Perversion

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (239)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

   The Lie > The Sadeian trap

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Sadeian trap" arises when a subject hides behind a pre-given, ready-made duty to justify (and disavow responsibility for) the surplus-enjoyment derived from his actions — a perverse structure — and that escaping this trap requires recognizing that the ethical subject is not the agent but the agens of the universal, constituting the Law rather than merely applying it.

   The type of discourse where I use my duty as an excuse for my actions is perverse in the strictest sense of the word.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.98

   Good and Evil > The logic of suicide

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's texts contain two logics of suicide that map onto two structurally opposed ethical positions: a sacrificial logic that preserves and reinforces the big Other, and a second logic—suicide *via* the Other—that annihilates the symbolic coordinates giving the subject identity, and which paradoxically satisfies all the formal conditions of a pure ethical act, making it indistinguishable from (and thus the perverted double of) Lacan's conception of the Act.

   an act which satisfies all the conditions of an ethical act is already here, 'realized' - yet always only in a perverted, 'perverse' form: as an act of diabolical evil.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.101

   Good and Evil > Degrees of evil

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of "radical evil" is systematically misread when applied to empirical historical events like the Holocaust; it is instead a transcendental-structural concept—the necessary consequence of freedom itself—that explains the possibility of non-ethical conduct, not its empirical magnitude, and that this misreading enables a reductive "ethics of the lesser evil."

   It may also be called the perversity [perversitas] of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] among the incentives of a free will.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.107

   Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that within Kantian ethics, "diabolical evil" and "the highest good" are structurally indistinguishable—both name the formal structure of an accomplished ethical act—and that any genuine act necessarily involves a transgression of the existing symbolic order, such that the difference between good and evil dissolves at the level of the act's structure, a conclusion Kant produced but refused to acknowledge.

   the subject cannot hide behind her duty - she is responsible for what she refers to as her duty

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.128

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > In letter 70, he puts it like this:

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's conduct toward Madame de Tourvel exemplifies the perverse structure as Lacan conceives it—making the Other enjoy/become a subject—while his eventual betrayal of Merteuil illustrates Lacan's formula of 'giving ground on one's desire' (céder sur son désir), wherein the rhetoric of 'it is not my fault' is itself the purest confession of guilt and the mark of the subject who has abandoned desire for the logic of the superego.

   we are dealing here with the paradigm case of the perverse position as Lacan conceives it: what is at stake for the pervert is not finding enjoyment for himself, but making the Other enjoy, completing the Other by supplying the surplusenjoyment she lacks.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.230

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'terror' as a political-ethical form operates through a forced logic of subjectivation—compelling the subject to choose in a way that simultaneously constitutes and destroys her as subject—revealing a structural homology between radical terror and the ethical Act, and showing that the closest approach to the ethical Act may require the transgression of the universal moral law itself.

   the German officer, his attitude might be described in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of perversion: like the pervert, he identifies not with the victim but with her jouissance.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.277

   Index

   Theoretical move: This is the index of Zupančič's *Ethics of the Real*, a non-substantive navigational apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any independent theoretical argument.

   perversion 58-9, 60, 1 15, 217

8. #08

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: Freud uses the analysis of "typical dreams" (especially nakedness/exhibition dreams) to argue that such dreams are universal because they draw on shared infantile sources—specifically childhood exhibitionism preceding the acquisition of shame—and that the dream-work's distortion through wish-fulfilment and repression explains their characteristic structure, including the contradictory indifference of spectators.

   among those remaining perverted there is a class which has accentuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the exhibitionists

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.186

   [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

   Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.

   the structure of perversion comes down to an identification with the imaginary phallus of the (m)Other (463, 1): in perversion the subject positions themselves as the instrument of the Other's jouissance.

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.

    how it can also play the role of a fetish object in perversion, an object that must be present for desire to occur at all

11. #11

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

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (letters O–R) from a scholarly volume on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    perversion [37], [85], [187], [189], [225]–[226], [284]

12. #12

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.101

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Myth Was Not Proto- Science > The Ideal of the Redoubtable

    Theoretical move: The archaic Homeric ideal of the "redoubtable" hero is diagnosed as a symptomatic defensive formation: the hero's pose of self-possession against the abyssal Thing (Das Ding) ultimately collapses into narcissism, imaginary investment, and dependency on the Other's gaze, making it structurally homologous with the bifold perceptual complex of the Freudian Thing rather than a genuine engagement with it.

    The fundamental structure embodied by the archaic ethos thus emerges as precisely homologous with the bifold structure of the 'perceptual complex' of the Freudian Thing.

13. #13

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.150

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > From Circumcision to Crucifixion

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that bodily mutilation rituals in Judaism (circumcision) and Christianity (crucifixion) operate as structurally distinct symbolic operations: circumcision establishes the signifier of the phallus and holds open the regime of signification, while crucifixion installs a phantasmatic identification with the objet a that risks collapsing into a narcissistic-masochistic perversion rather than genuine opening toward the Other.

    Yet for that very reason the underlying structure becomes essentially perverse. As Slavoj Žižek compellingly argues, the basic strategy is comparable to that of the fireman who deliberately sets a house on fire so that he may play the hero who arrives just in time to put it out.

14. #14

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.168

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology > The Manichaean Temptation

    Theoretical move: The Lacanian architecture of belief—which requires a supposed non-believer as its structural support—explains why mainstream Christianity persistently "substantializes" evil into a gnostic dualism despite both orthodox Augustinian theology and Jesus's own teaching; the psychic requirement of belief generates the division between good and evil as its ideological shadow.

    Such turning toward creation instead of toward the Creator is in the literal sense a 'perversion.' Sinners' implicit aim is to place themselves in the position of God.

15. #15

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.205

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

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

    As we saw in our examination of the appeal to the big Other in the dynamics of perversion, the game of transgression is at every point dependent upon some prior assertion of the law. In posing himself as the dutiful servant of the big Other, the pervert merely appears to violate the existing order.

16. #16

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.28

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > Death at the Bott om of Everything

    Theoretical move: McGowan redefines the death drive not as aggression or a return to inorganic stasis but as a structural impetus to repeat an originary constitutive loss, arguing that masochism—not sadism—is the paradigmatic form of subjectivity, and that this primacy of the death drive makes any notion of progress inherently self-undermining.

    Though most readers focus on the essay's philosophical coupling of Kantian morality with Sadean perversion, the more significant step that Lacan takes here occurs in his explanation of sadism's appeal.

17. #17

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.143

    I > Changing the World > Th e Questionable Task of Analysis

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are forms of private rebellion that leave the social order intact, and that psychoanalytic "normalization" should be understood not as adaptation to the status quo but as the production of a subject capable of genuinely transformative public action.

    The pervert never completes the radical act and topples the figure of authority, because perversion's enjoyment stems from the act of contesting itself. This is why one can say that the pervert acts out but never fully acts.

18. #18

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.149

    I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic success consists in the subject publicly avowing its fantasy and acting from the "nonsense" of its own enjoyment rather than sacrificing that enjoyment to social authority — thereby exposing the groundlessness of all symbolic authority and opening a path for collective transformation. Hamlet's trajectory from perverse fool to authentic fool is used as the paradigmatic illustration of this move.

    The pervert's public show of enjoyment is not an insistence on enjoyment for its own sake; the public show is an att empt to give rise to an authority who would lay down the law prohibiting that enjoyment.

19. #19

    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_194"></span>**Structure**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

    perversion by the operation of disavowal

20. #20

    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_148"></span>**perversion**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines perversion not as deviant sexual behaviour but as a distinct clinical structure, characterized by the operations of disavowal (in relation to the phallus) and a specific positioning of the subject as object/instrument of the Other's jouissance—inverting the structure of fantasy—and argues this structure is equally complex to neurosis, differing not in richness but in the inverse direction of its structuration.

    Lacan overcomes this impasse in Freudian theory by defining perversion not as a form of behaviour but as a clinical STRUCTURE.

21. #21

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_70"></span>**fetishism**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the Lacanian reworking of fetishism: shifting Freud's account from a realist (penis-substitution) to a symbolic-linguistic framework (phallus-substitution), extending disavowal as the constitutive mechanism of perversion in general, and ultimately destabilising Freud's claim that fetishism is an exclusively male perversion by proposing that the real penis can itself function as a fetish for heterosexual women.

    Lacan also extends the mechanism of DISAVOWAL, making it the operation constitutive of perversion itself, and not just of the fetishistic perversion.

22. #22

    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_154"></span>**preoedipal phase**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconceives the preoedipal phase not as a dyadic mother-child relation but as an imaginary triangle mediated by the phallus, arguing that psychoanalytic structure requires a minimum of three terms; the intervention of the real drive and then the father as a fourth term disrupt this triangle, and all perversions originate in identifications within it.

    all the perversions have their origin in this phase (S4, 193). PERVERSION always involves some kind of identification with another term in the preoedipal triangle, whether it be the mother, or the imaginary phallus

23. #23

    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_46"></span>**defence**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures Freudian defence by distinguishing it structurally from resistance—defences are permanent symbolic structures (effectively equivalent to fantasy) while resistances are transitory imaginary responses—and further identifies desire itself as dialectically constituted by a defensive prohibition against exceeding the limit of jouissance.

    like the neurotic, the pervert 'defends himself in his desire'

24. #24

    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.

