Parlêtre

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (77)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.108

   READING *HAMLET* WITH LACAN

   Theoretical move: The passage uses Shakespeare's Hamlet to illustrate the structural distinction between demand and desire (Hamlet demands his mother act but desires her refusal), and then develops this through a close reading of the Graph of Desire to argue that the "utopian moment" of desire escaping the Other is always recaptured by the symbolic circuit—because fantasy itself is alienated in the Other—while identifying the neurotic's fundamental question as "Where do I fit in?" within the Other's desire.

   Need has no existence in the world of speaking beings until it has been translated, assimilated, and absorbed into language.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.42

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Lacan's Ode to Mediation** > COMMENTARY

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the Lacanian thesis "the unconscious is structured like a language" entails a radical intersubjectivity mediated entirely by the symbolic order, such that there is no unmediated access to another's unconscious — not through speech, body language, or affect — and all analytic communication is therefore constitutively misunderstanding requiring interpretation.

   there is no such thing as a speaking being who is not thoroughly imbedded in other people's discourses, desires, and affects

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.60

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Historical Backdrop and Terminology**

   Theoretical move: Fink reconstructs the terminological and conceptual genealogy of Lacan's *fantasme* by contrasting it with Klein's imaginary-only 'phantasy,' arguing that Lacanian fantasy is irreducible to the imaginary because it is always already structured by the symbolic—and later indexed to the real through the migration of object *a*—a distinction formally encoded in the matheme (S/ ◊ a) and the L Schema.

   its mother (or other primary caretaker) has been a speaking being for many years before the child is born, and her relationship to her child and the objects the child calls out for is structured in terms of the language that structures her world

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.138

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Perversion and the Other**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the Sadean pervert's fundamental operation is to make the Other exist so as to secure his own completeness as an unbarred subject; this allows a structural differentiation of the three clinical categories (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) according to the status of the Other, and reveals the sadist's impossible attempt to recover a primordial jouissance prior to language, repression, and castration.

   his pleasure has not had to pass through the filter of language and, therefore, technically speaking, we probably should not even refer to it as jouissance

5. #05

   Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.21

   BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > BODIES ON THE COUCH

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the mirror stage and the Joycean body as Lacanian anchors to argue that trans embodiment reveals a structural feature of all subjectivity—namely, that the body is never naturally "owned" but is always a fragile, externally mediated construction—thereby reframing gender transition away from the "wrong body" myth toward a Lacanian understanding of identification, fragmentation, and the ego's dependence on idealized images.

   Are bodies merely constructs, tailored by culture, language, and desire? Or does some deeper truth lie beneath their surface, a truth that psychoanalysis must grapple with?

6. #06

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.21

   [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Parade

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.

   Lacan proceeds to recommend shifting focus from this 'I' to what is essential to it specifically as a speaking being (i.e., a parlêtre).

7. #07

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_193"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0219"></span>**split**

   Theoretical move: Lacan radicalises Freud's 'splitting of the ego' from a pathological phenomenon specific to fetishism/psychosis into a universal and irreducible structure of subjectivity itself: the subject is constitutively divided as an effect of the signifier and of speech, making any ideal of full self-presence impossible.

   The subject is split by the very fact that he is a speaking being

8. #08

   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_195"></span>**Subject**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical genealogy of Lacan's concept of the 'subject', arguing that it is irreducibly distinct from the ego, constituted through language and the symbolic order, essentially split, and identified with the Cartesian cogito reread as the subject of the unconscious rather than self-conscious agency.

   because the subject is essentially a speaking being (parlêtre), he is inescapably divided, castrated, SPLIT.

9. #09

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.41

   **2** > <span id="page-38-0"></span>**The Adversary**

   Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's "return to Freud" hinges on a specific, analytic conception of truth as unconscious—identified with the *parlêtre* and the split subject ($)—which serves simultaneously as a critique of ego psychology's false ego/id duality and as the ground for distinguishing Lacanian analysis from all other humanistic or moralistic accounts of repressed verities.

   this 'power of truth' (pouvoir de la vérité) designates an unconscious (more specifically, the 'speaking being' [parlêtre], the subject of the unconscious [$] irreducible to the ego

10. #10

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.49

    **2** > <span id="page-38-0"></span>**The Adversary**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's critique of his analytic "adversaries" (ego psychologists and Kleinian object-relations theorists) turns on two axes: their fetishization of clinical forms over Freud's living spirit, and their reductive pre-Oedipal reductivism—both of which are shown to be impossible by the Nachträglichkeit structure that permanently mediates and liquidates any access to a pre-Oedipal "real." The passage's deeper theoretical move is to show that transference neurosis maps the analysand's libidinal economy onto the analyst-as-Ur-Other, and that psychoanalytic truth, once discovered, propagates itself even through its falsifications.

