Partial Drive

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (324)

1. #01

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

   The Act and Evil in Literature

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

   In the first case, we enjoy the body of the other part by part, but when we want to 'put the pieces together', they can never make a whole, a One.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.151

   The Act and Evil in Literature > Notes

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on "The Act and Evil in Literature," gathering citations from Lacan, Kierkegaard, Zizek, and others; while non-narrative in form, several notes contain substantive theoretical quotations on partial drive, jouissance, castration/repression, and the Master/Slave dialectic as applied to Don Juan.

   If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what ... would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of 'respect' (Achtung) is structurally homologous to Lacan's concept of anxiety: both are 'objective' affects without a cause but with an object (objet petit a), both arise from a 'lack that comes to lack' (le manque vient à manquer), and both mark the subject's encounter with what exceeds the order of representation — thereby aligning Kantian drive theory with Lacanian drive theory avant la lettre.

   the object of the drive coincides with the itinerary of the drive, and is not something that this itinerary 'intends' to attain. In other words, the object of the drive is not an object supposed to provide some satisfaction to the subject, but this satisfaction itself: the object of the drive is satisfaction as object.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.257

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and drive are not opposed but sequentially related: pure desire is the limit-moment at which the subject's fantasy-support appears within its own frame and is sacrificed, marking a torsion from the register of desire into the register of the drive—a passage that constitutes the telos of analytic experience beyond the traversal of fundamental fantasy.

   The absolute object-cause of desire becomes the partial object, the object of the drive.

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **BURNING FREUD: THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS AS A CLASSIC OF SCIENCE AND LITERATURE**

   Theoretical move: The passage reads Freud's "burning son" dream from Chapter VII of *The Interpretation of Dreams* as staging an inverted Oedipal guilt — it is the father who suffers Oedipal guilt toward the son — and links this to the phantasm of the primal father in *Totem and Taboo*, whose pure narcissism reduces desire to autistic self-glorification and displaces others into mere instruments of will.

   the primal father would possess symbolically all the part-images of the mother's body as the perverse reflections of his own self-love

6. #06

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.45

   LOSIN G W H AT WA S ALR E ADY G ONE

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the lost object is constitutively lost—generated retroactively by signification itself rather than empirically lost—and that the subject's satisfaction is inseparable from the repetition of this loss; capitalism and object relations psychoanalysis both err by granting the lost object a substantial, pre-given status, thereby obscuring the ontological primacy of lack.

   He claims, 'When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken.'

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.223

   [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "central defect" of post-Freudian theories of transference (genetic/ego-psychological, object-relational, and intersubjective-introjective) is their reduction of the analytic situation to a dual, imaginary relationship, thereby neglecting the symbolic order and the constitutive impasse of desire; against these, Lacan insists that the direction of treatment must be oriented by the patient's signifiers rather than any normalizing ideal of adaptation or harmonious object-love.

   The origins of object relations theory can be found in Karl Abrahams' work on the notion of the part-object as the object aimed at by the partial drives.

8. #08

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.265

   [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > II. Where is id?

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Lagache's account of the id's structure reaches an impasse because it ignores the function of the signifier; by re-reading the Freudian paradoxes of the id (unorganized, without negation, silent) through linguistic structure (synchrony/diachrony, the signifier's foundational duplicity, and Bejahung), Lacan shows that lack and negation are constitutive of the id and are the very conditions for the emergence of the subject.

   the famous Freudian succession of oral, anal, and genital drives. This does not at all mean, Lacan points out, that drives are identical to signifiers, or that the drives are somehow linguistic. Rather, the point is that their structure is the important thing about them

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.280

   [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the inverted vase schema to articulate the layered structure of imaginary and symbolic identification — distinguishing i(a)/ideal ego from i′(a)/ego-ideal, situating the Other (mirror A) as the structural third that disrupts dyadic imaginary relations, and arguing that the subject of desire emerges in the gap between statement and enunciation opened by signifying substitution — against object-relations developmentalism and ego-psychology.

   Lacan agrees that the notion of a part-object is an important discovery for psychoanalysis, but finds it unfortunate that this discovery has led to 'an ideal totalization of this object'

10. #10

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

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.

    Object a is a partial object or part-object, but this should be understood in a structural sense. Namely, it is 'the exponent of a function' – it is a part-object selected out among the body's 'appendages'

11. #11

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.52

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Finding Oneself in the Void

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's coming-to-be is constituted through its excentric relation to the Other via *das Ding*, and that the *objet petit a*—materialized through the cession of part objects (culminating in the infant's cry as first ceded object)—is the structural trace of the Thing that inaugurates both separation from the Other and the subject's positioning in the space of desire.

    Freud focuses on three component parts of the body— breast, feces, and penis— each associated with different organ systems and drive satisfactions.

12. #12

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.58

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* does not disappear from Lacan's thought after Seminar VII but is progressively replaced by *objet petit a*, which functions as the trace of the Thing; this substitution is theoretically motivated by the need to avoid reifying the Thing, which is ultimately a locus of pure lack—not a substance but something purely supposed by the subject.

    Lacan is clear that when breast, feces, and penis function as part objects they serve as elementary instantiations of the objet a.

13. #13

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.81

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Force

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that archaic Greek religion—its temple architecture, ritual sacrifice, and pantheon—can be read through Lacan's framework as a structural apparatus for staging the Real: the temple encloses the void of the Thing, sacrifice reenacts the birth of the signifier (the "murder of the thing"), and the gods themselves are modes by which the Real is revealed, not simply screened.

    the vivisected limbs and organs of the victim recalling Lacan's notion of part objects, the most primitive embodiments of the objet a, the harbingers of inchoate desire.

14. #14

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_144"></span>**part-object**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's theorisation of the part-object from its Kleinian and Freudian origins through to its reformulation as objet petit a, arguing that for Lacan objects are partial not because they are fragments of a whole body but because they are only partially represented in the unconscious via the signifying system, and that they lack specular image—making them irreducible to narcissistic completeness.

    just as all DRIVES are partial drives, so all objects are necessarily partial objects.

15. #15

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_55"></span>**drive**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's reworking of Freudian drive theory: by distinguishing drive from instinct, articulating the drive's circuit through three grammatical voices, insisting on the irreducible partiality of drives, and identifying every drive as a death drive, Lacan reframes the drive as a symbolic-cultural construct whose circular aim — not goal — constitutes the only path beyond the pleasure principle.

    Lacan argues that the drives are partial, not in the sense that they are parts of a whole (a 'genital drive'), but in the sense that they only represent sexuality partially; they do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of enjoyment.

16. #16

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_ncx_77"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_page_0096"></span>***G***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary traces the theoretical development of several key Lacanian concepts—gap, gaze, genital stage, gestalt, and graph of desire—showing how Lacan progressively distinguishes his positions from Freudian ego-psychology, Sartrean phenomenology, and object-relations theory through a consistent emphasis on constitutive division, the non-relation, and the structured duplicity of desire.

    The genital drive is not listed by Lacan as one of the partial drives. Given that Lacan argues that every drive is a partial drive, his refusal to include the genital drive among the partial drives is tantamount to questioning its existence.

17. #17

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_136"></span>***objet (petit) a***

    Theoretical move: This passage traces the full conceptual evolution of objet petit a across Lacan's work, showing how it migrates from a purely imaginary little other (schema L, 1955) through the object of desire/fantasy (1957) to the real cause of desire, surplus-jouissance, and finally semblance of being at the centre of the Borromean knot—demonstrating that the concept accumulates rather than replaces its earlier determinations.

    Objet petit a is any object which sets desire in motion, especially the partial objects which define the drives. The drives do not seek to attain the objet petit a, but rather circle round it.

18. #18

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_33"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0046"></span>**castration complex**

    Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Lacan's transformation of Freud's castration complex: by redefining castration as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object (the phallus), articulated across three "times" of the Oedipus complex, Lacan universalises castration beyond anatomical difference and makes the assumption or refusal of castration the structural hinge for both clinical structures (neurosis/perversion/psychosis) and sexuation.

    it is the first moment when the partial drives are unified under the primacy of the genital organs.

19. #19

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_48"></span>**demand**

    Theoretical move: Demand is theorised as structurally double: it articulates a biological need while simultaneously becoming a demand for love from the Other, and this gap between the two functions is precisely what generates desire as an insatiable leftover — a move that situates demand as the mediating term in the Need-Demand-Desire triad.

    Lacan rethinks the various stages of libidinal organisation as forms of demand. The oral stage is constituted by a demand to be fed... In the anal stage... it is the demand of the Other

20. #20

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_10"></span>**absence**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that absence is not a mere negation but has positive ontological status within the Symbolic order — grounded in Jakobson's phonemic logic and Freud's fort/da — such that the word itself is "a presence made of absence," and absence as such can constitute a partial object, thereby distinguishing the Symbolic from the Real.

    Lacan to say that 'the nothing' (le rien) is in itself an object (a partial object) (S4, 184–5).

21. #21

    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_174"></span>**sadism/masochism**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: (1) it establishes Lacan's reversal of Freud's sadism/masochism hierarchy by grounding both in the invocatory drive, making masochism primary and sadism a disavowal of it; (2) it articulates the concept of 'scene' as the frame distinguishing acting out (remaining within the symbolic) from passage to the act (exit from the symbolic into the real via identification with objet petit a).

    Masochism occupies a special place among the perversions, just as the invoking drive occupies a privileged place among the partial drives; it is the 'limit-experience' in the attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle.

22. #22

    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_182"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0208"></span>**sexual relationship**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically unpacks Lacan's formula 'there is no sexual relationship' as condensing six distinct theoretical points about sexual difference: the mediating role of language, the asymmetry of the symbolic order (one signifier, the phallus), the impossibility of harmony between the sexes, the partiality of the drive's object, the woman's reduction to the mother function, and the opposition of sex to meaning/relation in the real.

    The sexual drives are directed not towards a 'whole person' but towards PART-OBJECTS. There is therefore no such thing as a sexual relationship between two subjects, only between a subject and a (partial) object.

23. #23

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part27.xhtml_ncx_162"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part27.xhtml_page_0185"></span>***Q***

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian theory, despite its predominance of triadic schemes, consistently requires fourfold (quaternary) structures to achieve adequate "subjective ordering" — and traces how the fourth element variously occupies the positions of death, the phallus, the letter, or the sinthome across different theoretical moments.

    the four partial drives and their four corresponding part-objects

24. #24

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_ncx_101"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_page_0119"></span>***K***

    Theoretical move: This passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it positions Kleinian psychoanalysis as a key foil for Lacan's reading of Freud, cataloguing his criticisms (fantasy in the imaginary, neglect of the symbolic, linguistic unconscious) while acknowledging partial affinities; second, it articulates Lacan's fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge—imaginary connaissance (ego-based misrecognition) and symbolic savoir (unconscious desire, jouissance of the Other)—establishing their opposed roles in psychoanalytic treatment.

    for developing the concept of the PART-OBJECT (though once again Lacan's formulations on this concept differ greatly from Klein's).

25. #25

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_49"></span>**desire**

    Theoretical move: This passage establishes Desire as the central concept of Lacanian theory by distinguishing it rigorously from Need and Demand, grounding it in the Hegelian-Kojèvian framework of mutual recognition, and defining it structurally as a relation to Lack caused by Objet petit a rather than a relation to any satisfiable object.

    the drives are the particular (partial) manifestations of a single force called desire (although there may also be desires which are not manifested in the drives: see S11, 243).

26. #26

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    6

    Theoretical move: Freud reconstructs the history of his drive theory, arguing that the introduction of the death drive beside Eros is not a rupture but a clarification of a long-developing dualism, and concludes that civilization itself is the arena of the struggle between Eros and the death drive—the life drive's project of binding humanity into ever-larger units against the autonomous, original drive for aggression and destruction.

    In sadism, which has long been recognized as a partial drive of sexuality, one would be faced with a particularly strong alloy of the striving for love and the drive for destruction

27. #27

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.217

    **XVII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Balint's object-relation theory by showing that intersubjectivity—not satisfaction of need—is the original and irreducible dimension of desire, demonstrated through the perversions and Sartre's phenomenology of the gaze and love, and concluding that there is no transition from animal need to human desire without positing intersubjectivity from the start.

    Before the stage of genital normalisation, first sketched around the Oedipus complex, the child is given over to an entire series of phases connoted by the term component drives.

28. #28

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.152

    **xn**

    Theoretical move: The optical schema of the spherical and plane mirror is used to articulate the tripartite Real/Imaginary/Symbolic structure, showing how the Mirror Stage institutes the Ideal Ego as an anticipatory mastery that alienates the subject's fragmented desire into the other, while grounding the Hegelian thesis that 'desire is the desire of the other' in a structural account of human subjectivity distinct from animal Innenwelt/Umwelt coupling.

    Freud's libido theory is built upon the preservation, upon the progressive compounding of a number of partial drives, which may or may not succeed in leading to a mature desire.

29. #29

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topological inversion between the anxiety-point and the point of desire across the oral and phallic/scopic levels: at the oral level anxiety is located at the Other (the mother's body) while desire is secured in the fantasy-relation to the partial object; at the phallic level this is strictly reversed, with orgasm itself functioning as the anxiety-point's homologue. The eye is then introduced as the new partial object (objet a) whose structure of mirage and exclusion from transcendental aesthetics anchors this topology.

    the distinction of the partial object has been played out as functioning in the relation of desire.

30. #30

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.103

    BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a catalogue of partial objects (objet petit a) as pre-symbolic, non-shareable objects whose entry into the field of exchange signals anxiety, while simultaneously arguing that the partial object's synchronic function in transference has been systematically neglected — a neglect that explains Freud's limit at castration and the post-analytic failures in sexual function. Topological surfaces (cross-cap, Möbius strip) are then deployed to distinguish the specular (imaginary) object from objet petit a.

    the synchronic dimension, the dimension of what is precisely included, latent, in the position of the analyst and where lies, in the space that determines this position, the function of the partial object.

31. #31

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.242

    **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral drive must be re-examined to show that the anxiety-point (located at the level of the mother/Other) and the point of desire (located at the mamma as partial object) are structurally distinct and non-coincident, with the mamma functioning as an 'amboceptive' object internal to the child's own sphere — thereby reframing the castration complex not as a dead end but as misread through an oral reduction that only metaphorically displaces it.

    The lack to which satisfaction is linked, however, is something else. The gulf between lack and the function of desire in action, structured by the fantasy and by the subject's vacillation in his relation to the partial object, indicates the non-concurrence that creates anxiety.

32. #32

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.324

    **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that anxiety is "not without object" — its object being the objet petit a in its primordial form as a "yieldable object" (cession) — and uses this to ground the specific structure of obsessional desire: the a precedes and substitutes for the subject, inaugurating a dialectic in which all forms of the a (breast, gaze, voice, faeces) share the structural characteristic of potential cession.

    the libido's points of fixation are always poised around one of the moments that nature offers to the potential structure of subjective cession

33. #33

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.178

    **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is grounded in the "deciduous" (falling-away) character of the partial object, which he reframes as a neurotic fantasy rather than a structural given, and uses the clinical phenomenon of anxiety-triggered orgasm to illustrate the real relation between anxiety, jouissance, and desire — positioning anxiety as a signal at the intersection of the Real and the subject's loss.

    It is only on the basis of this deciduous object that we can see what it means to have spoken about the partial object. In point of fact, I'll tell you right away, the partial object is an invention of the neurotic. It's a fantasy.

34. #34

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.267

    **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that visual desire masks anxiety by substituting the non-specular Objet petit a with mere appearances, and pivots to establishing the voice as the most originary partial object — more fundamental than the scopic or anal object — whose relation to anxiety and desire must be grasped through the myth of the father's murder rather than through the primacy of maternal desire.

    I haven't reported… on either the anal object or the anal stage. This is because it is also strictly speaking unthinkable, unless it is taken up completely from scratch in the function of desire, starting from this point… the object of the voice.