    A more radical defence against castration than repression is disavowal, which is at the root of the perverse structure. The different modalities of refusing castration find expression in the various forms of perversion.

25. #25

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_69"></span>**father**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically distinguishes three registers of the father (symbolic, imaginary, real) to show that the father is not a unified concept but a tripartite structure whose interplay constitutes the conditions of possibility for subjectivity, psychosis, and perversion — and to position Lacan's theory against object-relations prioritization of the mother-child dyad.

    Psychosis and perversion both involve, in different ways, a reduction of the symbolic father to the imaginary father.

26. #26

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_68"></span>**fantasy**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is not opposed to reality but is a discursively constituted, structurally fixed defence against castration and the lack in the Other; its mathemic formalisation ($ ◇ a) places it within a signifying structure that the analysand must ultimately traverse in the course of treatment.

    The perverse fantasy inverts this relation to the object, and is thus formalised as [a ◇ $]

27. #27

    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_151"></span>**phobia**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retheorises phobia not as a clinical structure but as a "revolving junction" (plaque tournante): the phobic object functions as a signifier without univocal sense, enabling the subject to work through the impossibilities blocking passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, and phobia thereby occupies a gateway position between the two great neurotic structures and perversion.

    a gateway which can lead to either of them and which also has certain connections with the perverse structure. The link with perversion can be seen in the similarities between the fetish and the phobic object

28. #28

    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_53"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0068"></span>**disavowal**

    Theoretical move: Lacan systematically tightens Freud's concept of disavowal by restricting it exclusively to perversion and contrasting it rigorously with repression (neurosis) and foreclosure (psychosis), while reframing its object from the perceived absence of the penis to the structural lack of the phallus in the Other — making disavowal the denial that lack causes desire.

    Lacan makes it the fundamental operation in all forms of perversion... Disavowal is the fundamental operation in perversion, just as repression and foreclosure are the fundamental operations in neurosis and psychosis.

29. #29

    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_197"></span>**Sublimation**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's reformulation of Freudian sublimation: rather than redirecting the drive to a non-sexual object, Lacan argues that sublimation changes the object's *position* within the structure of fantasy by elevating it to the dignity of the Thing, thereby grounding sublimation in the symbolic order, ethics, and the death drive rather than in biology or social prohibition alone.

    perversion not simply a brute natural means of discharging the libido, but a highly structured relation to the drives which are already, in themselves, linguistic rather than biological forces

30. #30

    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).

    Krafft-Ebing used the terms in a very specific sense, to refer to a sexual PERVERSION in which sexual satisfaction is dependent upon inflicting pain on others (sadism) or upon experiencing pain oneself (masochism).

31. #31

    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.

    it is not possible to define perversion by reference to a supposedly natural form of the sexual relationship (as Freud did). Heterosexuality is thus not natural but normative

32. #32

    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_138"></span>**Oedipus complex**

    Theoretical move: The passage expounds Lacan's distinctive reworking of the Oedipus complex as a three-timed logical passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order, mediated by the paternal function and the phallus, arguing that the prohibition of jouissance operative in the Oedipal myth masks the more fundamental Lacanian insight (drawn from Totem and Taboo) that maternal jouissance is not merely forbidden but structurally impossible.

    In perversion, the complex is carried through to the third time, but instead of identifying with the father, the subject identifies with the mother and/or the imaginary phallus

33. #33

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_171"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0192"></span>**repression**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that repression, understood through Lacan's reworking of Freud, is the structural operation that defines neurosis among the clinical structures; primal repression is recast not as a datable psychical act but as the structural incompleteness of language itself, while secondary repression is formalised as a metaphoric operation in which repression and the return of the repressed are identical.

    Whereas psychotics foreclose, and perverts disavow, only neurotics repress.

34. #34

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    2

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the programme of the pleasure principle governs mental life but is structurally incompatible with reality, and surveys the various strategies (intoxication, sublimation, drive-control, isolation, etc.) by which human beings attempt to manage this constitutive tension between the pursuit of happiness and the inevitability of suffering — positioning religion as one palliative among others rather than as a unique answer to the purpose of life.

    Here we have an economic explanation for the irresistibility of perverse impulses, perhaps for the attraction of whatever is forbidden.

35. #35

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.81

    <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses the figure of Smiley to theorize a subject driven not by repressed sexuality but by a constitutive lack of interiority — a "chameleon" subjectivity that dissolves into role-playing, making desire, drive, and perversion irreducible to sadomasochism or therapeutic models of repression. The passage pivots on distinguishing Smiley's ascetic renunciation-as-perversity from both repression and sadomasochistic enjoyment.

    The Smiley of novel and series is queer in the more radical sense that a 'normal' sexuality cannot be assigned to him... His perversity is renunciation itself.

36. #36

    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.

    There is not one form of the perverse phenomena whose very structure is not, in every moment of its being lived through, sustained by the intersubjective relation.

37. #37

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.223

    xvra > **The symbolic order**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that perverse desire, structured around the imaginary dyadic relation, necessarily dissolves into an impasse (annihilation of either subject or object), and that escaping this impasse requires the symbolic order — demonstrated by showing that the Master/Slave dialectic, though mythically imaginary in origin, is always already bounded by symbolic/numerical structuration, which underpins the intersubjective field and language itself.

    Perversion is to be placed at the limit of the register of recognition, and that is what fixes it, stigmatises it as such. Structurally, perversion such as I have delineated it for you on the imaginary plane, can only be sustained with a precarious status which, at every moment is contested, from within, for the subject.

38. #38

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.306

    xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar I, providing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but maps the distribution of core concepts (imaginary, ideal ego, ignorance, image, interpretation, intersubjectivity, introjection) across the seminar.

    and perversion 220-1 intersubjectivity of perversions 215, 216, 220-2

39. #39

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    **XVII**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that intersubjectivity is not grounded in imaginary dyadic relation but in the symbolic function itself: the child's use of language (naming, presence/absence) demonstrates that the symbolic and the real are primary, with the imaginary only becoming accessible retrospectively through adult realisation - thus critiquing object-relations theory (Balint) for missing the constitutive role of the symbolic.

    Perversion, in sum, is the privileged exploration of an existential possibility of human nature its internal tearing apart, its gap, through which the supra-natural world of the symbolic was able to make its entry.

40. #40

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.276

    xxn > The concept of analysis > **Wbe-faas any questions?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan dismantles the affective/intellectual opposition as analytically useless, grounds transference in the action of speech as the founding medium of intersubjective relations, and distinguishes narcissistic (imaginary) love—the desire to capture the other as object—from active (symbolic) love directed at the other's being.

    The first time that I spoke at length about narcissistic love was, if you remember, as the direct continuation of the dialectic of perversion.

41. #41

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.127

    **X**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses ethological evidence (Lorenz/Tinbergen's releasing mechanisms) to argue that the libidinal drive is structurally centred on the imaginary—on image rather than real partner—thereby grounding the distinction between ego-drives and sexual drives in the Imaginary register, and reframing Freud's two narcissisms as two distinct relations to the image.

    Sexual behaviour is quite especially prone to the lure. This teaches us something which is important in working out the structure of the perversions and the neuroses.

42. #42

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.312

    xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar I, non-substantive in theoretical argument but mapping the key conceptual terrain of the seminar across entries such as speech, subject, symbolic, transference, and signifier.

    and perversion 218

43. #43

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and law are structurally identical—sharing the same object—such that the Oedipus myth encodes the originary coincidence of the father's desire with the law; this identity is then mapped onto masochism (where the subject appears as *ejectum*/objet a), the castration complex, transference (structured around agalma and lack), and the passage à l'acte, illustrated through Freud's case of the young homosexual woman.

    This is one of the aspects that the a can take on such as it is illustrated in perversion.

44. #44

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.148

    **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the analytic paradox of "defence against anxiety" by arguing that defence is not against anxiety itself but against the lack of which anxiety is a signal, and he further differentiates the structural positions of the objet petit a in neurosis versus perversion/psychosis to clarify the handling of the transferential relation — culminating in a redefinition of mourning as identifying with the function of being the Other's lack.

    if it has to do with a pervert or a psychotic, the fantasy relation (i O a) is established in such a way that a is in its place on the side of i'(a). In this case, to handle the transferential relation, we do indeed have to take within us the a at issue, like a foreign body

45. #45

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    **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.

    the specificity of the perverse position, which the neurotic takes reference from and leans on for all kinds of ends

46. #46

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.215

    **x** > **xv**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of vessels (the pot of castration as minus-phi, the Klein bottle as the structure of objet a) to argue that anxiety arises not from castration itself but from the way the object a comes to half-fill the hollow of primordial castration via the desire of the Other; circumcision is then read as a ritual embodiment of this topological structure, instituting a normative relation between subject, objet a, and the big Other.

    one that will meet up with what you've been indicated regarding the fundamental structure of what is ridiculously called perversion. At each moment of homosexual attachment, castration is what's at issue.