    Actual analysands on analysts' couches are speaking subjects (i.e., $s as parlêtres) who have become what they are through an ontogenetic life history always-already mediated by the socio-historical matrices of big Others as symbolic orders

11. #11

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.65

    **3** > <span id="page-63-0"></span>Soon after, I add:

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's relationship to Hegel is one of productive ambivalence rather than outright rejection: Hegel's "cunning of reason" (List der Vernunft) is read by Lacan as proto-psychoanalytic, such that Hegel's own philosophical system undergoes a dialectical self-subversion—the truth of the Freudian unconscious speaks through Hegel's speech about truth, even as Hegel remains deaf to its implications. The unconscious (as speaking Ding) is unavoidable, surfaces in dreams/slips/jokes, and exists exclusively on the surface of symbolic inscription rather than hidden in psychical depths.

    its unconscious knowledge that, in and through whatever detours, deferrals, twists, turns, and so on, inevitably will have their effects upon the parlêtre sooner or later

12. #12

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.89

    **5**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of "The Thing's Order" in "The Freudian Thing" establishes the Saussurian signifier-system as structurally homologous with Hegelian speculative dialectics: in both cases, relational wholes (networks of differences-without-positive-terms; dialectical Gestalten) sublate isolated immediacies, and this shared logic connects the symbolic order of language to the unconscious parlêtre and to the mirror stage's imaginary ego.

    the language spoken by, and making possible, the speaking Thing of unconscious truth (i.e., the enunciating subject of the unconscious as a parlêtre)

13. #13

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.95

    **5** > He continues:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian mirror stage is always-already co-constituted by the Symbolic (signifiers, parental language) interpenetrating the Imaginary body-image, that the symbolic order as transsubjective big Other structurally exceeds any aggregation of individual needs, and that ego psychology's rejection of the unconscious operates via foreclosure/repudiation rather than repression—making it a collective psychosis rather than mere resistance.

    what he takes to be the whole range of analytically understood psychopathologies…reveals just how profoundly and thoroughly the symbolic order penetrates and permeates the bodily being of the parlêtre.

14. #14

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.104

    **5** > He continues:

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" — against the ego-psychological mistranslation — is the pivot around which Lacan's critique of ego psychology, his return to Freud, and his theory of the subject as parlêtre (barred subject distinct from the ego) are simultaneously articulated, showing that the translation controversy has both clinical and metapsychological stakes.

    This ça is nothing other than the subject (thus the appeal to the homophony between 'Es' and 'S') of the unconscious qua speaking being, the parlêtre as the $ distinct from the ego.

15. #15

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.105

    **5** > He continues:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's retranslation of Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" reframes the analytic goal not as ego-mastery over the id but as the subject's ethical duty to identify with and own its unconscious dimensions—a position that simultaneously requires treating the analytic symptom as a signifying structure irreducible to the medical model of the sign.

    the ego as being, in its very essence, nothing but a set of defenses against the unconscious, opposing itself to the speaking subjectivity-beyond-the-ego of the parlêtre

16. #16

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.121

    **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.

    le sujet qua $, la Chose freudienne comme parlêtre de l'inconscient

17. #17

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.124

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

    Theoretical move: Against ego-psychological defense analysis, Johnston argues that Lacan's Hegelian-Freudian conception of truth—whereby the unconscious always at least half-says the truth through even the ego's resistances—requires analysts to treat everything said (and unsaid) as analytically interpretable, repositioning the Symbolic big Other as the true interlocutor rather than the imaginary dyad of egos.

    the subject (i.e., 'something else,' 'some-thing other,' 'the thing that speaks to you,' la Chose comme vérité, the $ qua parlêtre of the speaking unconscious

18. #18

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.144

    **8**

    Theoretical move: By staging a dialectical reversal through the prosopopoeia of the talking lectern, Lacan demonstrates that ego psychology's implicit model of the ideal analysand is an inert, mute object whose discourse is wholly replaced by the analyst's own, and that the ego itself—far from being a therapeutic norm—is constitutively alienating méconnaissance formed under the pressure of the Other's discourse.