35. #35

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.227

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan regrounds the philosophical function of "cause" — irreducible to critique across all of Western philosophy — in the structural "syncope" of the objet petit a within the fantasy: cause is not a rational category but the shadow of anxiety's certainty, which is the only non-deceptive certainty, and this move radically challenges any cognizance that attempts to domesticate desire into objectivity.

    It should be remembered that this portion is a body and that we are objectal, which means that we are only objects of desire as bodies.

36. #36

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.176

    **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan maps the perverse positions of sadism and masochism through the differential concealment of anxiety and the object (objet a), arguing that anxiety is the subject's real leftover and that castration is best understood not as threat but through the structural "falling-away" of the phallus as object—a detumescent object whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence.

    Does qualifying the breast as a partial object say it all? When I say amboceptor, I'm emphasizing that it is just as necessary to spell out the maternal subject's relation to the breast as the nursling's relation to the breast.

37. #37

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    **x** > **xv**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses archaeological and textual evidence of circumcision (Egyptian inscriptions, biblical passages) to argue that circumcision's structural significance lies not in a totalising sign but in the articulation of *separation from an object* — specifically, 'to be separated from one's foreskin' — thereby grounding the practice in the logic of castration and the structuring of the object of desire.

    maintaining the foreskin as the object of the operation just as much as he who is undergoing it

38. #38

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.303

    **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP** > what the reproducer has understood what the explainer had understood

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Piaget's tap experiment to critique psychology's blindness to the causal dimension of the object as structured by desire and the phallic relation, then articulates five levels of the constitution of objet petit a in the S/A relation—oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and the desire of the Other—deploying this schema to reframe obsessional neurosis as structured around demand's cover over the desire of the Other, with anxiety as the irreducible kernel.

    At the level of the relation to the oral object... the disjunction between subject and a, the breast, is produced... At the second level, the level of the anal object

39. #39

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.306

    **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a "circular constitution" of objet petit a across all libidinal stages—against Abraham's linear-developmental model—grounding the cause-function of desire structurally in the gap between cause and effect, with excrement as the paradigm case that reveals how biological objects only acquire their subjective destiny through the dominance of the signifier.

    The fourth and fifth stages are in a return position that brings them back into correlation with the first and second stages respectively.

40. #40

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety has a determinate structure — it is always *framed* — and uses this structural claim to reposition both the Unheimliche and the fantasy (via the Wolf Man's dream as window-framed scene) as instances of that framing, while also deploying Ferenczi's notion of the "unmediated interruption" of female genitality to argue that the structural empty place (locus of jouissance) is constitutive of desire prior to any diachronic myth of maturation.

    something other than a locus of convergence, of synthesis, of everything that up to that point had presented itself in terms of partial aims

41. #41

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

    we've found ourselves having to add to the oral object, the anal object and the phallic object... two further stages of the object, thus bringing them to five

42. #42

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    BookX Anxiety > **v** > Schema of the effaced trace

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises when the constitutive void that preserves desire is filled in by a false response to demand, and that the drive (distinct from instinct) is structured by the cut between barred subject and demand, with partial objects (breast, scybalum) marking the place of this void rather than stages of relational maturation.

    when we're led to bring in the object that is correlative to the oral drive, we speak of the maternal nipple... what allows it to be replaced by any old feeding bottle, which functions in exactly the same way in the economy of the oral drive.

43. #43

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.337

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

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

    whilst it is true that in sum and substance the Other is always there in its full reality... development doesn't afford even access to the Other's reality... the oral level... the anal object

44. #44

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.187

    **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety functions not as a mediator but as a *median* term between jouissance and desire: the subject of jouissance is mythical and can only appear through the remainder *a*, which resists signifierization and therefore cannot serve as a metaphor for that subject; it is precisely this irreducible waste-remainder that founds the desiring (barred) subject, with anxiety marking the gap between jouissance and desire that must be traversed in the constitution of fantasy.

    When I used Zurbaran to tell you about breasts and eyes, using his Lucy and Agatha, were you not struck by the fact that these objects a present themselves in a positive form?

45. #45

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.361

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    partial object 94, 167, 168, 236, 240

46. #46

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.313

    **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anal object (excrement as objet petit a) achieves its subjective function not through the mother's demand alone, but through its structural articulation with castration (- φ): excrement symbolizes phallic loss, grounds obsessional ambivalence, and prefigures the function of the object a as territorial/representative trace — yet this still falls short of explaining how the concealment of the object founds desire as such.

    At the level of the oral stage, where the object a is the breast, the nipple, what you will, the nub of what's at issue is as follows.

47. #47

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.335

    **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

    from the oral to the anal, from the anal to the phallic, from the phallic to the scopic, and from the scopic to the vociferated

48. #48

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan insists that the drive cannot be reduced to a biological or organic given (thrust/Drang), and grounds this by returning to Freud's 1915 article to show that 'Trieb' is a fundamental concept (Grundbegriff) comprising four irreducibly distinct terms—Drang, source, object, aim—whose very enumeration reveals the drive's non-natural, constructed character.

    Freud himself tells us at the beginning of this article that the drive is a Grundbegriff, a fundamental concept.

49. #49

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, in its turning inside-out through the erogenous zone, always seeks something that responds in the Other; and he prepares to introduce the lamella-myth (via Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium) to articulate the drive's 'false organ' as the only graspable pole in the domain of sexuality.

    the polarity of the drive cycle and something that is always at the centre. It is an organ, in the sense of an instrument, of the drive

50. #50

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    CONTENTS

    Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive structural/navigational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.

    14 The Partial Drive and its Circuit

51. #51

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that beyond appearance lies not a 'thing-in-itself' but the gaze, and that across all drive dimensions—including the scopic—the objet a functions uniformly as that which the subject separates from itself to constitute itself, serving as a symbol of the lack (the phallus insofar as it is absent), requiring the object to be both separable and related to lack.

    At the oral level, it is the nothing, in so far as that from which

52. #52

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical metamorphosis between partial drives; the passage from one drive to another is produced not by organic maturation but by the intervention of the demand of the Other, with the lost object (objet petit a) serving as the structural cause of drive-circuit incompleteness rather than an originary satisfaction.

    There is no relation of production between one of the partial drives and the next. The passage from the oral drive to the anal drive can be produced not by a process of maturation, but by the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive.

53. #53

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.193

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's three-stage account of the drive circuit (active, reflexive, passive) to argue that the appearance of a new subject — the other — is constitutively produced by the drive's circular course, making the subject not a presupposition but an outcome of the drive's reversal.

    Beschauen und beschaut werden, to see and to be seen, qualen and gequalt werden, to torment and to be tormented.

54. #54

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates Freud's drive theory by substituting 'machen' for 'werden' to reveal that the drive's loop is structured around 'making oneself' (se faire) — seeing, heard, sucked — thereby showing that each drive's reflexive turn constitutes the subject while also introducing the voice drive (making oneself heard) as a structural complement to the scopic drive.

    Let us turn to the oral drive. What is it? One speaks of phantasies of devouring, of being gobbled up.

55. #55

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto a hierarchy of structural positions—demand, metaphor/gift, desire, unconscious—culminating in the argument that the gaze functions as objet petit a precisely because it operates through a constitutive lure, placing the subject at the level of lack.

    At the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other. It is the same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is the closest to the experience of the unconscious.

56. #56

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.186

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the Drang (thrust) of the drive through a topological-mathematical analogy drawn from vector calculus and potential energy fields, arguing that the drive's constancy is defined not by physiological variation but by its relation to a rim-like structure (gap/béance) — what he calls the Quelle — which maintains a constant flux across any surface it subtends.

    what characterizes the Drang, the thrust of the drive, is the maintained constancy which, to take a fairly useful image, measures up to an opening that is, up to a certain individualized point, variable.

57. #57

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.191

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the partial drives constitute the irreducible middle term between repression/symptom (structured as signifiers) and interpretation/desire, and that sexuality participates in psychical life precisely through the gap-like structure of the unconscious—a structure that cannot be reduced to neutral psychical energy.

    sexuality comes into play only in the form of partial drives. The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious.

58. #58

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.215

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity distinction in drive theory is purely grammatical (an artifice of Freud's articulation), and that each drive stage must be reformulated as an active "making oneself seen/heard," while distinguishing the drive field (pure activity) from the narcissistic field of love (reciprocity); he simultaneously grounds the erogenous zones in the lamella's rim-insertion into bodily orifices as the structural link between libido, the drives, and the unconscious.

    the organ of the libido, the lamella, which links to the unconscious the so-called oral and anal drives, to which I would add the scopic drive and what one ought almost to call the invocatory drive

59. #59

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.183

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's claim that the drive's object is a matter of indifference by introducing objet petit a as the cause of desire that the drive encircles rather than directly satisfies, captured in the untranslatable formula 'la pulsion en fait le tour' — the drive circles/tricks the object without ever reaching it.

    As far as the oral drive is concerned, for example, it is obvious that it is not a question of food, nor of the memory of food, nor the echo of food; nor the mother's care, but of something that is called the breast

60. #60

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

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The partial drive is theorised as the mechanism by which the pleasure principle is forced open, revealing a jouissance beyond homeostasis and introducing an "other reality" that retroactively structures the Real-Ich itself.

    The forcing of the pleasure principle by the effect of the partial drive—it is by this that we may conceive that the partial, ambiguous drives are installed at the limit of an Erhaltungstrieb

61. #61

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: The partial drive achieves satisfaction not by attaining a biologically defined reproductive aim but through the self-enclosed circuit of its own return to the erogenous zone; the distinction between 'aim' (way taken) and 'goal' (terminal end) is used to redefine drive satisfaction as the loop itself rather than any external terminus.

    If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point of view of a biological totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit.

62. #62

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.206

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's account of the Lust-Ich and Real-Ich to argue that love is grounded at the level of the Ich (not the drive), and that the partial drives appropriate the fields of pleasure/unpleasure only secondarily — connecting Freudian narcissism to the classical philosophical (Thomistic) theory of love as willing one's own good.

    It is a question here of the diversity of the partial drives. In this way, we are brought to the third level that he introduces, that of activity/passivity.

63. #63

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.196

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the partial drive as a headless subject whose circuit (modeled on Freud's Schub) returns around a rim-object, and argues that the topological unity between the gaps of the drive apparatus and the gaps of the signifying chain is what enables the drive to function within the unconscious—while carefully distinguishing drive structure from perversion.

    We must consider the drive under the heading of the kon-Stante ICrafi that sustains it as a stationary tension.

64. #64

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's essential structure — its circular return to the subject rather than simple object-directedness — is irreducible to love or well-being, and that the subject's realization in the signifier depends on a constitutive gap in its relation to the Other, theorized topologically as the function of the rim.

    the movement by which the arrow that sets out towards the target fulfills its function only by really reemerging from it, and returning on to the subject

65. #65

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.192

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: The partial drive is theorised as only partially representing sexuality's biological curve of fulfilment, whose structural movement (outward and back) cannot be reduced to linguistic voicing; sexuality is integrated into the dialectic of desire through partial drives, not through biological pairing, and the drive's telos is death — illustrated via Heraclitus's bow-as-life/death figure.

    sexuality is realized only through the operation of the drives in so far as they are partial drives, partial with regard to the biological finality of sexuality.

66. #66

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the 'liquidation of the transference' cannot mean dissolving the unconscious or eliminating knowledge; rather, it must mean the permanent liquidation of the deceptive movement by which transference closes the unconscious—culminating not in identification with the analyst but in the dissolution of the Subject Supposed to Know as a structural position.

    proper function of the part-object, and of what is signified, for example, by the breast, which he deals with at length, is doomed although interesting in itself, to an aimless development that leads nowhere.

67. #67

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is never the aim of desire but rather the foundation of identification (or its disavowal), and uses this to pivot toward Freud's analysis of love, establishing that love's fundamentally narcissistic structure is what must be interrogated to understand how the love object can come to function as an object of desire.

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

68. #68

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive is structured around a lacunary apparatus in which the lost object (objet a) is installed, while fantasy functions as the support of desire by placing a split subject in relation to an object that never shows its true face; perversion is then theorized as an inversion of this fantasy structure wherein the subject determines itself as object.

    It is the status of the objet a in so far as it is present in the drive.

69. #69

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.187

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function specifically as rims by virtue of the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that when other bodily zones enter the economy of desire they do so through desexualization—most paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—thereby distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the broader field of desire.

    In the analytic tradition, we always refer to the strictly focused image of zones reduced to their function as rim. This does not in the least mean that, in our symptomatology, other zones do not come into play.

70. #70

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.218

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends the structural (linguistic) account of the unconscious against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics, by re-articulating those dynamics through the topology of the subject/Other division and the partiality of the drive, thereby integrating libidinal force into a structuralist framework rather than opposing it.

    Every drive being, by its essence as drive, a partial drive, no

71. #71

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.182

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real must be defined as the impossible—not merely as the obstacle to the pleasure principle (Freud's limited formulation) but as constitutive of both fields (pleasure principle and drive alike), and that no object of need can ever satisfy the drive, whose satisfaction is always partial and displaced.

    in analytic experience, the oral drive is encountered at the final term, in a situation in which it does no more than order the menu.

72. #72

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.198

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive—illustrated through exhibitionism and sado-masochism—is only completed in its reversed, active form when the other is brought into play; this circuit constitutes the sole permitted transgression of the pleasure principle, revealing that desire is a detour aimed at catching the jouissance of the other.

    the structure of the drive appears, it is really completed only in its reversed form, in its return form, which is the true active drive.

73. #73

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (the ego ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject is seen) and the deeper, alienated level at which the objet petit a is encountered in transference — love as deception is contrasted with the paradoxical 'something more than you' that the analysand addresses to the analyst, culminating in the logic of the gift-turned-into-excrement as the swerve that marks analytic conclusion.

    the meaning of that breast-complex, that mammal-complex, whose relation to the oral drive Bergler saw so clearly, except that the orality in question has nothing to do with food

74. #74

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche—only its equivalents (activity/passivity) appear there—and therefore the subject must learn from the Other (via the Oedipus complex) what it means to be man or woman; sexuality is established in the psyche through lack, not through any direct biological function.

    Whether it is the drive, the partial drive, that orientates him to it, or whether the partial drive alone is the representative in the psyche of the consequences of sexuality

75. #75

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the enigma of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is fundamentally decoupled from biological rhythm, kinetic discharge, and aim-attainment, establishing the drive as a constant force whose satisfaction does not require reaching its object.

    it is curious that there are four vicissitudes as there are four elements of the drive

76. #76

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan defers but acknowledges the economic point of view (energetics, constant force vs. variation) as a valid theoretical concern for understanding the drive, hinting that a reference to energetics in a limited system — where each point is characterized in terms of potential energy — will illuminate the discontinuous combinatory structure of the drive.

    the other qualities that specify the drive must be conceived as discontinuous elements

77. #77

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.197

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: In perversion, and specifically voyeurism, the subject is not absent but rather precisely placed within the drive's circuit: the object of the scopic drive (the gaze) is the lost object refound through the introduction of the Other, and what is sought is not the phallus but its absence — making absence itself the constitutive object of the scopic drive's aim.

    You grasp here the ambiguity of what is at issue when we speak of the scopic drive.

78. #78

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the object of the drive as a "headless subjectification" — a structure without a subject — and links this topological formulation to the Freudian account of how repression of libido under the pleasure principle paradoxically enables the very development of the mental apparatus, including the capacity for attention (Aufmerksamkeit).

    The object of the drive is to be situated at the level of what I have metaphorically called a headless subjectification, a subjectification without subject, a bone, a structure, an outline, which represents one side of the topology.

79. #79

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the narcissistic field of love (where the Other is structurally absent) to the partial drive's circular movement as the proper mechanism through which the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — distinguishing narcissistic self-love from the drive's heterogeneous, gap-bearing circularity, and using the scopic drive as the exemplary case.

    sexuality as such comes into play, exercises its proper activity, through the mediation—paradoxical as that may seem—of the partial drives.