47. #47

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.59

    BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the classical Freudian account of castration anxiety from anxiety-as-signal-of-lack to anxiety-as-presence-of-the-object, demonstrating through the neurotic/pervert contrast and the exhaustion of demand that it is not the absence but the imminence of the object that generates anxiety, and that castration only appears at the far limit of demand's regressive cycle.

    For the pervert, things are, if I may say so, in their right place. The a is right where the subject can't see it and the capital S is in its place. This is why one can say that the perverse subject... offers himself loyally to the Other's jouissance.

48. #48

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

    Even in perversion, where desire is given as what lays down the law, that is, as a subversion of the law, it is in fact truly and verily the support of a law.

49. #49

    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.

    I stress that the drive is not perversion. What constitutes the enigmatic character of Freud's presentation derives precisely from the fact that he wishes to give us a radical structure

50. #50

    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 pervert is he who, in short circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds in his aim, by integrating in the most profound way his function as subject with his existence as desire.

51. #51

    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.

    the structure of perversion. Strictly speaking, it is an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.

52. #52

    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.

    what defines perversion is precisely the way in which the subject is placed in it.

53. #53

    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.

    I stress that the drive is not perversion. What constitutes the enigmatic character of Freud's presentation derives precisely from the fact that he wishes to give us a radical structure

54. #54

    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.

    what defines perversion is precisely the way in which the subject is placed in it.

55. #55

    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.

    it is an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.

56. #56

    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 pervert is he who, in short circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds in his aim, by integrating in the most profound way his function as subject with his existence as desire.

57. #57

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

    that of the pervert for whom desire situates itself properly speaking in the dimension of a secret that is possessed, experienced as such and which as such develops the dimension of his jouissance.

58. #58

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.226

    **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the signifier from the sign by locating its function on the side of the emitter rather than the receiver, arguing that the signifier's representation of a subject for another signifier necessarily bars and divides that subject — and uses this structure to differentiate the clinical positions of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion with respect to a message's gap and the desire of the Other.

    If you are perverse, you are interested in the dimension of desire. You are this desire of the Other. You are caught in the desire of the desire of the Other as such

59. #59

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.103

    **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.

    it is necessary in what is going to follow, that I should tell you what an o-object is in psychosis, in perversion, in neurosis, and there is every chance that it is not the same.

60. #60

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.233

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.

    that of the pervert for whom desire situates itself properly speaking in the dimension of a secret that is possessed, experienced as such and which as such develops the dimension of his jouissance.

61. #61

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

    **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the example of the "alone at five o'clock" love-sign to demonstrate that the signifier (unlike the sign) represents a subject for another signifier — not from the side of the receiver but from the side of the emitter — and deploys this to differentiate the clinical structures (psychosis, neurosis, perversion) by how each relates to the gap structured in a signifying message.

    If you are perverse, you are interested in the dimension of desire. You are this desire of the Other. You are caught in the desire of the desire of the Other as such.

62. #62

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 15 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic 'scientific' presentations systematically falsify their object by conspiring against the patient, and uses this critique to advance a methodological point: that perversion must be theorised from Freud's foundational claim that perversion is normal, so the clinical problem becomes explaining why abnormal perverts exist - a historical-structural question he aligns with Foucault's archaeological method.

    perversion is normal. You have to start from there once and for all, and in that case the problem, the problem of clinical construction, would be to know why there are abnormal perverts.

63. #63

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's analysis of Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan deploys the Narcissus myth and the figure of counterfeit money to theorize how the fraudulent (mis)recognition of the image-as-truth constitutes a fundamental structure of conscience and desire: the subject, captivated by its own reflection, mistakes the image of nothing for the real, such that malice (latent falsification) becomes the originary condition of every conscience.

    Sinon represents in the movement of fraud, the culminating point, the radical perversion where malice encloses the falsifier in his image which has become for him the truth itself.

64. #64

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.274

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Möbius strip's double-circuit topology to argue that the Oedipus Complex has two equivalent articulations — the generative drama of the law and the drama of the desire to know — and proposes that only through the objet petit a can the castration complex be rigorously formalized, a task he defers to the following year's seminar.

    perversion is normal. In other words, that under certain conditions, it may not stand out as a blemish at all.

65. #65

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's commentary on Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan (or his seminar presenter) elaborates how the myth of Narcissus structures a theory of fraudulent conscience: the mirror of Narcissus figures the capture of the subject by its own image, such that the falsification of the sign (counterfeit money) allegorizes the primal separation of consciousness from truth — a movement from the Real to a self-enclosed fiction that becomes "truth itself" for the pervert.

    One could probably say that it is to the absoluteness of this image that the pervert is fixed.

66. #66

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.274

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the normality of perversion (illustrated by the Abbé de Choisy) to a recapitulation of the year's key theoretical advances: the gaze as the privileged objet petit a whose function as (-phi) articulates the castration complex, and the Oedipus Complex re-read via the Möbius strip as requiring two full circuits to complete its meaning.

    one must begin from the fact that perversion is normal. In other words, that under certain conditions, it may not stand out as a blemish at all.

67. #67

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 15 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the standard format of the psychoanalytic 'scientific paper' distorts clinical truth by constituting a 'conspiracy against the patient', and uses the example of perversion to insist that genuine scientific rigour requires returning to Freud's foundational claim that perversion is normal—reframing the clinical problem as why abnormal perversion exists at all, a move he aligns with Foucault's historical problematization of madness and medicine.

    perversion is normal. You have to start from there once and for all, and in that case the problem, the problem of clinical construction, would be to know why there are abnormal perverts.

68. #68

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284

    Monsieur Safouan

    Theoretical move: Safouan uses the case of the obsessional's duplicated love-object to argue that the splitting between the narcissistic (desired) and anaclitic (demanded) object is structured by the function of (-phi): the more the virtual body-image i(o") tends to coincide with the imaginary phallus, the more the subject is "subtilised" into (-phi), so that the beloved's identification with the phallus is not an act the subject performs but an operation in which he is already caught — resolving into the question of how symbolic castration (via Oedipal negation) regularises the phallic position.

    he really gets very close to perversion. What is this jewel-case and what does he put in it?

69. #69

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

    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.

    The fact that the masochist establishes a situation regulated in advance and regulated in its details ... forms part of a production, of a scenario, which has its sense and its advantage

70. #70

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.218

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a biographical anecdote but a structural-logical condition that "norms" the subject with respect to the sexual act, and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the mediation of a value-function tied to castration — a move that repudiates ego-psychology's proliferation of subjective entities and the concept of primary narcissism.

    namely, … perversion - the only one capable of operating in a fashion that is not faulty (fautive) is, let us say, the subject who is castrated and … in order (en règle) … with this complex called the castration complex.

71. #71

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    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.

    along a path that is the inverse of that leading to the stumbling point of castration, that perversion is articulated

72. #72

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236

    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.

    Perversion is looking for this point of perspective, in so far as it can give rise to the accent of jouissance. But he looks for it in an experimental fashion. Perversion, while having the closest relation to jouissance, is - like the thinking of science - cosa mentale.

73. #73

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight/Möbius strip) provides the structural model for both repetition and alienation, showing how the "additional One" (Un-en-plus) generated by the retroactive return of repetition fractures the Other and the subject alike, and that the act emerges precisely at the point where the passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition intersect on these non-orientable surfaces.

    A point of jouissance is essentially locatable as jouissance of the Other; a point without which it is impossible to understand what is at stake in perversion.

74. #74

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the neurotic's relation to fantasy from the perverse by situating their respective jouissance-arrangements in topological-spatial figures (toilet, bedroom, boudoir, parlour), and closes by announcing that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is foreclosed — a structural definition of the analytic act that will anchor the following year's seminar.

    from the phantasy in its function at the level described as perverse, to that of its function in the neurotic register there is exactly the distance … of the bedroom!

75. #75

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.275

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire structurally emerges from the gap between demand and need within language, that unconscious desire is constituted as "desire-not" (désirpas) through a broken link in the discourse of the Other, and that fantasy functions not as content within the unconscious discourse but as an axiom — a "truth-meaning" — that anchors the transformation-rules of neurotic desire.

    what allows us to make the point of the difference there is between a perverse and a neurotic structure.

76. #76

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.252

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy has a grammatically closed structure ("a child is being beaten") that is the correlative of the alienation-choice "I am not thinking," and that jouissance in perversion must be distinguished from the neurotic fantasy's role as a measure of comprehension/desire — with perversion defined through the impasse of the sexual act rather than through the fantasy structure itself.

    to articulate the nature of the jouissance involved in perversion, with respect to the difficulty or to the impasse of the sexual act, is to produce something which has, with respect to the phantasy… the function of this phantasy which cannot as such present, be anything other, than strictly this formula, ein Kind ist geschlagen.