    Lacan's talking lectern qua speaking being (être parlant, parlêtre) of the previous section's prosopopoeia continuing its aggressive interrogation of the ego psychologists

19. #19

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.150

    **8**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego's structural duality—as both a vehicle for unconscious speech and a weapon of resistance against it—makes it a negative index for the analyst: the weak/fragmented ego betrays unconscious truth (full speech), while the strong/whole ego fortifies méconnaissance, which is why Lacanian clinical practice targets ego-weakness rather than ego-strength, in direct opposition to ego psychology.

    The speaking subject of the unconscious (parlêtre de l'inconscient as "l'inconscient du sujet" [$]) exploits the object that is the ego as a ventriloquist does a puppet.

20. #20

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.173

    **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.

    the speaking being (parlêtre) of the analysand's unconscious and the analyst as the Other to whom It speaks (ça parle)

21. #21

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.184

    **10** > <span id="page-170-0"></span>**Analytic Action** > Or, as I put the same ideas elsewhere:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's "playing dead" (silence and self-cadaverization) instantiates both Symbolic and Real dimensions of the big Other, with death functioning as an incarnation of the Real that precedes its explicit theorization in Seminar VII, and that dialectical thinking—contra bivalent formal logic—is requisite for grasping mortality's paradoxical convergence of the representable and unrepresentable.

    the very words making/marking the identity of a specific parlêtre and through which this peculiar being expresses itself, including such words as the proper names and personal pronouns he/she uses, long predate him/her

22. #22

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.190

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject is constituted through the Symbolic order (big Other as "locus of speech"), and that the Freudian unconscious must be accounted for in strictly Symbolic—not phenomenological-Imaginary—terms, with the unconscious's peculiar atemporality, repetition, and desire explained through the structural mediation of signifiers and the Hegelian-Kojèvian desire-for-recognition.

    Lacan's speaking subject, his sujet comme parlêtre, is neither, one, separate from language nor, two, conscious.

23. #23

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.207

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that biological need (hunger as the oral drive) undergoes a transformational sublation into signifier-mediated demands and desires through Imaginary and Symbolic mediations, and that this Freudian-Lacanian thesis is reinforced by Hegel's (via Kojève) dialectic of recognition, wherein bare survival becomes inextricably entangled with intersubjective recognition—while the ego's resistance to recognizing the unconscious is recast as the Imaginary blocking Symbolic (full) speech.

    another discourse, that of the Symbolic subject (i.e., the parlêtre of the unconscious), speaks in and through the sequences of signs the Imaginary ego expresses

24. #24

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.227

    **12**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural impossibility of paternity (the father always failing to embody the Symbolic Law) produces superegoic overcompensation, and that the proper telos of Lacanian analysis is not happiness but the weakening of the Imaginary ego so that the Symbolic unconscious can speak — with the parlêtre's symptom-knots loosened by letting the unconscious articulate its truths.

    the analytic talking cure, by operating directly on the very signifying stuff of which psychical subjectivity itself is woven, cannot but induce transformations in the fabric of the parlêtre (with the tapestry of its unconscious-structured-like-a-language) loosening or untying those knots of signifiers with which neurotic symptoms are entangled.

25. #25

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.229

    **12**

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

    The speaking unconscious, the ça parle of the parlêtre, is the 'center' around which analysis orbits

26. #26

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.246

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

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that the Lacanian Real functions as an Anstoss — simultaneously a condition of impossibility and of possibility for psychoanalysis — because the subject perpetually slips away from the Symbolic's concatenations of signifiers, making the "impossible profession" of analysis both structurally necessary and interminably generative.

    this emphasis occurs in the guise of la Chose freudienne comme parlêtre, the signifer-emitting truth-that-speaks as ça parle

27. #27

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.83

    <span id="page-74-0"></span>**4** > Te tenth and fnal paragraph of this section goes on to add:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's appeal to Saussurean structural linguistics in "The Freudian Thing" serves as a corrective to post-Freudian analytic currents (ego psychology, object-relations) that eclipse language as the real condition of possibility for analytic experience, with the bell-tower/sun metaphor encoding Lacan's critique of IPA orthodoxy as a parricide of the Freudian-Saussurean foundation.

    shifting focus from this 'I' to what is essential to it specifically as a speaking subject (i.e., a parlêtre)

28. #28

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.78

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot provides the model for a "Real meaning effect" in analytic interpretation: by homogenising the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) as equally consistent and showing their non-chain knotting, he repositions the analytic saying (*dire*) as what makes a knot—not mere word-use—while introducing "ek-sistence" as the Real correlate of the knotted Imaginary.