80. #80

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.220

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the lack at the heart of the subject's advent by grounding it in a real, biological lack introduced by sexed reproduction and individual death, and replaces Aristophanes' myth of complementary sexual halves with the myth of the lamella — repositioning the libido not as a field of forces but as an unreal organ that embodies the partial drive's essentially death-driven character.

    the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being.

81. #81

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: Against any holistic or unifying conception of sexuality (love as representative of the total sexual tendency), Lacan reads Freud's drive-text as establishing that the drives are irreducibly partial, governed by an economic factor tied to the Pleasure Principle operating at the level of the Real-Ich (homeostatic nervous system), not by biological reproductive finality.

    the drives, as they present themselves in the process of are partial drives are linked to an economic factor.

82. #82

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.285

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: The analyst must maintain a precise distance between the point where the subject sees himself as lovable and the point where objet petit a causes the subject as lack; this gap, which the petit a never crosses, is what makes transference operable and can be topologized as an internal eight (cross-cap) surface.

    The drive in its relation to the part-object is subjacent here.

83. #83

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or divisible energy but as an organ — both in the sense of a bodily part and an instrument — thereby displacing hydraulic/economic models and preparing a structural-topological account of the drive and its relation to the subject and the Other.

    making oneself... seen, heard, sucked, shitted

84. #84

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.213

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan equates the libido with immortal, irrepressible life subtracted from the sexed being, positioning it as the ground of all partial objects (objets a), and locates the emergence of the subject in the locus of the Other through the logic of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier.

    all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The objets a are merely its representatives, its figures. The breast—as equivocal...

85. #85

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is constituted through division in the field of the Other, such that only partial drives (never a unified sexual drive) are apprehensible, while love and genitality belong to the Other's field and are structured by the Oedipus complex — meaning the ganze Sexualstrebung is nowhere present in the subject but diffused across culture.

    we apprehend only partial drives. The ganze Sexualstrebung, the representation of the totality of the sexual drive, is not to be found there, Freud tells us.

86. #86

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a polemical dismissal of neo-Freudian adaptational constructions to re-grounding the drive's theory: he argues that transference enacts the reality of the unconscious precisely as sexuality, but questions whether love—its visible surface in the transference—is the privileged or culminating form of that sexuality, thus opening a more radical inquiry into the partial drive.

    At this point, I will resume my discourse on the drive. I was led to approach it after positing that the transference is what manifests in experience the enacting of the reality of the unconscious, in so far as that reality is sexuality.

87. #87

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's concept of drive (Trieb) as a fundamental fiction rather than a myth or model, arguing that the Grundbegriffe of psychoanalysis must trace their way in the real to be scientifically valid, and begins a deconstruction of the drive's four terms by examining their disjointedness, starting with thrust as tendency to discharge.

    Now let us ask ourselves what appears first when we look more closely at the four terms laid down by Freud in relation to the drive. Let us say that these four terms cannot but appear disjointed.

88. #88

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorises the drive not as an instinct oriented toward a natural end but as a surrealist 'montage' — an assemblage whose components (Drang, object, aim, source) can be reversed and recombined without any governing finality, thereby radically distinguishing the drive from biological instinct.

    Why does one speak of the mouth and not of the oesophagus, or the stomach? They participate just as much in the oral function. But at the erogenous level we speak of the mouth, of the lips and the teeth

89. #89

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets the Breuer/Anna O. episode to demonstrate that "man's desire is the desire of the Other," arguing that Freud treated Breuer as a hysteric by locating Bertha's transference in the unconscious of the Other rather than Breuer's own desire—and then pivots this to claim that what truly determines the direction of psychoanalytic theory of transference is the desire of the analyst.

    I could do an analysis of Abraham for you simply on the basis of his theory of part-objects.

90. #90

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    CONTENTS

    Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive organisational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.

    14 The Partial Drive and its Circuit

91. #91

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > THE EYE AND THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces the scopic drive's structural split between eye and gaze as the operative form of castration anxiety in the visual field, then uses the phenomenon of mimicry — critiquing adaptive explanations — to press the question of what the drive's "something transmitted" ultimately is, opening toward the function of the ocelli as a non-adaptive display.

    something is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree it

92. #92

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106

    THE LINE AND LIGHT

    Theoretical move: Lacan situates the eye as a privileged partial object among those central to psychoanalytic experience, tracing its appearance back to the earliest forms of life, and introduces a triangular optical schema to frame the relation between subject, organ, and the gaze.

    The relation of the subject with the organ is at the heart of our experience.

93. #93

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that in the scopic dimension, the objet a functions as the separated organ that symbolises lack (the phallus in so far as it is lacking), unifying the gaze with the broader logic of drive-objects across all dimensions.

    It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack. I'll explain at once what I mean. At the oral level, it is the nothing, in so far as that from which

94. #94

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto distinct registers of lack and desire, arguing that at the scopic level the gaze functions as objet petit a through a constitutive lure whereby the subject is presented as other than he is and what is shown is not what he wishes to see.

    The anal level is the locus of metaphor—one object for another, give the faeces in place of the phallus.

95. #95

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the standard account of transference away from the analysand's unconscious spontaneity and toward the desire of the analyst, arguing that every analyst's theory of transference is itself a readable symptom of the analyst's own desire — a move that simultaneously re-reads the Breuer/Anna O. episode through the formula "man's desire is the desire of the Other."

    I could do an analysis of Abraham for you simply on the basis of his theory of part-objects.

96. #96

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues against organicist and archaic readings of the drive by returning to Freud's 1915 structural analysis of Trieb, insisting that the drive must be understood as a Grundbegriff (fundamental concept) composed of four distinct terms—not reducible to mere biological thrust or inertia—and that this distinction is precisely what his teaching requires analysts to grasp in order to understand the unconscious.

    Freud says that it is important to distinguish four terms in the drive: Drang, thrust; the source; Objekt, the object; Ziel, the aim.

97. #97

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.178

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, as a Grundbegriff, functions not as a model but as a fundamental fiction (in Bentham's sense), and begins deconstructing Freud's four terms of the drive by examining their disjointed character, starting with thrust as a tendency to discharge tied to the concept of excitation (Reiz).

    Now let us ask ourselves what appears first when we look more closely at the four terms laid down by Freud in relation to the drive. Let us say that these four terms cannot but appear disjointed.

98. #98

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Trieb (drive) is categorically distinct from biological need (hunger, thirst) and from momentary impulse-force; it is a constant force (konstante Kraft) operating on a topological surface field anchored in the nervous system (Real-Ich), not in the organism as a whole—a move that separates the drive from any naturalistic or organismic reading.

    the Triebreic is that by which certain elements of this field are, says Freud, invested as drive. This investment places us on the terrain of an energy—and not any energy—a potential energy

99. #99

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the paradox of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is structurally decoupled from biological rhythm and from the attainment of any specific aim, establishing the drive's constancy as irreducible to kinetic or biological models.

    it is curious that there are four vicissitudes as there are four elements of the drive

100. #100

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines the Real as the impossible — not as the simple negation of the possible, but as that which is structurally separated from the pleasure principle and which no object can satisfy — and uses this to argue that the drive is constitutively unable to find satisfaction in any object of need, making the impossible an essential element of both the field of the drive and the pleasure principle.

     Even when you stuff the mouth—the mouth that opens in the register of the drive—it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth.

101. #101

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's insistence on the object's indifference in the drive compels a radical revision of the breast as object: it must be reconceived not as a nutritive or mnemonic referent but as objet petit a — the cause of desire around which the drive circulates (faire le tour), a formula that captures both the drive's encirclement of the object and its trick of never reaching satisfaction through it.

     As far as the oral drive is concerned, for example, it is obvious that it is not a question of food, nor of the memory of food, nor the echo of food; nor the mother's care, but of something that is called the breast

102. #102

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive is not a natural instinct oriented toward a biological end but a "montage" in the surrealist sense—a heterogeneous, reversible assemblage of Drang, object, aim, and source, whose very paradoxicality distinguishes it structurally from instinct.

     Why does one speak of the mouth and not of the oesophagus, or the stomach? They participate just as much in the oral function. But at the erogenous level we speak of the mouth, of the lips and the teeth

103. #103

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: The passage poses the question of whether the economic point of view (constant force vs. variation) can be reconciled with Lacan's emphasis on discontinuity in the drive, and Lacan gestures toward energetics—specifically the concept of potential energy in a limited system—as the framework that will address this apparent contradiction.

     the other qualities that specify the drive must be conceived as discontinuous elements. My question concerns the element of thrust that you have rather pushed to one side

104. #104

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.186

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mathematical concept of flux (from vector calculus and potential energy) to argue that the Drang (thrust) of the drive is characterized by a constant maintained across variable rim-like structures — the gap/béance — thereby grounding the drive's constancy topologically rather than physiologically.

     what characterizes the Drang, the thrust of the drive, is the maintained constancy which, to take a fairly useful image, measures up to an opening that is, up to a certain individualized point, variable

105. #105

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function as rims precisely through the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that whenever non-erogenous zones enter the economy of desire they do so under the sign of desexualization—manifested paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the wider circulation of desire.

     It is precisely to the extent that adjoining, connected zones are excluded that others take on their erogenous function and become specific sources for the drive.

106. #106

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the problem of sexuality in the transference by questioning whether love is the privileged manifestation of sexuality in the analytic situation, pivoting toward a return to Freud's central texts on the drive as the proper theoretical ground.

     I will resume my discourse on the drive. I was led to approach it after positing that the transference is what manifests in experience the enacting of the reality of the unconscious, in so far as that reality is sexuality.

107. #107

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: Against the view that love represents the totality of sexual striving, Lacan follows Freud in arguing that drives are irreducibly partial — linked to an economic factor governed by the pleasure principle at the level of the Real-Ich (conceived as homeostatic nervous-system regulation) — thereby resisting any biologistic reduction of sexuality to reproductive finality.

     the drives, as they present themselves in the process of are partial drives are linked to an economic factor.

108. #108

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Sexuality enters psychical life exclusively through partial drives whose gap-like structure mirrors that of the unconscious; it occupies the interval between the primal repressed (a signifier, homogeneous with the symptom) and interpretation (which is directed toward desire and is, in a certain sense, identical with it), and this interval cannot be reduced to a neutral energetics.

     The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious.

109. #109

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.192

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The partial drive is constitutively structured by an outward-and-return movement (the "dialectic of the bow") and only partially represents the curve of sexuality in the living being; crucially, sexuality is realized not through biological pairing but through partial drives that pass into the networks of the signifier, binding sexuality to the subject's constitution and, ultimately, to death.

     sexuality is realized only through the operation of the drives in so far as they are partial drives, partial with regard to the biological finality of sexuality.

110. #110

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's account of the drive's reversibility (active/passive poles) as demonstrating that the drive's circuit is fundamentally circular and that this circularity is what occasions the appearance of a new subject — the Other — not as a pre-existing subject but as an effect produced by the drive completing its round.

     it is remarkable that, in order to illustrate the dimension of this Verkehrung, he should choose Schaulust, the pleasure of seeing, and what he cannot designate other than by the combination of two terms in sado-masochism.

111. #111

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the partial drive's satisfaction consists not in reaching a biological end-goal (reproduction) but in the circular itinerary of the drive itself — the loop that departs from and returns to the erogenous rim — distinguishing 'aim' as path/circuit from 'goal' as terminal end-point, and grounding this in Freud's auto-erotic metaphor of the self-kissing mouth.

     If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point of view of a biological totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit.

112. #112

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical progression between partial drives; rather, transitions between drives are produced by the intervention of the demand of the Other, not by organic maturation or logical deduction. The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive but the structural marker of its constitutive lack.

     There is no relation of production between one of the partial drives and the next.

113. #113

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's structure is topologically homologous to the structure of the unconscious: both are organised around a rim/gap that the drive must circumnavigate, with the object (objet petit a) serving as the sole guarantor of consistency, and this shared topology is what allows the drive to function within the unconscious—while insisting that the drive itself is not perversion.

     We must consider the drive under the heading of the kon-Stante ICrafi that sustains it as a stationary tension.

114. #114

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: In perversion, and specifically voyeurism, the scopic drive's circuit completes itself not by seeing the phallus but by encountering its absence; the gaze functions as the lost object that is refound through shame when the Other intervenes, making the object-cause of desire constitutively the absence of the phallus rather than its presence.

     the loop turns around itself; it is a missile, and it is with it, in perversion, that the target is reached.

115. #115

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive — illustrated through exhibitionism and sadomasochism — is only completed in its reversed form (return to the subject via the Other), and the drive's course is posited as the sole form of transgression available to the subject with respect to the pleasure principle, with jouissance of the Other as the drive's ultimate, always-missed aim.

     the structure of the drive appears, it is really completed only in its reversed form, in its return form, which is the true active drive.

116. #116

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The partial drive's forcing of the pleasure principle is theorized as the mechanism by which a jouissance beyond homeostasis becomes operative, revealing that a second reality (beyond the Real-Ich) retroactively structures the subject's very organization.

     The forcing of the pleasure principle by the effect of the partial drive—it is by this that we may conceive that the partial, ambiguous drives are installed at the limit of an Erhaltungstrieb

117. #117

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of the drive must be understood topologically as a "headless subjectification" distinct from both the subject-with-holes constituted by the signifier and the objects of fantasy and desire, while also linking the repression of libido under the pleasure principle to the very development of the mental apparatus (including attention/Aufmerksamkeit).

     The object of the drive is to be situated at the level of what I have metaphorically called a headless subjectification, a subjectification without subject, a bone, a structure, an outline, which represents one side of the topology.

118. #118

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the drive's circuit through the lacunary apparatus of the subject, distinguishing the lost object's role in the drive from fantasy's role as the support of desire, and pivoting to argue that perversion is fantasy's inverted effect—where the subject determines itself as object—which in turn constitutes the sado-masochistic drive structure.

     the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself.

119. #119

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.201

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is never the aim of desire but rather functions as a pre-subjective foundation or disavowed identification, and uses this to reframe the love object's relationship to desire as resting on equivocation, with love's fundamentally narcissistic structure grounded in the pleasure principle rather than the drive.

     objet a, which is never found in the position of being the aim of desire.

120. #120

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or diffuse energy but as an organ—both a bodily part and an instrument—thereby shifting the conceptual ground from energetics to topology, and uses an analogy (the bladder rather than Plato's cave) to reframe the unconscious away from depth-metaphors.

     making oneself... seen, heard, sucked, shitted

121. #121

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the totality of the sexual drive (ganze Sexualstrebung) is nowhere apprehensible in the subject — only partial drives appear through the pulsation of the unconscious — while genital sexuality finds its form not in the drive itself but in the field of the Other (Oedipus complex, kinship structures), thereby structurally separating drive from love and from any unified sexuality.

     we apprehend only partial drives. The ganze Sexualstrebung, the representation of the totality of the sexual drive, is not to be found there, Freud tells us.

122. #122

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's developmental account of the Lust-Ich and Real-Ich to show that love is grounded at the level of the Ich (ego) rather than the drives, and that this narcissistic structure of love corresponds to the classical philosophical conception (St Thomas's *velle bonum alicui*), with partial drives only secondarily appropriating the ego's object-fields.

     Everything that is defined in this way at the level of the Ich assumes sexual value, passes from the Er/witungstrieb, from preservation, to the Sexualtrieb, only in terms of the appropriation of each of these fields, its seizure, by one of the partial drives.

123. #123

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the narcissistic field of love (where the Other cannot be represented) from the circularity of the partial drive, arguing that it is precisely through the drive's circular movement around the objet a that the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — a move that also introduces the concept of 'masquerade' as operating at the symbolic rather than imaginary level.

     sexuality as such comes into play, exercises its proper activity, through the mediation—paradoxical as that may seem—of the partial drives.

124. #124

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: By replacing Freud's 'werden' with 'machen' in the formulation of the drive, Lacan redefines the drive's loop as a reflexive circuit of "making oneself seen/heard," concentrating its activity in the se faire (making oneself), and uses this to illuminate the partial drives—scopic, invocatory, oral—as each tracing a different structural relation between subject and other.