77. #77

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that it is precisely this disjunction—marked by the barred Other—that grounds the question of jouissance in the sexual act; perversion responds directly to this question (via objects a), while neurosis merely sustains desire, making the perverse act and the neurotic act structurally distinct.

    The perverse act is situated at the level of this question about jouissance.

78. #78

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.261

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism exemplifies the fundamental economy of perversion: the masochist's identification with the rejected o-object and his demonstrative capture of jouissance reveals that sadism is not the reversal of masochism but its naive counterpart—the sadist, believing himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position of the o-object, enslaved to jouissance from the outside.

    All perversion has always this demonstrative dimension. I mean not that it demonstrates for us, but that the pervert is himself a demonstrator.

79. #79

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.276

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the function of fantasy in neurosis from its function in perversion by mapping clinical structures onto spatial metaphors (bedroom, toilet, boudoir, wardrobe, parlour, bog, analyst's office), culminating in the claim that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is presented as foreclosure (Verwerfung), thereby anticipating the seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

    without there ever being for her the equivalent of perverse jouissance

80. #80

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.275

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is structurally constituted by its displacement from demand through language, making it inherently the desire of the Other and necessarily unsatisfied; fantasy is reframed not as a content to be interpreted but as a truth-meaning axiom within the neurotic's unconscious discourse, supplying for the lack of desire.

    this comes, that its arrangement is borrowed from the field of the determination of perverse jouissance, is something, as you have seen, that I demonstrated

81. #81

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.252

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy is structured like a language (as a grammatically closed sentence), introduces jouissance as a new theoretical term to account for the economy of fantasy, and distinguishes neurotic fantasy (as a closed, inadmissible meaning correlative to alienation's forced choice) from perverse jouissance—articulated through the impasse of the (non-existent/only-existing) sexual act—insisting these are structurally distinct rather than analogically continuous.

    You must not imagine that for the pervert phantasy plays the same role. And this is why I am trying to explain to you the roots of what the pervert does which can only be defined with reference to the term that I introduced, new also in being so accentuated, which is called the sexual act.

82. #82

    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.

    Not to situate the function of the o-object in the field of the Other as such, leads to writing, for example, that in the status of the pervert, it is at once, for him, the function of the phallus and the sadistic theory of coitus which are the determinants. While it is nothing of the kind.

83. #83

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.218

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a narrative fantasy but a structural condition—being "normed" with respect to the sexual act—and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the introduction of jouissance to a value-function through negation/castration, while simultaneously repudiating ego-psychological entity-multiplication and the notion of primary narcissism as an analytic foundation.

    namely, … perversion - the only one capable of operating in a fashion that is not faulty (fautive) is, let us say, the subject who is castrated

84. #84

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.248

    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 end of this discourse is to allow us to map out the way in which the acts that are put, legitimately, in the register of perversion, concern the sexual act.

85. #85

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.205

    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.

    The fact that the masochist establishes a situation regulated in advance and regulated in its details, which can go as far as to put himself under the table, in the position of a dog, forms part of a production, of a scenario

86. #86

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.261

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism—not sadism—reveals the naked economy of perversion: the masochist's frantic identification with the rejected object (objet petit a) as the locus of jouissance is itself a demonstration that constitutes his jouissance, while the sadist, thinking himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position as slave of the drive. Both perversions share the same logic as fantasy, linking perversion to neurosis.

    All perversion has always this demonstrative dimension. I mean not that it demonstrates for us, but that the pervert is himself a demonstrator.

87. #87

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.255

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.

    it is in the measure that the presumed One … is left intact, that a partition is not established in it, that the subject described as perverse, comes to find … his jouissance.

88. #88

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.236

    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.

    Perversion is looking for this point of perspective, in so far as it can give rise to the accent of jouissance. But he looks for it in an experimental fashion.

89. #89

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight) is the structural ground of both repetition and alienation, and uses this topology to argue that the Other is inherently "fractured" (barred), that the subject's division is ineradicable from truth, and that the Act emerges as the logical consequence of alienation's passage through the topology of repetition.

    a point of jouissance is essentially locatable as jouissance of the Other; a point without which it is impossible to understand what is at stake in perversion.

90. #90

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    **Annex 3**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

    to whomsoever it gives only the enjoyment held to be perverse, is well and truly permitted by this, since the psychoanalyst makes of it the key, in order to withdraw it

91. #91

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.311

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions phobia not as a discrete clinical entity but as a structural "turntable" that illuminates the relations between hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion, and from which the disjunction between knowledge and power can be re-examined.

    by the junction that it realises with the structure of perversion, that this phobia enlightens us

92. #92

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.394

    Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

    Theoretical move: In this final session of Seminar XVI at the École Normale Supérieure, Lacan argues that a genuine student revolt would require attacking the relationship between the subject and knowledge at its root—distinguishing s(O) (neurotic) from the intact signifier of O (pervert)—while contextualizing this within a critique of the University discourse and announcing his expulsion from the ENS.

    the pervert who, for his part, is precisely the intact signifier of O, as I told you, and people try to reduce him to the s of the same O.

93. #93

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the imaginary (body image, ideal norms, Utopia) provides the historical ground for pre-scientific "knowledge," but genuine science — including the Freudian rationalist doctrine — breaks with the imaginary by grounding itself in the symbolic/mathematical function (x = f(y)), where meaning is retroactively determined by the point of arrival in a signifying chain.

    does the subject, in perversion, himself take care to supply for this flaw in the Other, which is a notion that you do not get into right away

94. #94

    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, something that at the level of the Other questions what is lacking in the Other as such

95. #95

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.304

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anaclitic relation is structurally grounded in the operation of objet petit a as a masking of the Other, that perversion consists in returning o to the big Other, and that phobia reveals the true function of anxiety-objects: the substitution of a frightening signifier for the object of anxiety, marking the passage from the imaginary (narcissism) to the Symbolic field.

    to render o to the one from whom it comes, the big Other...was the essence of perversion

96. #96

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363

    Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.

    the conjunction of the perverse subject with the o-object properly speaking... we do not dream for an instant of imputing such success to the psychoanalyst.

97. #97

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.374

    Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.

    I would employ the following metaphor to designate as a perverse structure the apparent restoration of the integrity of the Other in so far as it is the o-object, that is in a way the imaginary moulding of the signifying structure.

98. #98

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.247

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the o-object is fundamentally an extimate topological structure that functions as the locus of captured enjoyment within the field of the Other, and that the pervert's clinical function is precisely to fill the hole that this structure opens in the Other—making him, paradoxically, a "defender of the faith" rather than a contemner of the partner.

    the pervert is the one who devotes himself to filling this hole in the Other. That, up to a certain point… I would say that he is in favour of the Other existing, that he is a defender of the faith.

99. #99

    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.

    Where the surplus enjoying is unveiled under a naked form has a name. It is called perversion. And that is why a holy woman has a perverse son.

100. #100

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the stain/gaze as the structuring lack in the field of vision that inserts vision into desire via the o-object, then leverages this to distinguish perversion (where objet a fills/masks the phallic lack, restoring o to the Other) from neurosis (where the signified of the barred Other reveals the conflictual articulation at the level of logic itself), with the neologism 'hommelle/famil' marking the transition between these clinical structures.

     what I defined as perversion, is in some way the primary restoration, the restitution, of the o, to this field of O.

101. #101

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

     apart from a certain kind of lack of seriousness which is perhaps the most solid way to define perversion

102. #102

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a localized object but the very tetrahedral structure of the four discourses, and that each discourse constitutively prevents its own agent from comprehending it — the analyst included — because it is castration (as a gap) that guarantees the Real from which all discourse stems.

     a short one no doubt, but not without variety, of enjoyments that are qualified as perverse

103. #103

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what specifies the human animal is its anomalous, 'limping and amputated' relationship to enjoyment—a structural disjunction between copulation and jouissance—and that this very disjunction, rather than any biological reduction, is what grounds the possibility of mathemes and science, with lalangue as the medium through which this deficit-conditioned appearance leads to knowledge.

     perversion in the animal species, in the name of what? That the animal species copulate, but what proves to us that it is in the name of some enjoyment or other, perverse or not?

104. #104

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.85

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

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

     Confusing his contemplative eye with the eye with which God looks at him, must, if kept up, partake of perverse jouissance.

105. #105

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.96

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.

     There is in them a subversion of behavior based on a savoir-faire, which is linked to knowledge (savoir), knowledge of the nature of things - there is a direct connection between sexual behavior and its truth, namely, its amorality.

106. #106

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

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

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

     The act of love is the male's polymorphous perversion, in the case of speaking beings.

107. #107

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

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

     the kind of Kantian that Sade was. Namely, that one can only enjoy a part of the body of the Other

108. #108

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     J.Lacan-... of this?

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

     the imaginary figures of the mystic are thus only the limit series of perverse representations of this impossible that language enrobes

109. #109

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.168

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

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

     There is a subversion of behaviour based, as I might say, on a knowhow which is altogether linked to a knowledge. And to a knowledge about the nature of things... namely, its amorality.