    Consistency for the *parlêtre,* for the speaking-being, is what is fabricated and what is invented.

29. #29

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.5

    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 creation described as divine is thus reduplicated by the chitchat of the speaking being (parlêtre) with which Evie makes the serpent into what you must forgive me for calling an ass-tightener

30. #30

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is the proper topological support for "first truths" about the Real, which is founded precisely by excluding meaning; and that the speaking being's (parlêtre's) only consistency is bodily/imaginary, while the knot — not the cord — is what properly ex-sists, grounding both truth and the analyst's responsibility in know-how (savoir-faire) rather than in any Other of the Other.

    The senti-mentality proper to the speaking being (parlêtre), the mentality, in so far as, since he senses it, he senses the burden of it. The mentality in so far as he lies (ment).

31. #31

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.51

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday! 6 December 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the Borromean knot of three (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) constitutes the minimal support of the subject — and is itself the structure of paranoid psychosis — while the Sinthome emerges as a necessary fourth term that knots the three rings when they would otherwise come apart, with phallic jouissance located at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Real, and meaning at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

    the subject which is supported by the parlêtre in the sense that this is what I designate as being the unconscious

32. #32

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.97

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real cannot constitute a universe on its own but only through its knotting with the Imaginary and Symbolic via the Borromean structure, and that the torus — not the simple ring — is the proper topological unit for this knotting; he further exploits the distinction between metaphor and structure to insist that topology here is structural (not merely analogical), while his anecdote about his grandson reframes the Unconscious as the intrusion of words one does not understand — language as parasitic.

    why does man have what I call parl'être, namely, this way of talking in such a fashion that nomina non sunt consequentia rerum

33. #33

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.47

    So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Knowledge (as unconscious signifier-effects) and Truth have no relation to one another, that the unconscious is structured as signifier-effects rather than philosophy, and that psychoanalysis is a 'scientific delusion' awaiting a science it may never produce — pivoting through the Four Discourses, the Borromean Knot, and the parlêtre to situate the irreducibility of the Real to matter.

    If indeed there is something of the parlêtre – that one speaks all alone, that one speaks all alone, because one never says anything but one and the same thing.

34. #34

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the structure of man (and the living body) is toric rather than spheroidal, and uses this topology to reframe the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious as a double Möbius strip cut from a torus — displacing any notion of psychic "progress" and redefining the une-bévue (mis-hearing/blunder) as the structural condition of the signifier's exchange value.

    Man *parle-être* as I said which means nothing other than that he speaks signifier, with which the notion of being is confused.

35. #35

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.79

    IV. Closing in on the Symptom

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends the productive opacity of the Écrits as a formal feature rather than an accidental one, while positioning the Freudian unconscious as a genuinely unprecedented discovery, and introduces the concept of the 'parlêtre' (speaking being) as his own reformulation of the unconscious, tying language and sexuality together in a way that psychoanalysis uniquely illuminates—before religion re-absorbs the symptom.

    I will have had a fair dose of what in my discourse I call the speaking being [parletre]. The speaking being is a term I use for the unconscious.

36. #36

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.36

    A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that ostensibly "presymbolic" or "presignifying" vocal phenomena—coughing, hiccups, babbling, and the scream—are not external to the symbolic structure but are always already captured by it; their very non-signifying character makes them the zero-point of signification and the minimal condition of possibility for the signifier as such. Simultaneously, the scream's transformation into appeal enacts the passage from need to desire via the structure of address to the Other.

    the linguistically most crucial step linking the voice and the signifier, and the developmentally most delicate transition between the infant and the speaking being

37. #37

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.41

    A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-linguistic voice (laughter, singing) is neither simply outside linguistic structure nor fully captured by it, and that the singing voice's apparent surplus-meaning is a structural fantasy/illusion that functions as a fetish disavowing castration—the very condition that gives the voice its fascination. The object voice (objet petit a) is precisely what aesthetic or religious idealization of the voice conceals.

    music exists only for a speaking being

38. #38

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.115

    The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies an irreducible ambiguous position between the ethical and the perverse: the ethical voice is pure enunciation without statement (demanding the subject supply the statement/act), while the superego is a "fat voice" that fills this void with positive content, guilt, and transgressive enjoyment — yet neither exhausts the voice, which always marks a void in both the subject and the Other. The chapter then opens onto the political dimension by following Aristotle's division between mere voice (phone) and speech (logos) as the foundation of the political.