     Let us turn to the oral drive. What is it? One speaks of phantasies of devouring, of being gobbled up.

125. #125

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive's turning-inside-out movement through the erogenous zone is structured as an appeal that seeks a response in the Other, and that the drive's proper "organ" is not the biological organ but an ungraspable, circumventable false organ — the objet petit a — whose nature he will illuminate via a myth drawn from Plato's Symposium.

     I wish to note here the relation between the polarity of the drive cycle and something that is always at the centre.

126. #126

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: The subject is constituted through the emergence of the signifier in the field of the Other, whereby it immediately 'solidifies' into a signifier and is thereby born divided; this splitting is the structural ground for the drive's essential affinity with death and for the libido's relation to the sexual cycle as loss.

     On this conjunction between the subject in the field of the drive and the subject as he appears in the field of the Other, on this effort to join oneself together, depends the fact that there is a support for the ganze Sexualstrebung.

127. #127

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity distinction in drive theory is purely grammatical (an artifice Freud uses to articulate the drive's outward-return movement), while the drive's structure is fundamentally active at every stage - each of the three Freudian stages must be replaced by reflexive formulas like 'making oneself seen/heard', linking the lamella, erogenous zones, and partial drives to the unconscious through the opening/closing of its gap.

     it is precisely the organ of the libido, the lamella, which links to the unconscious the so-called oral and anal drives, to which I would add the scopic drive and what one ought almost to call the invocatory drive

128. #128

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends his structural approach against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics by arguing that the topology of subject/Other division already accounts for drive dynamics, with the partial drive situated on the side of the living being called to subjectivity — thereby integrating sexuality into a structuralist framework rather than opposing the two.

     Every drive being, by its essence as drive, a partial drive

129. #129

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche (neither as biological reproduction nor as sexual difference), but only through the partial drive as a representative of lack; consequently, what one must do as man or woman is entirely delegated to the scenario of the Other—the Oedipus complex—and sexuality enters the subject only through the structure of lack.

     the partial drive alone is the representative in the psyche of the consequences of sexuality

130. #130

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's lack is grounded in a real, prior lack introduced by sexed reproduction and individual death, and substitutes Aristophanes' myth of the complementary sexual other with the myth of the lamella—redefining the libido not as a field of forces but as an unreal organ that embodies the partial drive's fundamentally death-driven character.

     the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being.

131. #131

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's logic — its circular return upon the subject — is irreducible to ambivalence or well-being, and that the subject's realization is produced through a structural gap in its signifying dependence on the Other, grounded topologically in the function of the rim/cut.

     the reversal of the drive is something quite different from the variation of ambivalence that makes the object oscillate from the field of hate to that of love and vice versa

132. #132

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that characterizes alienation; and the paradigm case of verbal hallucination — where the voice is the operative object — reveals that psychoanalysis inverts the classical epistemic ideal of a purified percipiens by grounding subjective assurance in an encounter with the 'filth' of the partial object.

     we base the assurance of the subject in his encounter with the filth that may support him, with the petit a of which it would not be untrue to say that its presence is necessary.

133. #133

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the "liquidation of the transference" not as dissolving the unconscious but as permanently liquidating the deception by which transference closes the unconscious — the deception being the narcissistic mirage in which the subject attempts to constitute itself as an object worthy of love for the Subject Supposed to Know, whose natural culmination Freud identifies as identification.

     proper function of the part-object, and of what is signified, for example, by the breast, which he deals with at length, is doomed although interesting in itself, to an aimless development that leads nowhere.

134. #134

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (grounded in the Ego Ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject sees itself) and the objet petit a as the paradoxical object that disrupts the deceptive mirroring of love in the transference, introducing mutilation and the gift-of-shit as the truth of analytic alienation.

     This is the meaning of that breast-complex, that mammal-complex, whose relation to the oral drive Bergler saw so clearly, except that the orality in question has nothing to do with food

135. #135

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: The analyst's management of transference must maintain the gap between the subject as lovable and the subject as caused by objet petit a, and this topological structure — the "internal eight" or cross-cap — formalizes the irreducibility of that gap: the petit a never crosses it, remaining as the unswallowable object stuck in the gullet of the signifier.

     The drive in its relation to the part-object is subjacent here.

136. #136

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

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

     it is at the level of the most fundamental quality which manifests the immediate presence in the operation of the word of what is indistinguishable from the drive.

137. #137

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap to argue that the subject's structure is constituted by the cut rather than by any intrinsic disposition of parts, and that the field of unpleasure (the objet a, death drive) necessarily traverses the interior of the pleasure-principle field — thereby providing a topological rather than purely dialectical solution to the impasse of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'.

     this o-object, which we identify to the partial object, is something which can be reduced to a biological relationship, to the relationship of the living subject with the breast, with the faeces or scybal

138. #138

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic experience centred on demand cannot be grounded in a biologistic or anaclitic conception of the mother-child relation; instead, the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and Other, with the demand always referring to the big Other as a third term irreducible to any concrete or fusional origin.

     the discovery, is the handling, is the perfecting, is the precise interrogation which has been centred from Abraham up to Melanie Klein and since, multiplied in multiple efforts to assure its avenues, the partial object

139. #139

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium—specifically Alcibiades's pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates—Lacan establishes the dialectical structure of transference as desire for a concealed object that the Other does not possess, and concludes that the analyst's own identificatory position must be suspended within transference, collapsing the distinction between transference and counter-transference.

     Breast, even waste, excrement properly speaking, in other cases in other registers, in other registers which are not those of neurosis, this function of the voice or of the look.

140. #140

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: The child's "omnipotence" over the adult has no magical source but derives from the fact that the child *is* the objet petit a for the desiring parent; the analyst's failure to locate this function means she herself is transformed into an object by the patient, and the question of her own jouissance in enduring ten years of intolerable tension reveals that counter-transference is structurally equivalent to a transference neurosis—a neurosis of the analyst grounded in a failure of the desire of the analyst.

     a depressive father… in whose economy the partial object has a prevalent importance

141. #141

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand), Lacan articulates the drive's circuit as a loop around a gap in the body, where "pure difference" (exquisite/acid fringe of sweetness) functions as the irreducible kernel of desire; the ejaculatory formula Poord'jeli is analysed as a vocal signifier that mimes and masters this circuit, connecting the drive's reversal to the sacred incantatory dimension of the Voice.

     Thus sustained by my example and leaving for today deliberately to one side the fascinating operations of the sense of sight... I will limit myself to this particular mode of trying to grasp which is the voice.

142. #142

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Foucault's *The Birth of the Clinic* independently converges with his own theory of the gaze and the o-object, using this convergence as structural confirmation that both inquiries touch the same real of vision — and he frames the passage through the lens of fantasy, metonymy-becoming-metaphor, and the genesis of the partial object in sensoriality.

     I will extract this really remarkable point which is the one by which he made the approach to the term of sensoriality in the genesis of the o-object.

143. #143

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: This seminar discussion, centered on Leclaire's case presentation, works through the theoretical status of the fundamental fantasy (Urphantasie) and its relation to signifier, myth, and body, while also elaborating the distinction between first name and family name as indexing the tension between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers of identification, and closing with a reading that connects transference, the Name-of-the-Father, obsessional structure, and anxiety.

     those who hold with the distinctions that are necessary to make at the level of drives in the constitution of the fundamental phantasy

144. #144

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) is the hiding place of the Other's desire, not merely a register of demand or transference identification, and that failing to distinguish desire from demand leads to a clinical impasse — illustrated through a case where the analyst remains captive to a decade-long identificatory grip because she reduces the symptom to oral demand rather than grasping the dimension of desire.

     the circle of drives is a continuous, circular circle and that the only question is to know in what direction one goes around it

145. #145

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: The child's "all-powerfulness" is not magical omnipotence but derives from the child's structural position as the objet petit a for the desiring adult; the analyst's failure to recognise this makes her into an object herself, turning counter-transference into a transference neurosis that renders analysis interminable.

     in whose economy the partial object has a prevalent importance

146. #146

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological properties of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap to argue that the subject's structure—its non-orientability, the function of the cut, and the relation between the subject, the big Other, and objet petit a—cannot be captured by classical set-theoretic (Eulerian) distinctions, and that the field of unpleasure (objet a, death drive) necessarily traverses the interior of the field of pleasure rather than standing opposed to it from outside.

     this o-object, which we identify to the partial object, is something which can be reduced to a biological relationship, to the relationship of the living subject with the breast, with the faeces or scybal, with one or other more or less incarnated shape of the o-object, the function of the phallus being here altogether present.

147. #147

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical vignette of a borderline patient treated for ten years to argue that the analyst's error was reducing the patient's symptomatology to demand (and its oral regression) rather than locating the properly structural dimension of desire—specifically, that desire is constituted by its torsion toward the Other's desire, and that the objet petit a is the site where the desire of the Other dwells, not a relation between two egos.

     the circle of drives is a continuous, circular circle and that the only question is to know in what direction one goes around it, but since it is circular one goes around it necessarily, obligatorily, from end to end

148. #148

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

     I will leave you... to imagine the possible games in the variety of senses, between one and the other, and I leave you also to highlight, for a correct classification of the neuroses, the possible traps and impasses of all the circuits of the senses.

149. #149

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Alcibiades's encounter with Socrates in Plato's *Symposium* as the structural prototype of analytic transference, Lacan argues that the *agalma* (hidden treasure) organises desire-as-lack and that what analysts call 'counter-transference' is properly a moment of unwarranted identification internal to transference itself, thereby collapsing the counter-transference/transference distinction into a single analytic field.

     Breast, even waste, excrement properly speaking, in other cases in other registers, in other registers which are not those of neurosis, this function of the voice or of the look.

150. #150

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic experience of demand cannot be grounded in a "living" or anaclitic dependency on the mother, but must be rethought through the articulation of the o-object (objet petit a) as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and the big Other — thus correcting post-Freudian reductions of demand to developmental/biological origins.

     the prevalence of the oral object, in so far as it is commonly called the breast, of this faecal object, on the other hand, if we put it on the same table or in the same circuit as the one in which there are situated all the objects articulated no doubt in analytic experience... namely the gaze and the voice

151. #151

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic dialectic cannot be confined to demand and the maternal Other (as in object-relations approaches), but must pass through desire and ultimately jouissance; castration is reinterpreted not merely as the Oedipal prohibition but as the barrier of desire that bars the subject from jouissance — and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic is criticised for falsely attributing jouissance to the master, revealing it as a mirage.

     the breast is only an appurtenance of this body which has strayed into this field of the Other by what we will call, provisionally, from our point of view, a biological contingency which is called, simply, being a mammal.

152. #152

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relationship between Jones's concept of aphanisis and Lacan's theory of the subject's fading, using this parallel to introduce jouissance as a bodily dimension that cannot be reduced to the pleasure principle and that stands in a constitutive tension with the subject's "I am" — arguing that the subject is always already implicated in the duplicity between being and non-being that jouissance makes visible.

     on the demand aspect, the objects that we know under the species of breast, in the sense and in the function that we give it in psychoanalysis, and of excrement or again as we express it, faeces... two other o-objects, namely, the look and the voice

153. #153

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Objet petit a cannot be reduced to perception but must be understood as a structural "representative of representation" — a trajectory of the subject through registers — that grounds desire through aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object, while also proposing a systematic mapping of the object across synchronic and diachronic axes of Freudian theory.

     we can also map out another series on the axis of diachrony which is the axis of the succession of oral anal phallic objects etc... I wonder whether the scopic object and the auditory object that Lacan brings into this register gain from being included in this series

154. #154

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

     E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the objet petit a as the cause of desire by articulating its double register: it marks both the lack in the Other and the loss inscribed in the process of meaning, while its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to mis-identify with knowledge in order to cover over that constitutive loss.

     We are dealing both with fragments of the body, with a part of the body and its symbolisation

155. #155

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     F - The (o), product of work

     Theoretical move: The passage repositions the objet petit a from a mere support of the partial object to the index of truth and pathway of inscription (the letter), arguing that the channel of Demand structures the itinerary toward truth, while Knowledge arises in place of truth after the loss of the object — and raises outstanding questions about the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, affect, and Freudian types of representation that Lacan has not fully resolved.

     the o-object to be considered less as a support of the partial object than as the pathway of a hand tracing

156. #156

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan corrects Audouard's misreading of his topology of the scopic drive by insisting that the "plane of the look" cannot project onto the picture plane in a geometrically reciprocal (intersubjective) way, and uses this correction to clarify that the drive's structure is a topological circuit around the o-object (objet petit a), not an optical reciprocity between subject and image.

     That the breast is a little object, all sorts of things are designed to show that it is not a matter here of this something carnal which is what is at stake when we speak about the breast

157. #157

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     A - The problem of the suture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture—the logical operation linking lack to the chain of signifiers—is not merely a formal linguistic procedure but requires the bodily, psychoanalytic dimension of the object (objet petit a / partial objects) as mediator between thing and cause; it advances a ternary (triangular) logic over binary structuralist opposition to account for the cutting-up of both signifier and signified, with the phallus as the vanishing term that holds the system together.

     oral object, anal object, phallic object, etc. these terms only representing their mapping-out with respect to the erogenous zones, leaving a place for more complex forms.

158. #158

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes to reframe Melman's reading of Stein's article: the analyst's word cannot be situated at a place of narcissistic fusion or primitive Bejahung (affirmation), but must instead be aligned with Verneinung (negation/denial) — since truth serves itself and cannot be "served," the analyst's position is defined by a structural cut rather than by fulfillment or lure.

     does that not come precisely from a fundamental failure to recognise of how orienting, directive there can be in such a vanishing point, the fact that it is forgotten that the demand, whatever it may be is pronounced with the mouth.

159. #159

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the topology of the Objet petit a by demonstrating that the scopic and invocatory objects occupy a dimension beyond demand/frustration theories of neurosis, and introduces the hyperboloid of revolution as a topological figure that models the structural relationship between subject (S) and o-object, pointing toward a group-structure combinatorial of partial objects culminating in castration.

     Another dimension is involved for the objects that I already introduced into a certain foursome which, perhaps, constitutes a dial, namely, the voice and the look.

160. #160

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes to reframe Melman's reading of Stein's article: the analyst's word is not a 'preaching' that serves truth but must be situated at the place of the objet petit a, and the analyst's position is better defined through Verneinung (negation/denial) than through Bejahung (affirmation), because truth serves itself — it cannot be served.

     does that not come precisely from a fundamental failure to recognise of how orienting, directive there can be in such a vanishing point, the fact that it is forgotten that the demand, whatever it may be is pronounced with the mouth.

161. #161

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.251

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the hyperboloid of revolution to illustrate the structural relationship between the subject (S) and the objet petit a, arguing that the o-object can only function within a group structure that permits negative values, which ultimately grounds the Freudian dimension of desire and castration.

     No element can have the function of o-object if it cannot be associated to other objects in what is called a group structure.

162. #162

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not a perceived object but a structure of transformation — the trajectory/circuit of the subject across registers — grounded in the differential distribution of representations, where aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object together constitute the inaugural narcissistic identification and the condition for desire as desire of the Other.

     we can also map out another series on the axis of diachrony which is the axis of the succession of oral anal phallic objects etc...

163. #163

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     F - The (o), product of work

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the Objet petit a as an "index of truth" and traces of lost-object work, reframing it not as a partial-object support but as the pathway of inscription—the letter—thereby linking demand, knowledge, truth, and the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz within an itinerary that moves from miscognition toward historical truth.

     the o-object to be considered less as a support of the partial object than as the pathway of a hand tracing, the inscription, the letter, o

164. #164

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan corrects a seminar participant's (Audouard's) attempt to reconstruct projective geometry of the gaze, using the error to clarify the topology of the scopic drive: the ground/look-plane cannot project onto the figure-plane along a horizon line but only along the line at infinity of the picture, and the drive's structure must be understood as a topological circuit around the objet petit a, not as an intersubjective reciprocity between two perspectives.