110. #110

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.146

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

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

     The act of love, is the polymorphous perversion of the male.

111. #111

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topology — particularly the distinction between ek-sistence (the track/cycle) and the hole — as the operative figure for primordial repression (Urverdrängt), arguing that the difficulty of mentally grasping the knot is itself the trace of an irreducible, foundational repression, and that the inexistence of the sexual relationship is not a failure but the very structure knotted into being.

     God is Father, hyphen, towards, père-vers. This is a fact made obvious by the Jew himself.

112. #112

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes ek-sistence as the Real dimension of the Borromean Knot, uses this to articulate the triadic RSI structure as an "infernal trinity," and pivots to redefine the symptom—against both Hegelian repetition (via Kierkegaard) and Marxian social analysis—as the particular way each speaking being (parlêtre) enjoys their unconscious.

     a neurosis is a failed perversion

113. #113

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     **Introduction** > *Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety, symptom, and inhibition are as heterogeneous to each other as Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are to each other; using Little Hans as a case study, he demonstrates that anxiety is the bodily ek-sistence of jouissance, and that the phallus is an irreducible burden upon the male speaking being (parlêtre), not a natural genital drive but a symbolic imposition.

     what I one day qualified as being a smuggler (bandoulière)

114. #114

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > There you are!

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Borromean knot to reframe Joyce's ego as a reparatory/corrective function that compensates for the failure of the Imaginary to knot properly with the Real and the Unconscious, thereby subordinating Joyce's singularity to the structural logic of père-version (perversion-as-father-function) and arguing that all human sexuality is perverse in Freud's sense.

     all human sexuality is perverse if we clearly follow what Freud says. He never succeeded in conceiving of the aforesaid sexuality otherwise than as perverse.

115. #115

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot must be understood as a tetradic (four-ring) structure in which the sinthome serves as the fourth element linking the otherwise separate Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; the Oedipus complex is recast as a symptom/sinthome, and the father's name is itself a sinthome, with Joyce's art exemplifying how artifice can work upon and through the symptom via equivocation in the signifier.

     perversion only means turning towards the father (version ver le père) and that in short the father is a symptom or a sinthome.

116. #116

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention traces how Joyce's textual practice in the Circe episode enacts a logic of signifying displacement and retrospective arrangement, in which the proper name (Mosenthal) functions as a "sup-position" — simultaneously anchoring and disarticulating the paternal voice — thereby threading together questions of the Name-of-the-Father, sexual identity, and suicide through a chain of substitutions rather than through any fixed signification.

     He's a perverted Jew... And the word pervert, in English, signifies rénegat.

117. #117

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Joyce's artistic ambition functions as a topological compensation for a de facto Verwerfung (foreclosure) by the father, and uses this to stage the broader claim that the Borromean knot articulates the entanglement of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real — with the sinthome as the supplementary loop that prevents their dissolution, while also developing the logic of per-version (père-version) as the son-to-father relation structuring the drive.

     Imagination by being the redeemer, in our tradition at least, is the prototype of what not unintentionally I write as per-version (père-version). It is in the measure that there is a relationship from son to father, and this for a very long time, that there arose this loony idea of the redeemer.

118. #118

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     **I** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues against psychogenesis—understood as the reintroduction of Jaspers's "relation of understanding" into psychiatry—by insisting that psychoanalysis operates beyond immediate experience and psychological causation, and that the field of psychosis must be understood structurally rather than through characterological or empathic intelligibility.

     essentially made up of what one may well describe...as the perverse structure of character. Like all perverts, it sometimes happens that the paranoiac goes beyond the limits

119. #119

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.323

     **XXV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends Freud's account of Schreber's psychosis—centered on castration, the Phallus, and the paternal function—against Macalpine's pre-oedipal/imaginary fantasy alternative, arguing that only a framework grounded in speech and the function of the father can account for the "verbal auditivation" and structural features that distinguish psychosis from neurosis.

     next year we shall see that the notion of object relation isn't univocal, when I begin by contrasting the object of phobias with the object of perversions

120. #120

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion in general, and fetishism in particular, is structurally grounded in the child's pre-Oedipal attempt to trick the unfulfillable desire of the mother by turning himself into a deceptive object—thereby constituting the intersubjective relation and the ego's stability—while also marking the danger of regression to an oral-devouring figure (Medusa) that underlies both phobia and perversion.

     all the perversions can be placed within this measure, where they always play from some angle with the significant object insomuch as it is, in itself and by its very nature, a true signifier

121. #121

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations framework by showing that what is presented as successful therapeutic "accommodation" to the real object (measured by proximity to it, e.g., perception of the odour of urine) is not genuine analytic progress but an artefact—a constructed, fragile pseudo-perversion that collapses at the first intrusion of the symbolic (being caught by the usherette), demonstrating that the "real" in this framework is ideologically managed rather than genuinely encountered.

     This is not strictly speaking a perversion and the author is not unwilling to face up to this but much rather an artefact.

122. #122

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses transvestism as the symmetrical complement to fetishism to argue that garments and the scopic relation both function around the *lack* of the object rather than its presence, and extends this to the "girl = phallus" symbolic equation, showing that in each case the subject's position vis-à-vis the phallic object (bringing, giving, desiring, replacing) is structurally distinct—while the imaginary "almightiness" of the Other is ultimately grounded in, and sustained by, an irreducible lack.

     Freud's thought took these paradoxes as its starting point. In particular, as far as desire is concerned, the starting point was perverse desire.

123. #123

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: By analysing a clinical case (Lebovici) where misidentification of the phobic object as "phallic mother" and countertransferential interventions drive the subject from phobia into perversion and ultimately passage à l'acte, Lacan argues that conceiving the analyst as a real object (the "bundling" model) distorts the analytic relation and produces pathological rather than therapeutic effects.

     the observation under the title Perversion sexuelle transitoire au cours d'un traitement psychanalytique. Therefore, there is no forcing on my part when I introduce the question of the perverse reaction

124. #124

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     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.

     At the level of the perverse fantasy, all the elements are there, but everything to do with signification has been lost, namely the intersubjective relationship. These are what we might call signifiers in their pure state, without the intersubjective relationship, signifiers shorn of their subject.

125. #125

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the structures of neurosis and perversion by mapping Dora's hysteria as a perpetual metaphorical self-positioning under shifting signifiers (Frau K. as her metaphor), while the young homosexual woman's perversion operates metonymically—pointing along the signifying chain to what lies beyond, namely the refused paternal phallus—and uses Lévi-Strauss's exchange theory to ground why woman is structurally reduced to object within the Law of symbolic exchange.

     In perversion we are dealing with a signifying line of conduct that points to a signifier that lies further along in the signifying chain, to the extent that it is linked to it by a necessary signifier.

126. #126

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the fetish-veil (object as screen between subject and the absent maternal phallus) from the enveloping fetish as protective aegis (identification with the mother), and further shows how the Real's irruption precipitates acting-out on the imaginary plane—illustrated by reactional exhibitionism as a symbolic equivalence between phallus and child that cannot be symbolically assimilated.

     it wasn't perversion at all, and nor has she managed to analyse it in the slightest.

127. #127

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the imaginary, real, and symbolic registers of the father to argue that it is specifically the real father—not the imaginary one—who bears the decisive function in the castration complex, and that the child's fundamental position in relation to the mother is structured by the phallus as the object of maternal desire, establishing the ground from which the Oedipal drama must be understood.

     there is no means of articulating the perversions in any other way, insomuch as, contrary to what is said, they are not fully explicable by the preoedipal stage, though they do indeed necessitate the preoedipal experience.

128. #128

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     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.

     paths which can be exemplary for us in clarifying the positions that have to be singled out when we analyse this desire.

129. #129

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations school (Marty, Fain, Bouvet) for reducing the analytic situation to a real dyadic relationship aimed at collapsing imaginary distance, thereby foreclosing the symbolic dimension of speech and the Other — and shows that this technical orientation produces paradoxical perverse reactions, particularly in obsessional cases. Against this, he reaffirms that the symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes must be held in their mutual, crossing functioning, with the paternal function and Oedipus complex as the fourth term that re-situates the preoedipal imaginary triad.

     leads to what may be called paradoxical perverse reactions… the precipitated outbreak of a homosexual attachment to an object, one that is in some sense quite paradoxical

130. #130

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian primacy of the phallus cannot be grounded in real anatomical experience but must be understood symbolically: the phallus functions as a signifier whose retroactive operation structures castration and privation, and analytic interpretations that treat frustration as an imaginary object-substitute (child-for-phallus) risk short-circuiting the symbolic structuration proper to the Oedipus complex.

     the most problematic perversion there is from the perspective of analysis, namely female homosexuality.