    Zoe is naked life, bare life, life reduced to animality; bios is life in the community, in the polis, political life.

39. #39

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.27

    The Similar and the Dissimilar > The Comic Structure of Subjectivity

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that subjectivity is constitutively comic because lack and excess are not opposed but structurally identical: the speaking being's constitutive lack (entry into language) is precisely what generates excessive attachment to unavailable objects, and comedy's function is to make this traumatic coincidence visible against the everyday logic that keeps them apart.

    Humans cannot just exist within the natural world as we imagine other animals can. We must exist constitutively, as beings of language, in an alienated relation to our world.

40. #40

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.34

    Lack and Excess > The Exigencies of Social Coherence

    Theoretical move: Lack and excess are not opposed but structurally co-constitutive: the subject's primordial lack (produced by entrance into language/signification) is the very condition of possibility for excess/enjoyment, and social cohesion is maintained precisely by keeping the two experientially separated — a separation that comedy momentarily undoes by revealing their identity.

    The subject cannot avoid the excess that derives from signification... Every being is implicitly a subject through its lack, though signification makes this lack explicit and thus excessive.

41. #41

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.36

    Lack and Excess > Addicted to Failure

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that addiction exposes the structural relationship between lack and excess that governs the speaking subject's enjoyment: the addict's failure stems from misrecognizing this necessary coincidence and attempting to pursue excess without lack, whereas comedy is defined precisely by its capacity to hold lack and excess together as mutually constitutive.

    The capacity for this type of valuation inheres in every speaking subject, but it reaches its apogee in the form of the addict.

42. #42

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.124

    Signification and Desire > The Absence of a Language Instinct

    Theoretical move: Language is structurally comic because it simultaneously fills a lack and produces excess, transforming the animal into a desiring subject; this coincidence of lack and excess — which evolutionary accounts of language (Pinker) systematically suppress — is the constitutive source of all comedy.

    it also transforms them from animals into beings of excess. In other words, speech fills a lack for the human animal, but it fills this lack excessively

43. #43

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.125

    Signification and Desire > From Needs to Desires

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

    Because of the signifier's impact on the speaking being, needs that can be fulfilled become desires that can't be.

44. #44

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.133

    Signification and Desire > Trouble in Signification

    Theoretical move: McGowan uses Lubitsch's *Trouble in Paradise* to argue that language's structural response to lack is constitutively excessive rather than adaptive: just as Gaston overreacts to vulnerability by generating new risks, language exceeds any compensatory function and produces new dangers alongside the old ones it displaces.

    language, unlike the development of sharp fangs or a third ear through natural selection, creates new dangers at the same time that it allows potential speaking beings to avoid old ones.

45. #45

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.134

    Signification and Desire > The Ability to Say the Wrong Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier structurally unites lack and excess, making comedy the fundamental mode of signification rather than communication; subjects engage excessively with language not to convey meaning but to seek satisfaction and fill their constitutive lack through an appeal to the desire of the social authority.

    The speaking being is burdened by desire or lack but equally by enjoyment or excess.

46. #46

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.197

    Notes > Chapter 1

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

    For speaking beings, thinking about reproduction can have a deflating effect on sexual desire because reproduction often appears as a punishment for the enjoyment of the act.

47. #47

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.27

    POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > OUTSIDE OF THE SACRED, THE ABJECT IS WRITTEN

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that great modern literature (Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Céline) constitutes the privileged site where abjection is symbolized and traversed, and that the aesthetic act of speaking/writing the abject—at the boundary of the symbolic construct and primal repression—performs a catharsis that simultaneously discloses and partially redeems what escapes signification.

    retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn

48. #48

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.47

    POWERS OF HORROR > SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia is an "abortive metaphor of want" — a drive-level substitute for the unnamable void that precedes objectal relation — and that language itself functions as a founding fetish that both enables and forecloses the full traversal of that want, making writing the privileged (if not analytic) site for metabolizing abjection.

    language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial… and defines us in our essence as speaking beings

49. #49

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.61

    POWERS OF HORROR > WHY DOES LANGUAGE APPEAR TO BE "ALIEN"?