     That the breast is a little object, all sorts of things are designed to show that it is not a matter here of this something carnal which is what is at stake when we speak about the breast

165. #165

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Jones's concept of aphanisis to pivot from a discussion of the o-object's four aspects (breast, faeces, gaze, voice) toward the foundational problem of the subject's being, arguing that aphanisis—the fading of the subject behind the signifier—opens the question of how jouissance (irreducibly corporeal) relates to the subject constituted by the "I think/I am" split, a relation Jones gestures toward without being able to theorize.

     This o-object... is presented under, not four forms, but let us say four aspects (versants)... on the demand aspect, the objects that we know under the species of breast... and of excrement... the look and the voice

166. #166

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     A - The problem of the suture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture is not a mere logical operation but is grounded in the body's structure: castration enacts the rupture of signifying concatenation, the phallus (-phi) functions as the vanishing third term in a ternary (rather than binary) structure, and the object mediates the passage from thing to cause — thereby both accomplishing and exposing the suture within signification.

     oral object, anal object, phallic object, etc. these terms only representing their mapping-out with respect to the erogenous zones, leaving a place for more complex forms.

167. #167

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

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

     the specific support of the I - of the I of the oral drive - was nothing other than the formula!

168. #168

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: By critically engaging Bergler's theory of "oral neurosis" and its invocation of masochism, Lacan argues that masochism cannot be reduced to the enjoyment of pain; rather, it is structurally defined by the subject assuming the position of the object (objet petit a as remainder/waste) within a contractual scenario that implicates the big Other as the locus of a regulating word—thereby illuminating the Other's role in jouissance and the logic of fantasy.

     what this means with respect to the drive defined as oral. And why, in a way, at the start, what seems, let us say, its most natural tendency is thus overthrown.

169. #169

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.102

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's meta-commentary on dream-function (the preconscious desire to sleep, "it is only a dream") and the Zhuangzi butterfly-dream to argue that the I is structurally constituted as a *stain* in the visual field—inseparable from the gaze/objet petit a—and that topology is the only rigorous framework for articulating the o-object's relationship to the subject's loss and repetition.

     by being linked to what is used in analytic discourse under the term of partial object

170. #170

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: By reading the Biblical myth of circumcision, Lilith, Eve, and the apple through a psychoanalytic lens, Lacan argues that the castration complex is the necessary condition for the fiction of an autonomous complementary object, and that the various forms of the objet petit a (concentrated in the figure of the apple as oral object) are what psychoanalysis has located within the dimension of knowledge opened by that originary cut.

     this object completely concentrated in this apple … one could say also in two others, even though the link to it is not yet made

171. #171

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces acting-out as the structural representative of the deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act: because the analytic intervention misreads or inadequately articulates what is at stake (as in Kris's ego-psychological "surface" intervention), the patient enacts/stages what was not properly interpreted, bringing the oral object-a "on a plate." This positions acting-out as the inverse shadow of the analytic act, and advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act is structurally non-sexual yet topologically related to the sexual act via the analytic couch.

     the oral o-object is here in a way made present, brought in on a plate - as one might say - by the patient

172. #172

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion is structurally intelligible as the attempt to reconnect jouissance and the body that have been disjuncted by the signifying intervention constitutive of the subject, with the objet petit a (small o) serving as the topological and structural key to this reconnection, while the sadistic act paradigmatically illustrates how the perverse subject, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of a jouissance located in the Other rather than knowing itself as the subject of that jouissance.

     The breast, this object which must indeed be defined as this something which, even though it is stuck, attached… And then, the others … we have already said excrement… And then, there are those I designated under the terms of the look and of the voice.

173. #173

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a, and that perversion—unlike neurosis or the master/slave dialectic—constitutes an experimental, subject-driven inquiry into jouissance by seeking the partial objects that escape signifying alienation; sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual act rather than natural gender attributes.

     these objects which function at the level of the edges of the body… the oral and what is also called the anal. But these others also… which are called the look and the voice

174. #174

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.166

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.

     the facts furnished by these objects … namely, the phallus, the different partial objects … by producing these objects it finds itself precisely what I said - speaking about it

175. #175

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 7 December 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the relation between the signifier and truth grounds logic itself: the fundamental axiom of implication (that the true cannot imply the false) is the condition of possibility for any logical handling of the signifying chain, and the introduction of the enunciating subject ('sujet de l'énonciation') suspends the automatic functioning of written truth-values, demonstrating that what can and cannot be written is the crux of both logic and analytic experience.

     the close relation that the partial object has with the structure of the subject. The ideal or even, simply, the fact of admitting that it is possible in any way to comment on a text of Freud by watering down his concepts invincibly evokes what can in no way satisfy the function of the partial object

176. #176

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates through the cut — topologically modeled on the cross-cap/projective plane — whereby the o-object is separated and Urverdrängung (primal repression) is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier; the barred subject emerges only in alienated form, and desire is re-formulated not as the essence of man but as the essence of reality, displacing Spinoza's anthropology into a strictly structural, a-theological account.

     it is not formulated by the least qualified writers, and since it will be, in fact, this year, our method, in formulating the logic of the phantasy, to show where… there is no other support for the castration complex than what is modestly called 'the anal object'.

177. #177

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.167

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual act is not a secret but a structural necessity announced by the unconscious itself, and that the Objet petit a — formalized as the "golden number" — functions as the incommensurable third term that both generates the sexual dyad and prevents its closure, articulating the impossibility of the sexual relationship through logical and mathematical formalization (Boolean algebra, imaginary numbers, the golden number).

     there can only be established a discourse in which this third counts, as I earlier sufficiently announced by the presence of the phallus and the partial objects

178. #178

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.102

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's theory of the preconscious as the agency that 'knows' one is asleep—and Zhuangzi's butterfly dream—to argue that the 'I am only dreaming' move masks the reality of the gaze, establishing the Objet petit a (as gaze/stain) as constitutively correlated with the I, and positioning topology as the rigorous framework for articulating the o-object's structure via cutting operations on surfaces.

     linked to what is used in analytic discourse under the term of partial object

179. #179

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biblical myths of circumcision, Lilith, and the apple to argue that the castration complex is the necessary precondition for the subject's relation to an 'object complement' that is fundamentally fictional, and that psychoanalysis has located this object — ultimately the phallic object — as the key to understanding what is at stake in the sexual act and in the dimension of knowledge.

     what the nature, what the nature and function is of this object completely concentrated in this apple. It is only along this path that we may be able to come to specify better ... what is involved in this object, the phallic object

180. #180

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.4

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XIV by introducing "the logic of phantasy" as a formal project: the matheme $◇a is posed as a logical relation between the barred subject and the objet petit a, with the diamond (poinçon) encoding biconditional implication (if and only if), and fantasy's structural surface—identified as desire and reality in seamless continuity—is topologically modeled via the cross-cap and Möbius strip, displacing the imaginary register in favor of a properly logical determination.

     the breast, the scybalum, the look, the voice, these detachable parts which are nevertheless entirely linked to the body - this is what is involved in the o-object.

181. #181

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian Wiederholungszwang constitutes the logical foundation of the subject, irreducible to the pleasure principle, by demonstrating that repetition produces a lost object retroactively—the originating situation is lost as origin by the very fact of being repeated—and that this structure, grounded in the unary trait, is what allows analytic knowledge to pass into the real via Verwerfung.

     the simple approach of clinical experience had already suggested to Freud the discovery and the function of the fact that there is, in the metabolism of drives, this function of the lost object as such

182. #182

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that this separation is the structural ground on which both the perverse act (which directly questions jouissance via the objet petit a) and the neurotic act (which merely sustains desire) must be rigorously distinguished; masochism is proposed as the exemplary perverse structure that lets us make this distinction.

     the sado-masochistic drive operates, completely, in an interplay where what is in question is there, in this point of disjunction, sufficiently marked by my siglum or algorithm, as you wish, of the signifier of the O barred, namely, the disjunction between jouissance and the body.

183. #183

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bergler's concept of "oral neurosis" and its triad of masochistic mechanism as a critical foil to develop his own theory of the oral drive, distinguishing raw aggression, narcissistic aggression, and pseudo-aggression, and then redefines masochism not as assumption of pain but as the subject taking the position of the object (objet petit a as waste/remainder) in a contractual scenario involving the big Other and jouissance.

     what this means with respect to the drive defined as oral. And why, in a way, at the start, what seems, let us say, its most natural tendency is thus overthrown.

184. #184

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

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

     it is, for its part, truly the specific support of the I - of the I of the oral drive

185. #185

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Through topological figures (cross-cap, projective plane) and set-theoretic logic (Euler circles), Lacan argues that the subject originates not as a pre-given entity but is *engendered* by the signifier through a primary cut; the objet petit a is the first "Bedeutung" — the residue of the subject's alienation from the Other — and desire is redefined as the essence of *reality* rather than of man, displacing Spinoza's formula into a properly psychoanalytic, a-theological one.

     Namely, a look that is grasped, the one transmitted at the birth of the clinic. Namely, what one of my pupils, recently, at the Congress of the University of Johns Hopkins, took as a subject calling it 'The voice in literary myth'.

186. #186

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.167

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

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

     there can only be established a discourse in which this third counts, as I earlier sufficiently announced by the presence of the phallus and the partial objects

187. #187

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.166

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.

     would not the facts furnished by these objects, that were never yet appreciated in the way that we were able to do it, be sufficient: namely, the phallus, the different partial objects?

188. #188

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 7 December 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the relation between signifier and truth short-circuits all supporting thought and grounds logic in the signifying chain alone; by demonstrating through truth tables and Stoic propositional logic that the signifier cannot signify itself except through metaphor, he establishes that what "can be written and what cannot" is the fundamental limit-question linking the subject of enunciation to the operation of logic.

     the close relation that the partial object has with the structure of the subject… the partial object ought to be able to be settled

189. #189

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a — the partial objects that escape signifying domination — and uses the master/slave dialectic to demonstrate that jouissance subsists on the side of the slave, not the master; perversion is then recast as a systematic, subject-driven inquiry into this residual jouissance of the Other, while sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual relation rather than natural gendered dispositions.

     these objects which function at the level of the edges of the body … the oral and what is also called the anal … the look and the voice.

190. #190

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152

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

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

     the functions that analysis pinpointed as being those of the feeding object, of the breast, of the excremental object, of the scybalum, of the function of the look and of that of the voice.

191. #191

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

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

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

     the same thing in the four other registers of the little o-object which would be incarnated in a 'I am not taking' for what concerns the breast... 'I am not letting go'... 'I am not saying'

192. #192

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural function — neither an insult nor a psychological category but a knot of "dé-connaissance" (mis-knowing) — in order to argue that the psychoanalytic act must reckon with the irreducible overlap between truth and stupidity, grounded ultimately in the inappropriateness of the sexual organ for enjoyment and the constitutive failure of truth when it encounters the sexual field.

     the notion of partial object is his original contribution. This is not the place to demonstrate its value. We are more interested in indicating its link to the partiality of the aspect that Abraham detaches from transference

193. #193

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-theorizes the breast as the primordial partial object (objet petit a) that functions logically as a constant/variable in the Fregean sense, grounding the gap between need and demand, and argues that the mother's status in analytic experience is not biological but structural — a linguistic-symbolic effect that depends on the subject's division, not on organic maternity.

     the reality of the mother is first of all only brought to us, designated by the function of what is called the partial object

194. #194

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a triangular mapping of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as cardinal poles to locate the Barred Subject, the unary stroke (first Identification), and the objet petit a, arguing that Truth belongs to the Other/Symbolic, Jouissance to the Real, and Knowledge to the Imaginary—positioning the analyst in the void between them. He then reads Winnicott's transitional object as an inadvertent, incomplete articulation of the objet petit a, showing how object-relations theory approaches but fails to theorize the subject commanded by that object.

     the way to demystify the function of the so-called partial object, as we see it being sustained to support the most abstruse, the most mystifying, the least clinical theory about the so-called developmental relations of the pre-genital with respect to the genital.

195. #195

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.161

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

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

     the four other registers of the little o-object which would be incarnated in a 'I am not taking' for what concerns the breast...Of the 'I am not letting go' and we know what that means in this structuring avarice of desire.

196. #196

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fenichel/Winnicott discussion to distinguish a normative, ego-psychological discourse about psychoanalysis from the analytical act proper, arguing that transference cannot be legitimised by an appeal to the analyst's objectivity but is itself constitutive of analytic practice—and that the analytic act has been systematically eluded, even by Freud's own treatment of parapraxis.

     in the normal character they serve, as partial impulses, the goal of fore-pleasure or of preliminary pleasure, under the primacy of the genital zone.

197. #197

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function irreducible to a mere insult, arguing that the psychoanalytic act must grapple with the overlap between truth and stupidity—specifically, that the sexual act (marked by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment) renders truth irreducibly compromised, which is the very dimension the psychoanalytic act operates within.

     the notion of partial object is his original contribution. This is not the place to demonstrate its value.

198. #198

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.146

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the breast, as partial object, functions as a logical variable (in the Fregean sense) that grounds the universal constant of demand, and that the analytic privileging of the mother-child relation is a mammalian-biological contingency rather than an essential truth — the 'residue of the division of the subject' (the wandering soul of metempsychosis) offers a more logically coherent figure for subjective emergence than the fantasy of uterine origin.

     the reality of the mother is first of all only brought to us, designated by the function of what is called the partial object.

199. #199

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.152

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

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

     functions that analysis pinpointed as being those of the feeding object, of the breast, of the excremental object, of the scybalum, of the function of the look and of that of the voice.

200. #200

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.367

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the structural necessity of the "additional one" (un-en-plus) and the empty set within the field of the Other, demonstrating through set theory that the inclusion of a first signifier into the Other necessarily generates a second term (the empty set/S(Ø)) and that subjectivity only appears at the level of S2, reorienting the field from intersubjectivity to intra-subjective structure.

     is inscribed in what is properly called an oral drive. It would be better to refer it to what it is, the placentary thing onto which I stick myself as I am able.

201. #201

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: The neurotic's problem is located in the impossibility of integrating the objet petit a onto the imaginary plane alongside the narcissistic image; Lacan reframes primary narcissism as a retroactive illusion produced by secondary (imaginary) narcissistic capture, and positions the fantasy formula ($ ◇ a) at the level of sublimation—while diagnosing neurosis as a structural failure of sublimation.

     it is in the measure that we believe that we are able to think that there was somewhere this relation not of supplement, but of complement for the One and that we invest the oral drive that it presents

202. #202

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic knowledge is constitutively related to—yet irreducible to—sexual knowledge: the drives are "montages" oriented toward satisfaction within a horizon that is the sexual, but the sexual act itself does not exist in any structural sense, and analytic knowledge is not a technique but a mode of "knowing how to be with it" (savoir y être) that reveals how one is always already in the sexual field without knowing it—a dupery that benefits no one and implicates all fields of knowledge.

     it exposes in behaviour the functioning of oral drives, anal drives, and of others again, scoptophilic or sado-masochistic drives

203. #203

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the perverse drives (scoptophilic, sadomasochistic) are fundamentally asymmetrical and structured around the topology of the Objet petit a: each drive operates not as a return of its counterpart but as a supplement to the Other, aimed at producing or evacuating the jouissance of the Other rather than of the subject—a logic that makes the pervert a "defender of the faith" of the Other's jouissance.

     no drive is simply the return of the other. They are asymmetrical and what is essential in this function is a supplement

204. #204

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.228

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of a sexual signifier means Woman is irreducibly unknown, accessible only through representatives of representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz); sublimation is then theorised as the objet petit a functioning as what "tickles das Ding from the inside," linking drive topology (edge-structure, vacuole) to the production of art and courtly love.

     the a-object has more than one form as Freud explicitly states... between the oral object, the anal object, the scoptophilic object and the sadomasochistic object

205. #205

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) to ground the constitution of fantasy as the point where subject and object (objet a) achieve a non-reducible consistency, arguing that truth has no guarantee in the Other but only its correlate in the fabricated o-object, while perversion names the site where surplus-jouissance is unveiled in naked form.

     these vanishing entities that I have already given the list of, which go from the breast to dejections and from the voice to the look

206. #206

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is constitutively grounded in loss/entropy, and that this structural gap—formalized as surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust)—is what drives knowledge as a means of enjoyment, necessitating the Four Discourses as its articulation; simultaneously, truth is identified not with full-saying but with half-saying, its essence being the concealed fact of castration/impotence, which redefines the analyst's position and the analytic act.

     by highlighting these diverse terms oral, anal, scopic, even vocal These are the different names by which we can designate as object what is involved in the o.