131. #131

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.126

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of the young homosexual woman to demonstrate how perversion arises from a structural permutation within the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad: when the symbolic father intrudes into the imaginary plane as a real event (giving a child to the mother), the subject identifies with the paternal function and reorganises her desire around what the love-object lacks (the symbolic phallus), revealing that love is essentially a gift of what one does not have.

     it is for this reason, and no other, that this will culminate in a perversion. The girl identifies with her father. She takes on his role and herself becomes the imaginary father.

132. #132

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish is constituted not through metaphor but through metonymy: it is the point in the symbolic-historical chain where the subject's history is arrested, functioning as a screen-memory that marks the onset of repression and veils the beyond-zone where the phallus-as-presence-absence should appear, while the subject's erotic life oscillates between imaginary identifications due to insufficient symbolization of the ternary (Oedipal) relationship.

     When last time I was speaking about the perverse structure as such, I spoke about metonymy, or allusion, or a relation that lies between the lines, these being the elevated forms of metonymy.

133. #133

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's case of the young homosexual woman to distinguish frustration from privation and to argue that desire can only be properly analysed once the subject has entered the pre-existing Symbolic Order; frustration is an evanescent, narcissistic moment that dissolves into either the symbolic chain of gifts or closed narcissism, and no clinical experience can be articulated without first positing the subject's entry into the legal-symbolic realm.

     THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

134. #134

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the normal Oedipal resolution installs the subject symbolically as bearer of the phallus through a paternal pact, and that when this symbolic mediation fails, imaginary solutions (fetishism, perversion) emerge as substitute modes of binding the three imaginary objects — with fetishism paradigmatically analysed as an oscillating specular identification between mother and phallus that can never achieve symbolic stabilisation.

     what is specific to perversion is precisely that it can only ever be brought about in these moments that are not ordained symbolically

135. #135

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Little Hans's successive transgressive fantasies as a mythical permutation-structure — a series of attempts to articulate and exhaust every form of an impossible solution to the deadlock between the maternal and paternal circuits — and uses this to distinguish Hans's neurotic trajectory from the perverse (fetishistic) path that remained structurally available to him.

     all these goings-on in relation to the mother's drawers indicate in negative the path Hans could have taken on the side of what culminates in fetishism.

136. #136

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.132

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing symbolic insistence (Wiederholungszwang) from imaginary deception in the transference, Lacan argues that the young homosexual woman's "ruse dreams" are in fact the return of an unconscious symbolic message ("You will bear my child") from the Oedipus complex—and that Freud's error was failing to locate transference at the level of symbolic articulation rather than preconscious intentionality; this is then set against the Dora case as its structural mirror (perversion as negative of neurosis).

     there is no finer illustration of Freud's formula that perversion is the negative of neurosis.

137. #137

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's biologistic and adaptationist framework by showing that the object's function is not complementary satisfaction but a defensive structure against fundamental anxiety—exemplified by the phobic object and the fetish—and proposes that the essential difference between phobia and fetish (both responses to castration anxiety) must be grasped through a rigorous structural analysis of the object, not through developmental mythology.

     the widespread use of the word fetish and the precise employment of the term to designate a sexual perversion

138. #138

     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.

     What is perversion? Within a single psychoanalytic group we have been hearing the most discordant voices raised on this issue.

139. #139

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that childhood sexual theories have the structural character of myth — not mere intellectual superstructure but a fictive yet structurally stable relation to truth — and uses this to reframe the topography of the preoedipal triangle (mother/father/child) and to insist that perversion, like neurosis, is structured around the castration complex and the presence/absence of the phallus, being neurosis's inverse rather than its simple positive.

     perversion is structured in relation to everything that takes on an order around the absence and presence of the phallus... It is structured by the same dialectic, to employ a vocabulary that is closer to the one I use here.

140. #140

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the child's passage through the Oedipus complex requires moving from an imaginary dialectic of veiling/unveiling around the phallic object (as the mother's imaginary phallus) to the symbolic register of castration in relation to the father, and that little Hans's phobia enacts this transition mythically. The scopic drive is shown to be structurally distinct from the purely imaginary dual relation, grounding the analysis of perversion and the misrecognition of female castration.

     how essential it is in the very genesis of everything that amounts to perversion, for example. Or, conversely, how it is only too clear in the technique of the exhibitionist act

141. #141

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish must be understood not in terms of an imaginary deficiency (the real penis) but as a substitute for the symbolic phallus qua absence — the phallus that exists only insofar as it circulates in symbolic exchange as both present and absent — thereby locating fetishism within the structure of the veil/curtain, where the object stands in for a constitutive lack that is simultaneously affirmed and disavowed.

     When it is not a neurosis that is at issue but rather a perversion, this is not so palpable… a good many authors show hesitation here and go so far as to place fetishism on the borderline between the perversions and the neuroses.

142. #142

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     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.

     Five temporal phases can be laid out to describe the major phenomena through which this perversion is instated. Whether we regard this perversion as fundamental or acquired matters little.

143. #143

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: The phallus functions as the master signifier of the symbolic order not by virtue of anatomy but because of its structural role as a constitutive lack: the mother's desire is organised around her lack of the phallus, and the entire pre-Oedipal dialectic—including the genesis of perversion—is a game about where the phallus is and is not, always necessarily veiled.

     nothing is conceivable in the phenomenology of the perversions... if you don't start with the idea that what is involved is the phallus... It's a matter of the phallus and of seeing how the child realises, more or less consciously, that his all-powerful mother is fundamentally in want of something.

144. #144

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.274

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Jones's naturalistic account of the phallic phase by insisting that the phallus is only conceivable as the signifier of lack — the signifier of the distance between demand and desire — and that entry into femininity requires inscription in the signifying dialectic of exchange (as theorized by Lévi-Strauss), not a return to a primitively given female position; the child's entry into this same dialectic is conditioned by the mother's desire, itself signified by the phallus she lacks.

     we see appear — let's say, in a very general form — these inversions or perversions of desire which show that within the imaginary relation with Oedipal objects, no normativization is possible.

145. #145

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's 'A Child is Being Beaten' to argue that the drive never appears nakedly in perversion but only as a signifying element, thereby collapsing the classical neurosis/perversion opposition and subordinating both to the logic of the signifying chain and repression; the primitive beating fantasy is further situated within a pre-Oedipal triangular structure that anticipates the Name-of-the-Father.

     In 1923, following Freud's article, Sachs and all psychoanalysts recognized that if you look closely, perversion carries exactly the same mechanisms of elision of the fundamental- that is, Oedipal- terms as we find in the analysis of neuroses.

146. #146

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is not grounded in any real, imaginary, or simply symbolic agency but is precisely a metaphor — a signifier substituted for the maternal signifier — and that this paternal metaphor is the unique mainspring through which the phallus emerges as the signified of desire, resolving the impasses of the Oedipus complex for both sexes.

     it's not completely accessible, it always leaves something that is approximate and unfathomable, even something dual, which makes for all the polymorphism of perversion.

147. #147

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the "nodal point" of the Oedipus complex as the moment when the subject must decide whether to accept the father's castration/privation of the mother, distinguishing two structural alternatives—"being or not being the phallus" (imaginary) versus "having or not having the phallus" (symbolic)—and shows how the father must intervene not merely as the bearer of the law de jure but as a real, graduated symbolic agent whose effective presence or deficit determines clinical structure.

     whether it's a question of phobia, neurosis or perversion

148. #148

     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.

     Perversion is therefore not to be classified as a category of the instinct or of our tendencies, but is to be articulated precisely in all its detail, in its instruments and, let's say the word, in its signifiers.

149. #149

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the historical evolution of debates around the Oedipus complex onto three structural poles—superego, reality, and ego-ideal—arguing that the function of the father and the Oedipus complex are co-extensive, and uses Melanie Klein's own findings to demonstrate that the paternal third term (the phallus) is irreducible even in supposedly pre-Oedipal imaginary relations, thus preparing the ground for his formal account of the paternal metaphor.

     Perversion was essentially thought to be a pathology whose aetiology supposedly referred specifically to the pre-Oedipal field, a pathology conditioned by an abnormal fixation.

150. #150

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of witticisms to establish metonymy as the foundational structure of the signifying chain — the "transfer of signification along the chain" — on which metaphor (substitution) depends, while also linking the metonymic function to the sliding of meaning, fetishistic displacement of desire, and the irreducibility of linguistic ambiguity (the impossibility of metalanguage).

     This was about establishing the fundamental phenomenon that we can call the radical perversion of human desires.

151. #151

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

     Theoretical move: By reading Genet's *The Balcony* as a clinical illustration, Lacan argues that the Ego Ideal is not the product of sublimation but of an eroticization of the symbolic function, and that perversion consists in enjoying the image of a signifying function; the drama's resolution—where the Chief of Police finally achieves symbolic recognition only through castration—demonstrates that accession to the order of the phallic symbol is inseparable from castration.

     We thus see this clearly perverse subject basking in the pleasure of seeking his satisfaction in this image, insofar as it's the reflection of a function essentially of signifiers.