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the collapse of the paternal/condensation function in borderline patients dissolves the sign's constitutive unity of word-presentation and thing-presentation, producing a desperate erotization of abjection as the only remaining anchor to the Other—a position that demands psychoanalysis attend to the heterogeneity of signifiance rather than reducing language to a purely philosophical or Saussurian model.

    guarantee its hold on the heterogeneous economy (body and discourse) of the speaking being

50. #50

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.76

    POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT AS RITUAL RESCUE FROM PHOBIA AND PSYCHOSIS > THE FUNDAMENTAL WORK OF MARY DOUGLAS

    Theoretical move: Kristeva, engaging critically with Mary Douglas and structural anthropology, argues that abjection is a universal, subjective-symbolic phenomenon coextensive with the social-symbolic order, proposing that defilement rituals function as collective elaborations of the same border-logic that constitutes the speaking subject — thereby requiring Lacanian symbolic order and subjective dynamics to supplement (and correct) purely syntactic anthropological accounts.

    the only concrete universality that defines the speaking being—the signifying process

51. #51

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.88

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

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that pollution rituals and abjection are socially elaborated responses to the archaic generative power of the mother, functioning to separate the speaking being from the body and secure patrilineal/patriarchal order; the Indian caste system's endogamy is read as a special case where sexual balance is achieved at the cost of multiplying abjective separations elsewhere in the social hierarchy.

    an attempt at separating the speaking being from his body in order that the latter accede to the status of clean and proper body, that is to say, non-assimilable, uneatable, abject

52. #52

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.123

    POWERS OF HORROR > *. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI*

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the New Testament enacts a structural transformation of abjection: by interiorizing impurity (relocating defilement from outside the body to inside the speaking subject), Christianity installs a new topology of subjectivity—the inside/outside boundary—that simultaneously reconciles with the maternal/pagan principle and sublates it into the category of Sin, thereby constituting a split, polyvalent speaking subject.

    Unacceptable, it endures through the subjection to God of a speaking being who is innerly divided and, precisely through speech, does not cease purging himself of it.

53. #53

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.135

    POWERS OF HORROR > AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Christian (Pauline) theology transforms biblical abjection into sin by interiorising and spiritualising it — making it a subjectified, drive-laden relation to the Law and the flesh — such that abjection, rather than being expelled, becomes the privileged site of jouissance, sublimation, and mystical communication with the Other.

    A created being that is always already evil, even if free will gives it responsibility for sin, such would be the ambiguity of the speaking being.

54. #54

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.150

    POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND HORROR

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's narrative, suffering and horror are not merely thematic content but the structural principle of abjection itself: when the subject-object boundary collapses, narrative form disintegrates from linear story into cry, then into poetic violence and silence, while sublimation (writing, music, love) marks the infinitesimal distance that keeps the speaking subject from total dissolution into abjection.

    a narrative is, all in all, the most elaborate attempt, next to syntactic competence, to situate a speaking being between his desires and their prohibitions

55. #55

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.171

    POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > LIFE? A DEATH

    Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's identification with Semmelweis as the paradigmatic structure of abjection: the confusion of life/death and feminine/masculine at the bodily threshold (puerperal fever) drives both the writer's vocation and his particular resolution of the Oedipal situation—not through neurotic triangulation but through simultaneous occupation of all three positions (father/son/feminine), making style itself the impossible third party that separates while touching.

    the danger of death prompted within the speaking being by his perception of that part of himself he fantasies as maternal and feminine

56. #56

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.220

    POWERS OF HORROR > POWERS OF HORROR

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that literature is the privileged signifier of abjection—the "ultimate coding" of civilizational crises—and that the psychoanalyst, positioned in the void, is the rare contemporary witness capable of demystifying the sacred horror underlying religious, moral, and political power, precisely through an "abject knowledge" that is undermined by forgetfulness and laughter.

    a narcissistic crisis on the outskirts of the feminine, shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the human adventure

57. #57

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.82

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

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

    they realize for the community what makes up in depth, historically and logically, the speaking being as such

58. #58

    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.

    Such ideational mediation, always operative in the forms of representational matrices inextricably interwoven with the affective lives of speaking beings, plays a significant part in generating the very feel of feeling.

59. #59

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.147

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Freud and Lacan are genuinely inconsistent in their theorizations of affect, and traces Lacan's shifting positions from an initial dialectical entanglement of the affective and intellectual toward an increasingly unidirectional priority of signifier-ideas over affects—a move Johnston critiques as a motivated misreading that subordinates affect to the ideational order of the unconscious.