207. #207

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the schema of the "wall of language" separating the subject (S) from the true big Other (A), distinguishing the imaginary plane of ego/specular other (a/a') from the symbolic plane, and arguing that the Other's capacity to lie—not merely to answer—constitutes the decisive proof of authentic intersubjectivity; this schema also serves as a critique of ego-psychology's imaginary reduction of analytic aims.

     by approaching things by way of the object relation and the partial drives, instead of locating it where it belongs, on the plane of the imaginary.

208. #208

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > That's all rro saying.

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's Entwurf to argue that repetition—not harmony with an Umwelt—is the structural condition for the constitution of the human object-world, and that the Real is without fissure and only accessible through the symbolic, thereby grounding both the pleasure/reality principle distinction and the function of repetition in a proto-structuralist reading of Freud's neurological sketch.

     voyeurism-exhibitionism, and of a drive whose source lies in an organ, the eye. But its object isn't the eye... what pertains to the register of sado-masochism also has its origin in an organic set-up, the musculature, but... its object... is something other.

209. #209

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Amphitryon (Sosie/double) and a critique of Fairbairn's clinical case to argue that analysis progresses not through ego-splitting observation but through speech addressed to the absolute Other, and that misrecognition of the imaginary register—treating imaginary drives as real—produces iatrogenic paranoia rather than cure.

     what is at issue is to get the subject to recognise her drives, and in particular, because in truth those are the only ones one comes across, those drives known in our elegant language as pregenital.

210. #210

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques ego-psychology-style analytic technique—which aims at imaginary reconstitution of the ego through identification with the analyst's ego—and counter-proposes an analysis oriented toward the big Other, where the analyst functions as an empty mirror so that true speech can traverse the wall of language and the subject can assume its relations of transference with its real Others; "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" is re-read as the subject (S) being called to speak and enter into relation with the real Other.

     his scattered limbs, his partial drives, the succession of partial objects - think of Carpaccio's Saint George skewering the dragon, with small severed heads, arms, and so on, all around.

211. #211

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

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is the substance of thought and that its irreducible gap from language—marked by the cry "that's not it"—demonstrates that structure and jouissance are co-constitutive, grounding the non-existence of the sexual relationship; Christianity and Aristotle serve as foils to show how philosophical and theological traditions have covered over this gap with the fantasy of knowledge and soul.

     his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation - oral drive - with which Christ's wife, the Church as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation.

212. #212

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of metalanguage to pivot toward topology: because the symbolic ex-sists rather than being, and because language can only be transmitted through further language, the matheme/formalization points beyond itself to the Borromean knot as the structural figure that can 'operate' on the first knot—linking writing, jouissance, and the non-rapport of sexuation under a single topological framework.

     as everything Freud articulates about what he unadvisedly calls 'partial drives' teaches us - the end of jouissance does not coincide with what it leads to

213. #213

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.32

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

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

     one can only enjoy a part of the Other's body… we must confine ourselves to simply giving it a little squeeze, like that, taking a forearm or anything else

214. #214

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 Ma y 1973

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no metalanguage by distinguishing the Symbolic from being, grounding formalisation in the act of saying rather than in ontological subsistence, and then demonstrates how topology—specifically the Borromean knot and the torus—provides the only adequate 'writing' of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject.

     The end of enjoyment is, this is what everything Freud articulates teaches us about what he ill-advisedly calls partial drives.

215. #215

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     What is the way of distinguishing these two cases?

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on two interlocking theoretical moves: Lacan argues for the primacy of topological structure over phenomenal shape (using the torus and Klein bottle), and Alain Didier extends this by mapping the circuit of the invocatory drive onto the logic of separation, proposing that musical jouissance operates as a sublimation that "evaporates" the lost object and thus transmutes lack into nostalgia.

     I allow myself to be pushed by it – it is moreover the drive. I allow myself to be pushed by it and I expect that it will give me this little o-object.

216. #216

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     So then what is this lack?

     Theoretical move: The passage maps a four-moment dialectical circuit of the drive (using music as its privileged illustration) in which the subject's repeated failure to encounter the objet petit a gradually confirms its radical impossibility, ultimately enabling a leap "through the fantasy" toward an ecstatic, desexualised Other jouissance that Lacan identifies with sublimation – and which constitutes the terminal point of the analytic process beyond ordinary surplus-jouissance.

     Lacan on the subject of the drive and of sublimation, asks the question, he asks himself how the drive is experienced after the phantasy has been gone through. And Lacan adds: 'It is no longer of the domain of analysis, but is the beyond of analysis'.

217. #217

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan analyses the three stages of the beating fantasy to argue that perverse fantasy represents a radical desubjectivation in which signifiers are preserved in "pure state" - stripped of intersubjective signification - and that this structure (like the fetish as screen-memory) reveals the valorisation of the imaginary image as a frozen residue of unconscious speech articulated at the level of the big Other; perversion is therefore not a pre-Oedipal relic but is fully constituted through and by the Oedipus complex.

     It is purported to be a pure and simple relic, the persistence of an irreducible partial drive. On the contrary... Freud indicates well enough that perverse structuration... can be articulated only... through the process, the organisation and the articulation of the Oedipus complex.

218. #218

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Freudian impasse between identification and object-choice by grounding both in the symbolic structure of the love relation and the oral drive, arguing against the Kleinian symmetry of introjection/projection and proposing instead that the drive always targets the real object as a part-object of the symbolic object—a dialectic of frustration and need that structures the constitution of the object from the outset.

     I say, on the contrary, that each time the drive appears in the analysis, or elsewhere, it should be conceived of in relation to its economic function, in relation to the unfolding of a particular defined symbolic relationship.

219. #219

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration is not the refusal of an object of satisfaction but the withholding of a gift-as-symbol-of-love, grounded in the child's always-already symbolic order; need-satisfaction becomes erotically charged (libido in the strict sense) only because it substitutes for symbolic/love-demand, making the oral drive a product of this dialectic rather than a biological given.

     Being an instinctual mode of hunger, it is the vehicle of a libido that maintains one's body, but that's not all it is... it is indeed an eroticised activity. It is libido in the strict sense, and it is sexual libido.

220. #220

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.110

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: By closely reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through a structural lens, Lacan argues that perversion cannot be reduced to either a fixated partial drive or the eroticisation of defences, but must be understood via the multi-level subjective structure revealed in the three-stage transformation of fantasy — a structure that is fundamentally intersubjective and retroactively organised through symbolisation.

     we simply have to come back to the notion of the persistence of a fixation that bears on a partial drive. This fixation is purported to traverse unscathed the entire progress through the dialectic that tends to be established by the Oedipus complex.

221. #221

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's case of the young homosexual woman through the L Schema's symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes, arguing that the phallus functions as the imaginary element through which the subject enters the symbolic dialectic of the gift, and distinguishing between frustration of love (intersubjective, symbolic) and frustration of jouissance (real, non-generative of object-constitution) against Klein and Winnicott's formulations.

     Why do frustrations from the anal level or the oral level tend to arise, and to bring about the frustrations, accidents and dramatic elements of the Oedipal relation, when going by the premises this should only come about in the genital elaboration?

222. #222

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.404

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage identifies the "homosexual transference" in obsessional neurosis as an illusory solution that the obsessional subject constructs around the object, bridging exploit, fantasy, and partial love, while distinguishing Abraham's concept of "partial love of the object" from the later Kleinian notion of the part object.

     Abraham never spoke of part object, he spoke of partial love of the object

223. #223

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.372

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bouvet's object-relations account of obsessional neurosis—centred on imaginary phallic incorporation—by insisting the phallus must be understood as a signifier (part object properly so called), and he uses this critique as a springboard to re-articulate the Graph of Desire, showing that desire is constitutively located in a field *beyond* demand, irreducible to the passage of need through the defiles of demand.

     What gives the object relation its value and is its pivot, what introduced the notion of object into the analytic dialectic, is above all what is known as the part object. The term is taken from Abraham's vocabulary, in a manner that isn't quite exact, since what the latter spoke of was the partial love for the object.

224. #224

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes perversion not as a category of instinct or tendency but as a signifying structure, arguing that the object in perversion is a "metonymic object" — produced by the sliding of signification beneath the signifying chain — and that the phallus names the imaginary pole that anchors the subject's radical identification with this always-fleeing object.

     not with this or that of its object functions that supposedly correspond to this or that partial tendency, as they say.

225. #225

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > 157 And we also have this schema:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject (S) is a structurally "dummy" fourth term outside the Oedipal triangle, dependent on the signifiers at the locus of the Other, and that the imaginary triangle—anchored by the ego/specular image, the mother-father-child triad, and the phallus as third point—maps how the paternal metaphor transforms the first (symbolic) triad into a second (imaginary) one; the phallus is thus the central object with which the subject imaginarily identifies, irreducible to a mere part-object.

     It eludes the fundamental function of the phallus, with which the subject imaginarily identifies himself, reducing it to the notion of part object.

226. #226

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.294

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the "psychologizing" regression in post-Freudian theory (culminating in Klein's "early Oedipus complex") that reduces castration to a partial, aggressive drive, and counter-proposes that castration must be understood in its irreducibly signifying character: as the structural relation between desire and the mark, prior to any psychological or genetic narrative.

     The castration complex is here reduced to the isolation of a partial, primordial, aggressive, and henceforth disconnected, drive.

227. #227

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.368

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Freudian dream analysis (the hysterical gesture of the hand on the jacket) to articulate the structural position of the woman in desire: she makes a mask of herself to *be* the phallus, and this leads to a rigorous reformulation of desire as the residue produced by the subtraction of need from the demand for love — an absolute condition that abolishes the dimension of the Other's response.

     We are told that sexual progress or maturation would entail passing from a partial object to a total object ... In coming to the place of desire, the other does not in any way become the total object, but on the contrary the problem is that the other totally becomes an object as instrument of desire.

228. #228

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.468

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

     the partial nature of the drives appears right from the outset, as does the fact that our connection with the object depends on the complex, complicated, and incredibly risky arrangement of those drives.

229. #229

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.398

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject encounters itself only as gap or cut in the unconscious chain, and that objet petit a is constituted structurally as a cut: the pregenital objects (oral, anal), the phallus (castration complex), and delusion are three forms of a that share the formal property of coupure, functioning as signifying props that screen the hole in the unconscious chain for a barred subject who fundamentally misrecognises itself there.

     At the oral level, the object is the nipple, that part of the breast that the subject can hold in his buccal orifice, which is also what he is separated from. The object is also excrement.

230. #230

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.101

     **VII**

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

     these erogenous zones that, until one has achieved a fuller elucidation of Freud's thought, one can consider to be generic, and that are limited to a number of special points, to points that are openings, to a limited number of mouths at the body's surface, are the points where Eros will have to find his source.

231. #231

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

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

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

     We have dubbed it a component drive, thereby employing the idea that it harmonizes with a totality

232. #232

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

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

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

     we should notice that this object is necessarily in a state of independence in a field that we take to be central as if by convention. The total object, our neighbor, is silhouetted there, separate from us

233. #233

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces sublimation as the positive, "other side" of the psychoanalytic critique of ethics, arguing that the plasticity and displacement-structure of the drives (*Triebe*) — irreducible to instinct and governed by the play of signifiers — is the necessary starting point for any theory of sublimation, while simultaneously exposing the paradoxical cruelty of the moral conscience as a parasite fed by the very satisfactions it demands.

     ends up in this passage with the elucidation of the Partiallust in the genital libido itself.

234. #234

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VII by framing the ethics of psychoanalysis as irreducible to moralism or the naturalist liberation of desire: the 'attraction of transgression' — running from Freud's murder-of-the-father myth through the death drive — constitutes the properly psychoanalytic entry-point into ethics, one that cannot be dissolved by taming perverse jouissance or reducing guilt.

     the term 'component,' used for designating the perverse drive, is in this situation given its full weight. Last year we explored the expression 'component drive'

235. #235

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.319

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

     the object - the partial object, the object insofar as it is the resurgence and effect of the parental constellation - as a blind woman

236. #236

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what Object Relations analysts call "countertransference" is actually an irreducible structural effect of transference itself: by virtue of the analytic situation, the analyst is necessarily positioned as the container of *agalma* (objet petit a), and this positioning—not the analyst's personal psychology—explains phenomena like projective identification, transference love, and the analyst's affective responses; the categories of desire, fantasy, and topology are required to articulate this adequately.

     two things are involved in the analyst when he conducts an analysis, two drives... the reparative drive which, he tells us verbatim, runs counter to the latent destructiveness in each of us, and, second, the parental drive.

237. #237

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines the psychoanalytic object as *àgalma* — the partial object of desire that is incommensurable with ordinary objects of equivalence — and argues that this object, not identificatory or metaphysical constructs, is the true pivot of love, desire, and analytic practice, requiring a strict topology of subject, little other, and big Other to be properly situated.

     whether you call it the breast, the phallus, or shit - is always a partial object. This is what is at stake inasmuch as analysis is a method or technique that has made headway in the field of desire

238. #238

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the oral, anal, and genital stages through the dialectic of demand and desire, showing how each stage structures the subject's relation to the Other differently, culminating in the genital/castration stage where objet petit a is defined as the Other minus phi (a = A - φ), revealing that the subject can only satisfy the Other's demand by demeaning the Other into an object of desire.

     the appraisal of the object - the object clearly remaining partial at this stage - still contrasts here with the refusal of desire

239. #239

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.391

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **"A D R EA M OF A SHADOW IS M A N "**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recasts Abraham's concept of "partial love for the object" (Partialliebe) to argue that identification with the ego-ideal operates through isolated signifying traits (einziger Zug), not global introjection, and that narcissistic cathexis of one's own genitals is the structural condition for the exclusion of the object's genitals — establishing the phallus as the pivot that organises the series of partial objects (objet petit a) within the imaginary field structured by the mirror stage and face-to-face erotic posture.

     Abraham introduced the notion that is incorrectly referred to as that of the 'partial object,' which has since circulated throughout psychoanalytic work, becoming the foundation on which quite a lot of theorization concerning the neuroses and perversions has been constructed.

240. #240

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.400

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

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural function of objet petit a as the remainder that animates desire: the partial object is constituted by the elision of the phallus from the narcissistic image, such that libidinal cathexis (Besetzung) circulates around a central blank, and the object of desire is precisely what is 'saved from the waves' of narcissistic love — establishing the dialectic between being and having through the oral, anal, and phallic stages of demand.

     I broached it last time regarding the object qua part, a part that presents itself as separate - the 'partial object,' as they say.

241. #241

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

     the fundamentally partial nature of the object insofar as it is the pivotal point, crux, or key of human desire

242. #242

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Psyche and Zucchi's painting as an image for the castration complex, arguing that the phallus becomes a signifier precisely by being cut off from the organ, making it the signifier of the point where the signifying chain is lacking — S(Ⱥ) — and thereby rendering the subject unconscious and barred, rather than the castration complex being reducible to a fear of aphanisis.

     whether it is a matter of emphasizing the decisive and primordial effect of what pertains to knowledge's entreaties... or a matter of operationalizing what is called the aggressiveness of primordial sadism or what has been articulated in the different possible views concerning the object - running the gamut from its decomposition [into partial objects]

243. #243

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.309

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's trilogy to argue that castration is constitutive of the desiring subject—not as frustration of need but as the structural elevation of the phallus to a signifying function—and locates the composition of desire across three generational stages: the mark of the signifier, the undesired object, and finally the constitution of desire proper, while critiquing ego-psychology's reduction of desire to need and the concurrent eclipse of the father function.