152. #152

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.518

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     perversion 242-5 ... perversion and 147,182

153. #153

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.492

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 3 **Concerning the Oedipus complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex is a structural prerequisite for theorizing pre-Oedipal configurations (perversion, neurosis, homosexuality), and uses the superimposition of two schemas—one imaginary, one intersubjective—to give 'identification' a precise topological meaning: the mutual substitution of subjects in speech.

     the imaginary mother-phallus-child triad introduced last year with respect to the most primitive perversions like fetishism.

154. #154

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's constitution depends on whether he is inscribed as a "desired child" within the symbolic triad (mother's desire, paternal signifier, subject), and uses the case of André Gide to demonstrate how the failure of this inscription produces perversion—where the ego-ideal is formed through an unconscious pathway rather than a conscious one—before pivoting to a theory of comedy as the representation of the subject's relationship to his own signifieds, culminating in the appearance of the phallus on the comic scene.

     The schema thus shows us that it's in the same place - depending on whether it is produced via the conscious pathway or via the unconscious pathway - that what, in one case, we call the ego-ideal and, in the other, perversion is produced.

155. #155

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan elaborates the three logical moments of the Oedipus complex as a structural sequence centred on the metonymic circulation of the phallus as the object of the mother's desire, showing how the paternal prohibition interrupts the child's identification as the mother's metonymic object and thereby opens the path to the third, identificatory moment — grounding castration in the paternal metaphor rather than in any social teleology.

     It has come into play both at the level of a perversion that I would describe as primary, on the imaginary plane, and at that of a perversion that we will perhaps talk a bit more about today... namely, homosexuality.

156. #156

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.

     To get away from the idea that perversion was purely and simply the drive coming to the surface... we waited for a sign from the conductor, which came when Freud wrote 'Ein Kind wird geschlagen'

157. #157

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.298

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces three formulas of desire (articulating desire's relations to narcissistic identification, demand/the Other, and the phallus as signifier) while arguing that Freud's *Totem and Taboo* discloses the constitutive link between desire and the signifier — specifically that the murder of the father marks the emergence of signifiers from death, and that human desire is irreducible to adaptation because the subject enjoys desiring itself.

     to include what is absolutely problematic, irreducible and, strictly speaking, perverse within it, and to avoid what is the essential, living characteristic of the manifestations of human desire

158. #158

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan schemas the Oedipus complex as three dialectical moments governed by the paternal metaphor: (1) the child identifies with the phallic object of the mother's desire, (2) the father intervenes imaginarily as depriver/castrator of the mother, and (3) the father reveals himself as *having* (not *being*) the phallus, enabling the boy's identification as ego-ideal and the decline of the complex—the entire movement being structurally a metaphor in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) is pinned to another to produce a new signification.

     a number of disturbances and perturbations can be established, including the identifications I have been calling perverse.

159. #159

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex must be articulated through the structure of the paternal metaphor: the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the mother in the signifying chain, and this symbolic operation is what installs the phallus as the privileged imaginary object mediating the child's relation to the mother's desire — establishing a metaphorical (not merely sociological or empirical) connection between the symbolic father and the imaginary phallus.

     We showed an exemplary perversion in fetishism, in the sense that the child there has a particular relationship with the object of what lies beyond in the mother's desire... in transvestism, it's in the contrary position that the child assumes the difficulty of the imaginary relation with the mother.

160. #160

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from demand by insisting on desire's eccentricity to satisfaction and its irreducibility to any graspable meaning produced by signification, while simultaneously grounding the signifier's distinctive status in its capacity for self-substitution within the topological space of the big Other — a structure animals lack, since they possess no law organizing signifiers into a concatenated discourse.

     a number of articles that formed a true introduction to the question of perversion, insofar as it presents itself as a symptom and not as the pure and simple manifestation of an unconscious desire.

161. #161

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.496

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire (objet a) is constituted as the signifier of desire-for-desire—not as a complement to instinct—and that the phallus functions not as a biological referent but as the privileged signifier of the Other's desire; desire is located in the gap between two signifying chains (repressed and manifest), while the Real is defined by inexorable return to the same place, and analytic interventions that reduce transference to current reality miss the essential dimension of desire.

     the article in which Glover attempts to situate the function of perversion in relation to the system of the subject's reality.

162. #162

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire in dreams (and in analytic experience) cannot be reduced to sexual desire or simple wish-fulfilment; rather, desire is essentially structured by fantasy — "to desire someone" means "to include them in one's fundamental fantasy" — and this fantasy structure is located on the Graph of Desire at the locus of the unconscious, where only signifying elements (signifiers) circulate and can be repressed.

     except in the case of those nice, instructive little perverts, little and big.

163. #163

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structure of fantasy ($◇a) by distinguishing how the object of desire (objet petit a) takes the place of the symbolically deprived phallus, and then uses this framework to differentiate perversion (emphasis on the imaginary pole, a) from neurosis (emphasis on the barred subject, $), with Hamlet serving as the privileged illustration of neurotic fantasy through his constitutive subjection to the Other's time.

     Perversion is characterized by the fact that in perverse fantasy, the entire emphasis is placed on the side of the strictly imaginary correlative... something concerning the essential relationship between the subject and his being becomes fixated on imaginary elements

164. #164

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.428

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "Freudian thing" is desire, and that desire is constitutively incompatible with any harmonistic or adaptive account of human development; against ego-psychological attempts (Glover, Hartmann) to reduce desire to a preparatory stage of reality-adaptation, Lacan proposes to re-situate desire within the synchronic structure of the signifier rather than the diachronic unfolding of the unconscious.

     Perversion is very precisely articulated by Glover as the 'means of salvation for the subject to assure continuous existence to this reality.'

165. #165

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.451

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques both a 1956 Parisian article that collapses the distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion, and the broader tradition of object-relations theory (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), arguing that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to an individual developmental conquest of reality; perverse fantasy illuminates the very structure of unconscious fantasy as such.

     the article is based on a constantly maintained confusion between perverse fantasy and perversion. The authors note that there are conscious and unconscious fantasies in the neuroses and the perversions that seem to overlap

166. #166

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.335

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps three successive stages of Hamlet's relation to the object (Ophelia) — estrangement, rejection/externalization, and mourning/reconquest — arguing that Ophelia functions structurally as the phallus that the subject externalizes and rejects, and that the fantasy formula ($◇a) tilts toward ($◇φ) in a movement that illuminates das Unheimliche and the modern hero's constitutive displacement onto the other's time.

     the fantasy tilts toward the object, toward perversion. This is one of the features of their relationship.

167. #167

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.529

     449. "Your daughter is mute"

     Theoretical move: This chunk is editorial/scholarly apparatus — footnotes and section headers glossing literary, biographical, and bibliographic references (Molière, Nestroy, Nabokov/Lolita, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle) that appear in Seminar VI — with no sustained theoretical argument of its own.

     XXVI The Function of Splitting in Perversion

168. #168

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VI by re-centering psychoanalytic theory on "desire" against the Object Relations drift toward "object-seeking" libido, arguing that desire—not affect, libido-as-energy, or object-relation—is the fundamental axis of psychoanalytic practice, and anchors this claim in a philosophical genealogy running from Aristotle's ethics of mastery through Spinoza's identification of desire with human essence.

     Brutishness is, in this case, akin to perversion. Aristotle has, moreover, in this regard a singularly modern conception that might be translated by saying that the master cannot be judged on this score.

169. #169

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.525

     384. Breathing

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial notes and commentary glossing references made in Lacan's Seminar VI, identifying textual sources, clarifying allusions, and cross-referencing other works by Lacan and his interlocutors; it is primarily bibliographic and non-argumentative, though it anchors several Lacanian concepts (aphanisis, logical time, fantasy, desire) to their source locations.

     XXIII The Function of the Subjective Slit in Perverse Fantasies ... 437. Polymorphously perverse disposition

170. #170

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.469

     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 structure of desire in neurosis is of a very different nature from the structure of desire in perversion, but we can nevertheless say that the two structures are opposites.

171. #171

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.499

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation — defined as the form into which desire flows, reducible to the pure play of the signifier — and perversion together constitute a dialectical circuit that resists social normalization, and that the analyst's function is to occupy the position of desire's midwife by maintaining the "cut" as the privileged mode of psychoanalytic intervention.

     perversion being understood in its most general form as what in human beings resists all normalization

172. #172

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.456

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By critically rereading Glover's adaptive theory of perversion and Klein's object-relations theory through the lens of the signifier, Lacan argues that the subject's primary structuring occurs at the level of signifying opposition (good/bad objects), not reality-testing; and that the bad internal object marks the precise point where the être/avoir (to be/to have) split institutes the subject's relation to an undemandable object — from which desire, irreducible to demand or need, emerges.

     perversion is unambiguously conceptualized by Glover as a form of salvation when compared with the supposed threat of psychosis.

173. #173

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.440

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of fantasy — defined by the aphanisis of the subject at the height of desire — is the hub from which neurotic (and perverse) clinical structures differentiate: the subject must find something to sustain desire in the face of the Other's desire, generating the distinct solutions of phobia, hysteria (unsatisfied desire), and obsession (impossible desire).

