that prohibits, separates, prevents contact

41. #41

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.133

    10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Freud's 1915 metapsychology of affect is internally contradictory: while Freud formally denies the existence of unconscious affects (reducing them to protoaffective ideational potentials), his own tripartite German terminology (Affekte/Gefühle/Empfindungen) and the logic of "true/false connections" between affect and Vorstellung open conceptual space for a coherent theory of unconscious or "misfelt" affects that Lacan's sweeping denial forecloses prematurely.

    the development of affect can . . . proceed from this conscious substitute [bewußten Ersatz], and the nature of that substitute determines the qualitative character of the affect.

42. #42

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.152

    11.

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's sustained subordination of affect to the signifier/Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rests on a selective and partially erroneous reading of Freud's 1915 metapsychology, and proposes instead (following Green) that affect and ideational structure are primordially indistinct—their separation being a secondary abstraction produced by repression itself.

    energetic affects and structural ideas, separated from each other as isolated psychical constituents, are fallouts distilled, through repression and related dynamics, from more primordial psychical units that are neither/both affective energies nor/and ideational structures.

43. #43

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.229

    13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly formulated neuro-psychoanalysis must perform a double move: grounding the denaturalized speaking subject (parlêtre/$) in naturalist accounts of neural plasticity while simultaneously using Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology to theorize subjects whose genesis exceeds bare organic anatomy — thereby resisting both reductive scientism and an antinaturalist 'laicized soul' dualism.

    ontogenetically emergent subjects, as loci of convergence for a vast multitude of overdetermining vectors of 'natural' and 'cultural' influences, are therefore, in part, incredibly dense condensations of 'hypercomplexity'

44. #44

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.201

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

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that linguistic syntax and memory are not properties of symbolic material itself but arise from a specific overlapping mode of application of symbols to a series — a structure that requires overdetermination (double/multiple referents per symbol) to achieve complete representation, making the unconscious "language" an effect of how symbolization is applied rather than of what is symbolized.

    Lacan provides a method of ciphering that assigns double meanings/referents (and sometimes quadruple ones) to all symbols, thus requiring overlapping for complete representation-a form of overdetermination, perhaps.

45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.361

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Over the Rainbow Coalition!

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that "culture war is class war in a displaced mode": the ideological coding of economic class antagonism as moral/cultural struggle (US populist conservatism) is not mere false consciousness or contingent hegemonic articulation, but is structurally overdetermined by class struggle as the "concrete universal" that determines how all other antagonisms (race, gender, religion) are articulated—while liberal multiculturalism, by seeking to translate antagonisms into differences, itself functions as an upper-class ideological tool.

    The term 'overdetermines' is used here in its precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class struggle is the structuring principle

46. #46

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.85

    **SIMULATION, EXPRESSION, AND TRUTH**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's theoretical trajectory from Babinskian psychiatry through Surrealism to a distinctly Freudo-Lacanian account of hysteria, arguing that his "Return to Freud" was simultaneously a return to hysteria as the privileged site where truth emerges in speech, and that his early mirror-stage framework recast hysterical symptoms as imaginary body-fragments rather than organic or simulated phenomena.

    one can act upon the symptom by one causal chain or the other. Lacan recommends that one should not exclude either mechanism

47. #47

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.124

    **PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT** > **Sex is a joke of nature**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual difference is irreducible to either anatomy or social construction—sex must be symbolized and gender embodied—and that this irreducibility is tied to the death drive, castration, and the sinthome; a clinical case (Stanley) and aesthetic examples (Antigone, Trecartin) are deployed to show that trans subjectivity engages an ethical rather than merely imaginary relation to beauty, mortality, and singularity.

    the most radical discovery of psychoanalysis is that sex is tied to the death drive... In Stanley's case, this is made absolutely clear—his wife will get pregnant using sperm from an anonymous donor.

48. #48

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.157

    **CLINIC OF THE CLINAMEN** > **Enjoy your sinthome!**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici deploys the Lucretian concept of 'clinamen' (the infinitesimal, unpredictable swerve of atoms) as a structural analogue to the Lacanian sinthome, arguing that both name a creative deviation that re-knots the Borromean registers and that this framework—rather than a pathologizing clinical structure—offers the proper analytic lens for transgender embodiment and symptomatology.

    the cure depends on what Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq call 'a decision of the ego' overdetermined by the drive