     Between the mark of the signifier and passion for the partial object, how is desire composed?

244. #244

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.

     we only supply it to the extent that we discover the meaning of desire as a relation to the partial object in the other, and as a choice of that object.

245. #245

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between demand and desire is irreducible: every demand structurally evokes a counter-demand from the Other, and it is precisely the meeting of these two demands—not a meeting of tendencies—that produces the discordance in which desire exceeds and survives (or is extinguished by) satisfaction, illustrated paradigmatically through oral demand and the nursing relationship.

     Today we will put our finger on it again by briefly retracing what comes first in analytic theory - namely, Triebe, drives and their vicissitudes.

246. #246

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must take the form of "nescience qua nescience" — not ignorance but the structural position of holding lack without filling it — such that the only sign the analyst can give is the sign of the lack of a signifier, which alone opens the analysand to the unconscious; this is grounded in the phallus as signifier structuring the entire economy of desire through the tension between being and having.

     the relation to the object as an object of desire - as a partial object with all the necessary focusing [accommodation] - into a system, in an amusing physics experiment that I called the inverted vase illusion.

247. #247

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.397

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **"A D R EA M OF A SHADOW IS M A N "**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallic object, functioning as a constitutive blank spot on the body image, retroactively conditions the structure of all objects as separable and potentially lost; narcissistic cathexis is thereby shown to be rooted in castration, not opposed to it.

     Not every object must be defined, purely and simply, as a partial object - far from it - but the central characteristic of the relationship between one's own body and the phallus conditions the relationship to the most primitive objects after the fact.

248. #248

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the privileged function of the phallus in identification is grounded in the signifier's logic of non-identity (Russell's paradox), and proposes a decisive reversal: in place of Kantian Einheit (synthetic unity as norm), psychoanalytic logic requires Einzigkeit (unary trait as exception/singularity), thereby replacing transcendental logic with a logic of the signifier.

     when we designated this object as the object of the oral drive, for example... the object of the oral drive in so far as we consider it as the primordial breast

249. #249

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     *Seminar 20*: *Wednesday 16 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically the properties of surfaces such as the torus and cross-cap—provides the structural ground for understanding the signifier, whose essence as difference and discontinuity (the cut) can only be fully theorized once the inside/outside distinction is destabilized by non-orientable surfaces; this move displaces spatial intuition in favour of a topological account of the signifying cut.

     The privilege of the oral, anal and genital orifices is of interest to us in that they are not really orifices which end up on the inside of the body: the digestive tube is only a passage, it is open to the outside.

250. #250

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

     if one or both partners has remained fixated to the partial object, locked in a dual situation

251. #251

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

     the function of the partial object could not in any way be reduced for us, if what we call partial object is what designates the point of repression because of its loss

252. #252

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper aim of analysis is not therapeutic adaptation but the subject's entry into desire, and grounds this claim structurally by showing that the object of desire (objet petit a) is constituted not by privation or frustration but by castration, and that this castrated object uniquely "carries number with it" — a point illustrated through re-reading the Wolf Man's primal-scene fantasy.

     the logical function of this object does not depend… either on its extension or on its comprehension; for its extension… depends on the structuring function of the point

253. #253

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

     we must refer to the pre genital modes of relating to objects, to this all important moment in the subject's life where the mediation between the subject and the Other between demand and desire takes place around this very ambiguously defined object which is called the partial object.

254. #254

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.49

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

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

     It is a mode of eroticized capturing of the body's principal orifices. Hence the famous Freudian definition of sexuality, from which people wanted to deduce a supposed 'object relation' said to be oral, anal, or genital.

255. #255

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.179

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies a structurally privileged position at the point of exception within the law: it epitomizes "validity beyond meaning" (Geltung ohne Bedeutung), functioning as the non-universal partial object that captures desire and holds the subject in thrall, thereby linking Lacan's topological account of subject/Other desire (via the torus) to Kafka's literary figures of bare life and sovereignty, and to Agamben's inclusive exclusion.

     the law always manifests itself through some partial objects… by servants, doorkeepers, maids; by trivia, by trash, the detritus of the law

256. #256

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.139

     The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses Freud's well-known ambivalence toward music as a pivot to argue that the voice operates across three registers in Freud's texts (fantasy, desire, drive), and that the key fault-line in the Freudian corpus is between an unconscious that "speaks" (structured like a language) and drives that are constitutively mute — with the death drive as the silent, invisible shadow subtending the "clamor" of Eros.

     they don't quite keep their mouths shut, not in the case of the oral drive, but if the mouth is opened, it is not in order to speak. (Eating or speaking—Deleuze will dwell insistently on this dilemma)

257. #257

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.196

     Silence > The dog

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization of the mouth converges with Freud's drive theory, and that both lines — voice and food — meet in the objet petit a; Kafka's "ultimate science" of freedom is then identified retroactively as psychoanalysis, the science capable of taking this intersection as its object.

     Eating can never be the same once the mouth has been deterritorialized—it is seized by the drive, it turns around a new object which emerged in this operation, it keeps circumventing, circling around this eternally elusive object.

258. #258

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.205

     Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

     what is essential is that the movement by which the arrow that sets out towards the target fulfils its function only by really re-emerging from it, and returning on to the subject.

259. #259

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.82

     The voice and the drive

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

     So the voice stands at a paradoxical and ambiguous topological spot... the property which it shares with all the objects of the drive: they are all situated in a realm which exceeds the body, they prolong the body like an excrescence, but they are not simply outside the body either.

260. #260

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.91

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: The voice, as object of the drive, operates through a constitutive asymmetry of incorporation and expulsion that makes it extimate—belonging to neither interior nor exterior—and this same structural topology grounds the intimate connection between voice and conscience that has animated the ethical tradition.

     the voice presents at its clearest the mechanism of the object of the drive, its topology, its topological paradox. All the objects of the drive function precisely through the mechanism of—excessive—incorporation and expulsion

261. #261

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.139

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

     It is only at the point where the fantasy enabling this relation to the partial object no longer holds that the anxiety ridden phenomenon of vampirism takes over

262. #262

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs terminological clarification, tracing the evolution of Freud's drive nomenclature from the ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissistic libido to the final antithesis of Eros (life drives) and death drives, while also noting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and situating Freud's speculations within a broader intellectual genealogy (Spielrein, Ferenczi, Plato, Upanishads).

     [Partialtrieb. The Standard Edition routinely renders the Partial-element of this term as 'component…', but there is no good reason to depart from the straightforward translation 'partial…']

263. #263

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat reveals a universal conservative character of all drives — the tendency to restore a prior state — and from this derives the thesis that the ultimate goal of all life is death (return to the inorganic), redefining the death drive not as a force opposed to life but as the deepest logic of organic striving itself.

     The theory that there are drives directed at self-preservation... They are indeed 'partial' drives, charged with the task of safe-guarding the organism's own particular path to death.

264. #264

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the structural-dynamic thesis that the psyche's tripartite division (id, ego, superego) must be articulated with the dualism of Eros and the death drive, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido as the energetic medium that links drive-fusion/de-fusion to the pleasure principle and to the indifferent displacements characteristic of the primary process.

     In the case of the sexual partial drives, which lend themselves particularly well to observation, one can see a number of processes that follow a similar pattern

265. #265

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the repetition compulsion inherent in drives is not necessarily in conflict with the pleasure principle but operates alongside it, and that the pleasure principle itself is ultimately subordinate to the death drive's tendency to restore the inorganic quiescence - with the annexation of drive-impulses (secondary process) functioning as a preparatory service to both pleasure and final dissolution.

     This characteristic would automatically be transmitted to each and every partial drive, and in the case of such drives would involve the retrieval of a particular stage of the development process.

266. #266

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     certain other parts of the body – the erogenous zones – might be able to substitute for the genitals and behave in a similar way to them

267. #267

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud consolidates his dualistic drive theory by aligning life/death drives with biological anabolism/catabolism, traces the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissism to the identification of Eros as the universal binding force, and accounts for sadism as a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function — all while insisting that this dualism cannot be collapsed into Jung's monism.

     It also occurs as a dominant partial drive in one of those forms of organization of sexual life that I have termed 'pre-genital'.

268. #268

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that masochism exemplifies a primary death drive turned back on the ego, while sexual drives serve as life-preserving counter-forces oriented toward reunification; the chapter concludes with a methodological self-critique acknowledging the speculative and figurative character of drive theory, framing the entire edifice as provisional hypothesis rather than empirical certainty.

     masochism, the partial drive complementary to sadism, has to be understood as the sadism within an individual turning back upon his own ego

269. #269

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.237

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *3. The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical architecture of the chapter by elaborating the sinthome as the singular limit of analysis beyond interpretation, articulating the act as an annihilating break with fantasy and the future, and positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction to act in conformity with desire rather than serve the 'service of goods'.

     insisting instead on the machine-like working of the partial, dehumanizing drives and offering a constant access to their surplus of jouissance

270. #270

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.128

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

     Vampirism is located beyond this point where the child maintains itself in relation to a partial object, an object of desire.

271. #271

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.243

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *objet petit a* is the "object-cause" of desire: a primordially lost, liminal object that is simultaneously imaginary, symbolic, and real yet belongs to none, and whose retroactive ceding—not subtraction from a pre-formed subject—constitutes the desiring subject itself, such that desire paradoxically originates only in and through the loss of its object.

     Within the compass of the objet a Lacan gathers the familiar psychoanalytic partial objects relevant to the Freudian stages of development—oral, anal, and phallic—but also adds some of his own.

272. #272

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.251

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > "You don't love me . . . you just don't give a shit."

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a—exemplified by the anal object—is not a natural object but is constituted through the demand of the Other, which "colonizes" the body's orifices and transforms biological functions into denaturalized libidinal strivings; drive development across stages is thus not natural maturation but a migration of the objet a driven by the Other's demand.

     The passage from the oral drive to the anal drive can be produced not by a process of maturation, but by the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive—by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other

273. #273

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.133

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Oedipal transformation is best understood structurally as a labor of the death drive that deconstructs imaginary identification and installs the child in the symbolic order, linking castration anxiety, superego formation, and jouissance into a coherent Lacanian re-reading of Freudian metapsychology.

     the partial objects discovered by psychoanalysis—including for Lacan not only the penis, breast, and feces, but also the voice and the gaze—assume the status of primitive signifiers.

274. #274

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.293

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 5. Freudian “Materialism” and the Transcendence of Desire

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian doctrine of the phallus as master signifier, together with the contradictory nature of objet a (split between the imaginary and symbolic registers), explains how the unconscious simultaneously orients desire beyond all imaging and remains tied to the imaginary body — thus Freud's "materialism" is not biological determinism but an account of how natural need is dislocated into drive and desire through the orbit of objet a, making desire structurally "useless" and open to an indefinite range of objects.

     Each of the primitive infantile drives—the oral, anal, and phallic—is set in motion in relation to a specific organ system and its function. Yet each serves to launch a movement of desire beyond the natural.

275. #275

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.290

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 3. The Body of Phantasy

     Theoretical move: The objet a is theorized as a "vanishing mediator" that is irreducibly equivocal—simultaneously a locus of pure lack and a virtual impress of imaginary embodiment—and this apparent contradiction is resolved not by choosing one pole but by understanding primal repression as the very mechanism that keeps the object straddling the imaginary and symbolic. The phoneme is identified as the prime structural analogue (and indeed instance) of the objet a, since it similarly conjoins material/bodily positionality with pure differential function.

     The subject's relation to its originary figures—the part objects of the breast, the feces, the phallus—has been repressed.

276. #276

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" (which closes off the human within its limits), Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" by demonstrating that human finitude is always already a *failed* finitude—a finitude with a structural hole—whose Lacanian name is objet petit a, and whose topology is best rendered by the Möbius strip: immanence that generates an other side without ever crossing to it.

     Lacan calls it the 'partial object,' the object *a.*

277. #277

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.227

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy is essentially the "genre of the copula" — the signifying articulation of the missing link between life and the Symbolic — and that the phallus, appearing in comedy as a partial object rather than merely a signifier, materialises this constitutive contradiction; comedy's "realism" is thus the realism of the Real of desire and drive, not the reality principle.

     As a partial object (that is, one in the series of partial objects), which is as such also a real locus of enjoyment, and is already mediated by the cut of symbolic castration against the background of which it appears.

278. #278

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the thesis that all drives are fundamentally conservative—oriented toward restoring a prior, inorganic state—thereby identifying the compulsion to repeat as a universal property of organic life and deriving the formula "the goal of all life is death," which redefines self-preservation drives as mere partial detours on the path to death rather than genuine forces of progress.

     The theory that there are drives directed at self-preservation… They are indeed 'partial' drives, charged with the task of safe-guarding the organism's own particular path to death

279. #279

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud tests his death drive hypothesis against biological science, finding partial but ultimately inconclusive support from Weismann's soma/germ-plasm distinction, and concludes that even if the physical manifestations of death are a late evolutionary acquisition, the underlying drive-processes oriented toward death could be operative from the very beginning of organic life—thus preserving the conceptual distinction between death drives and life/sexual drives.

     it was really only the former that we could claim showed the conservative character of drives or – better – their regressive character, corresponding to the compulsion to repeat

280. #280

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section traces the conceptual evolution of Freud's drive theory from the sexual/ego drive opposition through narcissism and Eros to the final life drive/death drive antithesis, while also documenting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and cross-cultural precursors to Platonic myth.

     [Partialtrieb. The Standard Edition routinely renders the Partial-element of this term as 'component…', but there is no good reason to depart from the straightforward translation 'partial…']

281. #281

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a dualistic drive theory by aligning biological distinctions (anabolism/catabolism, soma/germ-plasm) with the life drive / death drive polarity, tracing the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive antithesis to narcissistic libido, and arguing that sadism represents a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function—insisting against Jung's monism that a genuine dualism of Eros and death drive remains irreducible.

     It also occurs as a dominant partial drive in one of those forms of organization of sexual life that I have termed 'pre-genital'.

282. #282

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the repetition-compulsion of drives is not necessarily in conflict with the pleasure principle but rather precedes and prepares for its dominion; the pleasure principle is reframed as a tendency subservient to the deeper drive toward dissolution of excitation (the death drive), while the distinction between primary/secondary processes and annexed/non-annexed cathexis illuminates the graduated taming of pleasure over psychic development.

     This characteristic would automatically be transmitted to each and every partial drive, and in the case of such drives would involve the retrieval of a particular stage of the development process.

283. #283

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud recapitulates his dualistic drive theory (Eros vs. death drive), articulates their fusion and de-mergence as the dynamic mechanism underlying libidinal regression, ambivalence, and neurotic phenomena, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido that operates as a qualitatively indifferent energy serving the pleasure principle across both ego and id.

     In the case of the sexual partial drives, which lend themselves particularly well to observation, one can see a number of processes that follow a similar pattern.

284. #284

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.79

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_pg_78" class="pagebreak" title="78"></span>**Now a Stomach, Now an Anus . . .**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that political economy's reductive abstraction produces the worker not as a natural animal but as a "surplus abstraction" — an entity fragmented into vanishing particular bodily functions, structurally identified with sense-certainty's contradictions (now a mouth, now an anus), and thereby rendered ontologically inexistent: less than an animal, the shadow of an agent.