    When dealing with speaking beings—analysis deals with nothing but—any affects inevitably will be immanent and impure in a way that is tied up with constellations and configurations of ideational representations

60. #60

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.160

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect—centered on the claim that affect is not repressed but "unfastened," displaced, and estranged from signifiers—constitutes a principled theoretical position rather than a neglect of affect; crucially, this entails that the parlêtre's affective life is irreducibly alienated from signifier-mediated subjectivity, such that there is no representational rapport between affect and signifier.

    affects, at least those affecting the sort of subjectivity of concern in analysis (i.e., the human qua speaking being [parlêtre]), are anything but primitive phenomena of a self-evident nature

61. #61

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.165

    11.

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

    Hystericization occurs when the parlêtre on the couch is hurled into a vortex of doubts through coming to be uncertain about being comfortably and consciously in charge of his/her discourse

62. #62

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.170

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* (aligned with Freudian primary process) is the site where jouissance and language intertwine as *jouis-sens*, generating enigmatic affects that are structurally deceptive—with anxiety as the singular non-deceptive affect—thereby positioning affect as a product of the *parlêtre*'s capture in discourse rather than as transparent self-evidence.

    the parlêtre remains largely oblivious to its own unknown knowledge in the form of a speaking unconscious entangled with the jouissance-saturated meanderings of lalangue as something 'in la langue more than la langue itself.'

63. #63

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.176

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect, centered on anxiety as the uniquely human affect arising from the parlêtre's estrangement from self-transparent affective experience, must be read as a transcontextual theoretical framework rather than merely a historically contingent intervention, and it defends a dialectical (bidirectional) relation between anxiety and doubt against Lacan's own obsessional-neurosis-specific formulation of anxiety as the cause of doubt.

    as a parlêtre, one is deprived of the guarantee of certainty that, when one feels a feeling, one feels that one feels this feeling as such

64. #64

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.185

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that the Lacanian-Copjecian claim that affects are never repressed (only displaced) rests on a conflation of two distinct French terms—*honte* (shame as felt feeling, *Empfindung*) and *pudeur* (shame as affective structure/formation, *Affektbildung*)—and that properly distinguishing them undermines the standard Lacanian position and opens space for the existence of unconscious affects.

    these affects (as felt feelings, as Empfindungen) are symptomatic of subjectivity itself as constituted partially on the basis of restraining barriers and borders

65. #65

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.191

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a psychoanalytic (Freudian-Lacanian) metapsychology of affect supplements Damasio's neuroscientific account by locating the unconscious not as a hidden depth-node but as dissonant, defensive interventions *between* the levels of affective translation (emotion → feeling-had → feeling-known), and further that Damasio's model omits the Lacanian barred subject — the empty negativity of the Cogito — which is irreducible to either embodied core selfhood or autobiographical symbolic identity.

    the analysand, as a parlêtre voicing his/her thoughts and desires, comes to figure out what he/she really thinks and wants through the verbal labor of associational expression itself

66. #66

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.200

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Symbolic mediation (entry into language/the big Other) does not merely overlay a pristine biological core self but "transubstantiates" and "desubstantializes" it, producing a split subject ($) whose specifically human affects (anxiety, horror, melancholy) arise precisely from the gap opened by this denaturalization — a gap Johnston refines by insisting that denaturalization is never total but leaves anachronistic natural residues, such that the distinction between S (protoself) and $ (core self) persists as an internal split within $ itself.

    LeDoux even muses about the possible alterations of affective dynamics in human parlêtres driven by linguistic mediation

67. #67

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.206

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that neither naturalism nor antinaturalism adequately captures the human subject's psychical constitution; against Žižek's (sometimes) absolute antinaturalism, he proposes a dialectic of incomplete, "uneven" denaturalization in which archaic evolutionary strata and sociosymbolic orders remain in irreducible, conflictual tension—a position he claims is borne out by convergences between Damasian neuroscience and Lacanian metapsychology.

    the cause of discrepancies and splits between manifest features of the parlêtre

68. #68

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.214

    13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that a Freudian-Lacanian affective neuroscience requires neither reductive biologism nor antinaturalist denial: the parlêtre is split between nature and antinature, and this very gap (between evolutionary corporeal emotion and linguistically-mediated feeling) functions as itself an affective factor constitutive of the barred subject—a position developed through critical engagement with Panksepp, LeDoux, and Damasio.

    in the exceptional animals that are human beings as parlêtres, the energetic, vital flows of these old mammalian juices run smack into language, being channeled through the mediating networks of the linguistic-representational structures constitutive of speaking subjectivities

69. #69

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.221

    13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s

    Theoretical move: By mapping Lacan's lalangue/la langue distinction onto neuroscientific accounts of language acquisition (Changeux's selectionism, neural pruning, neuroplasticity), Johnston argues that the ambiguity and imprecision of affect-language is not merely an epistemological deficiency but reflects the real structure of affective life itself—a Hegelian move that locates the uncertainty of affect-taxonomies in the thing itself rather than in representational inadequacy.

    sheltering within the parlêtre of la langue, vestiges of lalangue continue to manifest themselves, particularly in the forms familiar from the Freudian 'psychopathology of everyday life'

70. #70

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.226

    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.