     One might here see a parallel to Freud's depiction of infantile sexuality: whereas in normal and perverted sexuality 'a well-organized tyranny has been established . . . infantile sexuality . . . lacks, speaking generally, any such centering and organization; its separate component instincts have equal rights'

285. #285

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.294

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ontology requires a pre-ontological register of "less-than-nothing" (den) distinct from both Nothing and Something, and uses the Klein bottle topology and the Higgs field paradox to demonstrate that Void/Nothing is not the ground but itself an achievement requiring energetic expenditure — thereby establishing a materialist distinction between two vacuums (false/true) that is strictly homologous to the Lacanian distinction between the death drive's circular movement and nirvana, and between den and objet a.

     the difference between goal and aim of a drive, as elaborated by Lacan: the drive's goal—to reach its object—is 'false,' it masks its 'true' aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement

286. #286

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.455

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads Beckett's procedure of abstraction—the gap between the "material of experience" and the "material of expression"—as the formal operation by which the Real/Impossible interrupts any seamless passage to social totality, and argues that this same logic of the almost-closed circle (humanitarian charity reproduces what it opposes) can only be broken by a real-impossible act.

     the speaker (who is not a person, but a partial object, a faceless MOUTH speaking—an 'organ without a body,' as it were)

287. #287

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.131

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

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

     all polymorphous-perverse play of partial drives takes place against the background of this impossibility/antagonism.

288. #288

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.152

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human sexuality is not a "civilized" displacement of natural animal sexuality but rather the point where the dislocation/impossibility immanent in all sexed reproduction becomes registered as such—via the Unconscious and surplus-jouissance—so that culture retroactively denaturalizes nature itself, while the transition from animal to human mirrors the Hegelian move from In-itself to For-itself applied to not-knowing.

     the immanent negativity (death as intrinsic to life) gets a material existence in the surplus enjoyment (which becomes its figure or representative) related to different partial drives and their satisfaction.

289. #289

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

     it is carried on a pillow beside him, as a nauseous partial object out of which, through an aperture resembling vaginal lips, trickles blood.

290. #290

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.161

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

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

     Each partial drive (or its object) is a repetition of this crack—a repetition which, in turn, constitutes this object as object.

291. #291

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.158

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: By reading Lacan and Deleuze together, the passage argues that the death drive is not a principle of destruction but the site of originary affirmation, and that repetition is not a response to a pre-existing traumatic original but the very mechanism that produces its own excess — with a constitutive split at its heart that parallels the Lacanian distinction between the void around which drives circulate and their partial figures.

     drives as involved in all kinds of partial satisfactions, following the well-known list (oral, anal, scopic), and the drive as purely disruptive pulsating negativity that propels them.

292. #292

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.191

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic account of sexuality as an ontological negativity—instantiated in the drive, fantasy, and the body as distinct from the organism—provides a properly materialist ethics that new materialism cannot supply, because it grounds freedom, difference, and ethical creativity in the constitutive gap at the core of human being rather than in a "flat ontology" that nullifies human peculiarity.

     the drive manifests in 'the mode of a headless subject, for everything is articulated in it in terms of tension.'

293. #293

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.177

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing scholarly apparatus (citations, bibliographic references, and brief clarifying remarks) for a chapter on sex, materialism, Laplanche, Deleuze, and Lacan; it is primarily bibliographic rather than substantively argumentative, though several notes contain compressed theoretical interventions worth tracking.

     Normativity—culturally prescribed normative sexuality—intervenes at the point of this crack; its primary aim is not to unify and 'tame' the original heterogeneity of partial drives

294. #294

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.47

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Dune* deploys the voice as an "impossible object" — an object-cause of desire that destabilizes rather than secures symbolic authority — in order to construct a fully fantasmatic world where the originary loss of the privileged object has not occurred, enabling direct access to jouissance and collapsing the boundary between internal and external reality.

     It is as if during the implementation of the voice the character's voice detaches from the character herself and becomes an independently existing object.

295. #295

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.81

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Struggle Between Life ond Deoth**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in *Fire Walk with Me*, the Man From Another Place figures the Lacanian libido as detached body part—the primordial lost object that institutes the death drive—while BOB figures the phallus as an attempt to short-circuit the drive by possessing the object without loss; the film shows that phallic authority is secretly subordinate to the death drive, and that fantasy makes visible the hidden dependency of the social order on this structure.

     the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being.

296. #296

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.113

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-111-0"></span>**Lost Objects**

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's "lost object" is a radical transformation of Freud's concept: whereas Freud's object is merely re-found after a first encounter, Lacan's object (a) is constituted retroactively as always-already lost—never having existed as such—and is defined as the leftover of symbolization that resists capture, functioning as the remainder of an impossible primal subject-object unity.

     Lacan explicitly acknowledges his debt to a number of psychoanalysts who helped him on his way to the concept object (a): Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein ('part-objects'), and Donald Winnicott ('transitional objects').

297. #297

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" that makes finitude a Master-Signifier closing off the infinite, Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" grounded in the Lacanian insight that human finitude is always-already a *failed finitude* — a finitude with a constitutive hole — whose materiality is objet petit a, and whose topology is best captured by the Möbius strip as the figure of immanent transcendence.

     Lacan calls it the 'partial object,' the object a.

298. #298

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.227

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Comedy is theorized as the genre of the copula—the site where the missing link between life and the signifier is made to appear—and the phallus is identified as the privileged signifier of this copula, one that appears in comedy not as signifier but as partial object, materializing the contradictions of the Symbolic. The 'realism' of comedy is then relocated from the reality principle to the Real of desire/drive as an irreducible incongruence within human existence.

     As a partial object (that is, one in the series of partial objects), which is as such also a real locus of enjoyment, and is already mediated by the cut of symbolic castration against the background of which it appears, yet the impediments of which it tends to escape at the same time

299. #299

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.112

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the standard critique of fetishism (which reduces the fetish to a contingent object filling an empty structural place) misses the "Hegelian performative" dimension whereby the big Other's empty place is constitutively correlated with an excessive partial object — castration names not merely the gap between element and empty place, but the very emergence of that place through a cut; this logic extends to a critique of the philosophy of finitude (including a Lacanian variant), which is countered by the obscene immortality of objet petit a / death drive as the true materialist infinite.

     this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical

300. #300

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.401

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical glosses; while several substantive conceptual asides occur (on the phallus as signifier of castration, Saint Paul's comic reinterpretation of Christ's death, the banality of the Good, and Stalinist normalization), the material is primarily footnote apparatus rather than sustained theoretical argument.

     Is hysteria not the illness in which the partial object within the subject runs amok, and starts to move around?

301. #301

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.65

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.

     this will is not realizable, that it gets blocked, stuck to a "partial object."

302. #302

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.126

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: The passage redefines the human-animal distinction not as one between man and beast but as an *inherent* difference within the human itself: between the human and the "inhuman excess" of drive that is constituted by the body's colonization by the symbolic order through the sinthome. The properly human task is then a Christological-sublimatory one—transforming the modality of this excess rather than suppressing it.

     the 'undead' partial object is the inscription on the body of what Eric Santner called 'signifying stress'

303. #303

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

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

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

     the 'pound of flesh,' the partial object which stands for what is 'in me more than myself,' is taken literally

304. #304

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.122

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

     when an organ—a partial object, the objectal correlative of the subject—autonomizes itself with regard to the person whose 'soul' is the form of its body

305. #305

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.117

     **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

     Theoretical move: Claire Denis's films perform a systematic demolition of fantasy by staging and then deflating the image of the enjoying Other—revealing the lack and partiality that underlie any apparent complete enjoyment—thereby redirecting subjects away from the paranoid lure of fantasmatic jouissance and back toward the partial enjoyment proper to the path of desire.

     The enjoyment linked to the path of desire remains partial: one enjoys the partiality of the objet petit a—the not having it as much as the having it.

306. #306

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.242

     29 > **13. The Banality of Orson Welles**

     Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes for chapters on Orson Welles and Claire Denis, theoretically elaborates the objet petit a as a constitutively lost and impossible object: Antonioni's nostalgic fantasy treats the object as once-accessible, Welles's films reveal the banality/emptiness at the origin (Rosebud, the sled), and Denis's cinematography stages the partiality of jouissance rather than its plenitude.

     we see only close-ups of their hands, their feet, their faces, and so on. At times, it becomes difficult to discern what body parts we see

307. #307

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.177

     23

     Theoretical move: The "cinema of intersection" is theorized as a distinct cinematic mode that sustains a rigid separation between the worlds of desire and fantasy within a single film, producing a direct, traumatic encounter with the gaze (as objet petit a) at the moment of their collision—an experience that ideology-serving "cinema of integration" forecloses by reducing the impossible object to an ordinary empirical one.

     the gaze, which must remain a partial object, disappears

308. #308

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.88

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation is not a surrogate for drive-satisfaction but *is* drive-satisfaction, and that the Real is located in the interval between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction-as-object; collapsing this gap in either direction (fetishism or Don Juan's hyper-realization) generates the superego injunction to enjoy. She then pivots to Nietzsche's figure of the "middle" (noon/midday) as a non-synthetic beyond that parallels this Lacanian logic of constitutive duality.

     Take the case of the oral drive: we have an object in the guise of food that we want to ingest... but, at the same time, we also have an object that embodies the satisfaction brought about by this very act of ingesting the food ('the pleasure of the mouth').

309. #309

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.183

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love, conceived as drive rather than desire, operates through a "time warp" logic in which the impossible Real happens rather than remaining structurally inaccessible; this enables love to "humanize jouissance" through a sublimation-as-desublimation that dislocates the sublime object from its source of enjoyment, thereby making jouissance itself an object of desire.

     the drive always finds or makes its way between two objects: the object at which it aims (for instance, food in the case of the oral drive) and—as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it—the satisfaction as object ('the pleasure of the mouth' in the oral drive).

310. #310

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.53

     **Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex** > *objet a*

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically theorizes the *objet petit a* as the object-cause of desire — constitutively absent, irreducible to signification, and functioning as the remainder/gap that both inaugurates subjectivity through loss and sustains desire by perpetually eluding satisfaction, thereby distinguishing it sharply from any empirical object of desire.

     the impossible substance of enjoyment, conceptualized by Lacan in terms of the (partial) object *a.*

311. #311

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.20

     **Demand** > **Drive**

     Theoretical move: The passage constructs a composite theoretical account of the Freudian/Lacanian drive by distinguishing its structural components (pressure, aim, object, source), separating it from instinct/need, and establishing its paradoxical logic: the drive is never satisfied by reaching its object but finds satisfaction in its own circular, repetitive movement—making every drive simultaneously sexual and a death drive.

     If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point of view of a biological totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is only to return into circuit.

312. #312

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.18

     **Contradiction** > **Death drive**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'death drive' is a misleading label for Freud's genuine insight that the subject's satisfaction is constitutively tied to loss and failure rather than to any literal desire for death; Lacan radicalises this by identifying every partial drive as a death drive insofar as it returns to and repeats the experience of loss.

     'the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed being.'

313. #313

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *objet a* and *das Ding* form a two-fold ontic-ontological dynamic: the *objet a* functions as the obstinate objective clue (the ontic "odd feature") that opens onto the abyssal void of *das Ding* (the ontological Real), thereby reversing Žižek's own formulation; and that *das Ding*, linked to the mother's inscrutable desire and mediated by the Name of the Father / signifier, is ultimately "extimate" — the Thing in the Other mirrors an unthinkable excess within the subject itself.

     the most primordial indications of the Thing in the Other are embodied in the breast, the feces, and the penis. Such part objects mark the boundary between the known and the unknown.

314. #314

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.114

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the death drive involves two distinct splits—the genesis of surplus satisfaction from organic need, and a constitutive negativity (inbuilt lack of being) around which the drive circulates—and that satisfaction/enjoyment is not the goal but the *means* of the drive, whose true aim is the repetition of negativity; this reframes the death drive not as a return to the inanimate but as the opening of alternative paths to death beyond those immanent in the organism.

     sexuality is not a totalizing function, it is not what totalizes the drives. There is no 'sexual drive' as a whole, and sexuality is driven forward by associations of 'partial drives' which have but one thing in common, namely and precisely this 'minus' or void.

315. #315

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.22

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

     Theoretical move: Zupančič inverts the standard account of religion vs. drive sexuality: Christianity does not repress partial drives but rather represses the *link* between enjoyment and sexuality, because what is truly threatening is not perverse jouissance but the ontological negativity of the sexual relation (the missing signifier), which registers in reality as the unconscious. Humanity is thus not an exception to Nature but the site where Nature's own lack of sexual knowledge acquires its singular epistemic—unconscious—form.

     there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives: as autofocused as they may well be, they can nevertheless function as the glue of society, as the very stuff of communion.

316. #316

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.123

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze share a common theoretical move: rejecting the pleasure principle as primary and affirming the primacy of the death drive, which they reconceptualise not as a tendency toward destruction but as the transcendental/ontological condition of repetition itself—a faceless negativity or "crack" that is irreducible to either life or death, and which constitutes rather than follows from the surplus excess and repression it generates.

     the object of the drive is different from the object of a need and involves another, surplus satisfaction, following a logic of its own

317. #317

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.33

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Quandary of the Relation

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "there is no sexual relation" should not be ontologized into a gloomy fact about reality, but understood as the very condition that generates ties and discourses; the non-relation, mediated by objet petit a as its objective counterpart, produces an "object-disoriented ontology" that links the sexual to emancipatory politics at a structural, not merely thematic, level.

     the impossible substance of enjoyment, conceptualized by Lacan in terms of the (partial) object a

318. #318

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.18

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Where Do Adults Come From?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that what makes enjoyment "sexual" is not its continuity with adult sexuality or its entanglement with partial drives per se, but its constitutive entanglement with the unconscious as a structural negativity arriving from the Other—such that sexuality is not first present and then repressed, but appears *only* as repressed, making the unconscious and sexuality ontologically co-extensive.

     le sexual is essentially related to different partial drives and their satisfaction; it is not innate, not object-based, and not procreative.

319. #319

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.58

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

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

     'Oral pleasure,' for example, which arises as a by-product of the satisfying of the need for food, starts to function as an autonomous object of the drive; it moves away from its first object

320. #320

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.38

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the antagonism between signifier and enjoyment, and between the Other and jouissance, arises not from heterogeneous origins but from their co-origination in the same locus; the Other and enjoyment are 'extimately' related such that any attempt to purify one of the other rediscovers what was expelled at the very heart of the purified term, producing a structural twist rather than a symmetrical relation.

     what we find, for example, at the very heart of the most sex-free, spiritual (Christian) love is a proliferation of partial objects and their enjoyment

321. #321

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Freud's trajectory in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"—from the monism of the death drive, through the Eros/Thanatos dualism, to a monism of sexual drives—in order to show that the Lacanian death drive is not a separate drive but the inherent negativity (the gap/void) around which every partial drive circulates, with objet petit a functioning as the "crust" that sticks to this void and makes repetition possible.

     On the one hand there are drives as involved in all kinds of partial surplus satisfactions, following the well-known list (oral, anal, scopic); but there is also the drive as the purely disruptive pulsating negativity that gives them their singular rhythm and torsion.

322. #322

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.125

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

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

     Each partial drive (or its object) is a repetition of this crack—a repetition which, in turn, constitutes this object as object.

323. #323

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.16

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > <span id="page-13-0"></span>Did Somebody Say Sex?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Freud's radical move was not to normalize sexuality but to expose its constitutive ontological impasse—sexuality as the "operator of the inhuman" that disrupts identity and grounds a theory of the subject; contemporary psychotherapy's reduction of sexuality to empirical practices is thus a defense against this fundamental negativity, which Lacan restores by returning sexuality to the dimension of the Real.

     it would also be a big mistake to consider that, in Freudian theory, the sexual (in the sense of constitutively deviational partial drives) is the ultimate horizon of the animal called 'human'

324. #324

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

     Theoretical move: The non-existence of the sexual relation is not a mere absence but constitutive of the Real itself; partial drives and their satisfactions are not a positive residue left after the fantasy's subtraction, but are intrinsically formed by the negativity of non-relation—the lack does not supplement the drives from outside but structures them from within.

     We must not make the mistake of conceiving the existence of the sexual relation as a fantasy, which psychoanalysis would invite us to get rid of, and to accept instead the reality of partial drives and fleeting pleasures ('squeezing' here and there) as the ultimate raw reality.