    Once created on these bases and in these ways, the parlêtre, the speaking subject who speaks to him-/herself and others about, among other things, affective phenomena using arguably hazy and inexact affect-vocabularies, is autoaffecting

71. #71

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.292

    13. > Inde x > Freud, Sigmund (*continued*)

    Theoretical move: This index chunk maps the theoretical terrain of a Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affects, tracking key debates around unconscious affects, the priority of signifiers over affects, the translation problems around Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, and Lacan's neologisms (lalangue, jouis-sens, senti-ment) as attempts to articulate the affective-linguistic interface — while situating these debates in relation to neuroscience, neurobiology, and continental philosophy.

    estrangement of the parlêtre from its affects, 137–38

72. #72

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.174

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety, as the sole non-deceptive affect, is generated structurally by the parlêtre's immersion in sociosymbolic configurations (discourses) that make self-objectification and intrasubjective self-knowledge radically uncertain; and it proposes a "return to Lacan" analogous to Lacan's return to Freud in order to develop an affective metapsychology that addresses the non-transparency of feeling to itself — the "unfinished" dimension of the Lacanian-Freudian Copernican revolution.

    the objectification of the parlêtre mentioned on this occasion is tantamount to the hystericization described earlier.

73. #73

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.233

    13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian distinction between affects and signifiers collapses under the combined pressure of Freud and affective neuroscience: affects are not merely consciously felt feelings (Empfindungen) but can mislead as to *what* they are—not just why—which means the affect/signifier distinction is better understood as a distinction internal to the category of the signifier itself, yielding the "infinite judgment" that affects are signifiers.

    the relative truth or falsity, honesty or dishonesty, of affects (as felt feelings) is measured against the standards of signifiers (as purportedly different in kind from feelings)... the (in)coherent 'psychical reality' of the parlêtre talking on the couch

74. #74

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.86

    **SIMULATION, EXPRESSION, AND TRUTH**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "discourse of the hysteric" represents a structural expansion of hysteria beyond clinical neurosis into a universal condition of the speaking being, one rooted in Hegelian dialectics, the alienating effect of language, and ultimately the hysterical *prôton pseudos* — thereby linking Lacan's formalization of discourse back to his earliest Babinskian formation while opening onto questions of gender, transgender experience, and the unconscious as "une-bévue."

    The hysteric's discourse pertains not only to a subjective structure but also to the essence of the speaking being.

75. #75

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.94

    **THE SWEET SCIENCE OF TRANSITION**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that being "outside sex" (hors-sex) is not a marker of psychosis but a structural feature of hysteria, and that trans men analysands often exhibit a hysterical structure characterised by an irreducible indecision about sexual positioning, dissatisfied desire, and a defensive strategy against castration — thereby relocating the clinical question of trans identity from foreclosure to neurosis.

    The expression 'to have a body,' as Lacan observed, shows that one 'is not a body': 'having a body' while 'being a body' requires a process of assuming the body one inhabits

76. #76

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.108

    **PORTRAITS IN A TWO-WAY MIRROR**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that Lacanian castration—understood as a structural relation to lack rather than an anatomical fact—is indispensable for the psychoanalytic treatment of trans persons, because it reveals that gender-crossing symptoms are not evasions of sexual difference but heightened engagements with it; the clinical vignette of Amanda illustrates how masquerade, anxiety, and the phallus function together around the impossibility of sexual identity.

    The speaking body loses flesh and gains physique in the symbolic; it is sexed through castration, which works at both a symbolic and imaginary level.

77. #77

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.117

    **PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the trans experience of bodily alienation is not pathological but reveals a universal condition: all subjects must undergo a process of embodiment that bridges a disjunction between experienced and given body. Moving beyond the mirror stage's imaginary identification, Gherovici draws on the Joycean body (ego supported by art/writing rather than image) to propose that gender transition is fundamentally about mortality and subjective death-and-rebirth rather than merely anatomical or sexual reassignment.

    Joyce's solution would be to invent a writing that would 'hold' the body.