     I only brought in perversion regarding the instantaneous moment of fantasy - fantasy that in perversion is the only thing that reveals the passage à l'acte [acting out].

174. #174

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.430

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in fantasy, the subject is not where he desires but is represented at the very moment of his disappearance (aphanisis), and that this structure—the correlation between $ and a—is what defines fantasy as the prop of desire; he then uses the exhibitionist's fantasy to demonstrate that perverse desire requires the symbolic frame (the Other's complicity) rather than proximity to the object, thus distinguishing perverse from neurotic desire structure.

     Today I will examine one of the most accessible perverse fantasies… It is the fantasy of the exhibitionist, that of the voyeur too.

175. #175

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.463

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

     there is an odd similarity between her as it were trans-subjective formulation - that is, between her unconscious formulation - and that of the pervert.

176. #176

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan

     449. "Your daughter is mute" > 457. "I am thinking, therefore I am" ,

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial/footnote passage providing bibliographic references and source annotations for Lacan's Seminar VI, covering Lacan's variations on the Cartesian cogito, Gillespie's articles on fetishism and perversion, and Freud's unfinished essay on ego-splitting. It is primarily non-substantive apparatus.

     "Notes on the Analysis of Sexual Perversions," IJP 33 (1952): 397-402; "The General Theory of Sexual Perversion," IJP 37 (1956): 396-403.

177. #177

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.479

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion inverts the neurotic's proof-structure: where the neurotic must ceaselessly prove desire's existence, the pervert takes it as given, and organises his entire construction around identifying with the phallus-as-object inside the mother, using the fetish or idol to symbolise the split between symbolic identification (I) and imaginary identification (i(a)) — a structure illustrated paradigmatically through male and female homosexuality and confirmed clinically via the anecdote of Gide's marble.

     In perversion, on the other hand, there is something that we might call a reversal of the proof process. What must be proven by the neurotic - namely, the continued existence of his desire - becomes the basis of the proof in perversion.

178. #178

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: By testing the algorithm (S◇a) against the phenomenology of desire—through dream interpretation, clinical vignette, and Jones's concept of aphanisis—Lacan argues that desire is structurally alienated in a sign and thereby constitutively linked to lack, such that castration functions as the "final temperament" of the metonymic vanishing of desire's object.

     sometimes lead to detours, or even what we call perversions, which are of a much greater structural importance than what, so to speak, nakedly played itself out in this case of impotence.

179. #179

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.487

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has deviated from Freud by subordinating desire to object-relations and moralizing normalization; against this, he insists that desire must be theorized as irreducible subjectivity constituted through the signifying chain, whereby drives are decomposed and separated from their sources — making desire a mapping of the subject with respect to the Other's desire, not a vital impulse.

     The entire development of the subjective drama of a neurosis is, after all is said and done, attributed to those identifications, as is the entire development of a perversion.

180. #180

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.435

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the structural argument that in perverse fantasy (exhibitionism/voyeurism), the subject is not identified with the visible object but with the 'slit' itself — the cut or gap that mediates between the glimpsed and the not-glimpsed — and that the barred subject ($) in fantasy is therefore structurally constituted by this cut, while the objet petit a in fantasy turns out to be the Other's desire rather than a simple part-object.

     Regardless of the form in which the slit presents itself- whether as part of a shutter, telescope, or any sort of screen - it is what allows the perverse subject to enter into the Other's desire.

181. #181

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.531

     449. "Your daughter is mute" > 462. The article I devoted to the case of Andre Gide > 463. Gide's history

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus chunk (editorial notes and source identifications) for Seminar VI, identifying textual sources for Lacan's references to Spinoza's cupiditas, phallocentrism, a Toulet poem, and Ernst Kris's ego-psychology paper — it performs no independent theoretical argument of its own.

     Lacan makes the 'problem of the perversions' revolve around a child's identification with the imaginary object of his mother's desire, insofar as she symbolizes it in the phallus.

182. #182

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.473

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural difference between neurotic and perverse desire turns on how each subject bears the "cut" or split: the neurotic indefinitely defers his desire in metonymic evasion, while the pervert directly identifies with the split/cut as constitutive of fantasy—a distinction Lacan develops by critiquing Gillespie's anatomical reduction of ego-splitting and by reading Gide's fantasies as evidence that perverse identification with the phallus operates differently from neurotic castration anxiety.

     There is a gap for the pervert too, of course. He, too, represents his being in the cut, since this is the fundamental subjective relationship. The only question is thus to know how this cut is experienced and borne by the pervert.

183. #183

     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.

     Everybody knows that we have restored full civil rights to perversion. We have dubbed it a component drive, thereby employing the idea that it harmonizes with a totality

184. #184

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's moral fable to expose the limits of the reality/pleasure principle as a criterion for ethics, arguing that sublimation and perversion both open onto a different register of morality oriented by das Ding (the place of desire), and re-grounds sublimation theoretically by distinguishing it from symptomatic repression through the drive's capacity to find its aim elsewhere without signifying substitution.

     excessive object sublimation and what is commonly known as perversion. Sublimation and perversion are both a certain relationship of desire

185. #185

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must not collapse the distance between analyst and analysand into imaginary fusion; such a collapse (figured as the "joiner" fantasy) leads to psychosis or perversion, and points toward the ethics of analysis being grounded in sublimation and the sublime rather than imaginary incorporation.

     the subject can achieve nothing but some form of psychosis or perversion, however mild its character

186. #186

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the world of goods structured around the ego ideal and ideal ego necessarily produces a catastrophic demand that exceeds it, and that only practices like the potlatch—the ritual destruction of goods—bear witness to the possibility of disciplining desire outside the dialectic of competition and conflict; this insight is linked to the contemporary threat of collective annihilation as a structural, not merely accidental, consequence of the discourse of science.

     it is only fleetingly, in a brief flash, that such images may cause something strange to vibrate in us which we call perverse desire, insofar as the darker side of natural Eros enters into it.

187. #187

     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.

     we will soon see that in truth everything in this moral theory was to destine it to failure... the experience of the man of pleasure presents itself with an ideal of naturalist liberation

188. #188

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > ⁴⁶⁷ **Editor's Notes** > **Notes to the Second Edition**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from the editor's notes to a second edition of Seminar VIII, listing page references for key Lacanian and philosophical concepts without advancing any theoretical argument.

     perversion, culture and 31

189. #189

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Greek love (erastes/eromenos) as a purified pedagogical model for theorizing the lover as desiring subject and the beloved as possessing something the lover lacks, thereby grounding the psychoanalytic concepts of desire, transference, and love in a single dialectical framework; simultaneously, he insists that homosexuality remains a perversion regardless of its cultural sublimation, and introduces the axiom that "love is giving what you don't have."

     While society leads, via censorship, to a form of disintegration which is called neurosis, perversion can be understood, contrariwise, as a kind of elaboration, construction, or even sublimation - to use that word - when it is a product of culture.

190. #190

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     **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** > **REAL PRESENCE** > Further along, we read.

     Theoretical move: The phallus (Φ) is theorized not merely as a sign of desire but as the signifier structurally excluded from the signifying system, whose function is to mark real presence—that which exceeds all signification—while the obsessive's compulsion to fill every gap in the signifying interval is understood as defense against encountering this real presence.

     the phallus, as experience reveals it to us, is not simply the organ of copulation, but is taken up in a perverse mechanism... It is in the moment that I explicitly designate as perverse that we find the instance of the phallus.

191. #191

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     **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.

     a simple glance at the diversity of animal ethology shows us, in effect, a rich variety of perversions... animal perversions, which go further than anything human imagination has been able to invent. Taken in this sense, aren't we simply brought back to the Aristotelian view that situates the foundation of perverse desire in a realm lying outside of the human realm?

192. #192

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the cross-cap/projective plane—specifically the hole structure of the Möbius strip and the double cut that yields a central piece plus a Möbius surface—to formalise the structure of fantasy ($ ◇ a), showing how the Objet petit a is situated at the point of lack in the Other and how narcissistic/specular identification serves as a lure that covers the true relationship to the object of desire.

     The pervert, is the normal in so far as for him the Phallus - the big that we are going to identify with this point which gives to the central piece of the projective plane all its consistency - the Phallus is all-important.

193. #193

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

     the pervert is normal in his perversion because he has to deal with the phallus in its variety

194. #194

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.183

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus—its two irreducible circles, their symmetric difference without intersection, and a privileged composite circle that both encircles and passes through the hole—to provide an intuitive topological model for the structural relationship between demand and desire, where the "self-difference" of the objet petit a and the void of desire are formalised through non-intersecting, non-unifiable fields.

     whether it is a matter of the obsessional, of the hysteric, of the pervert, even of the schizophrenic, have to articulate the relationship between desire and demand.

195. #195

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's sadistic fantasy misses its true target: it aims at the specular image i(o) rather than at the object of desire o itself, because a fundamental asymmetry between the specular image and the object (which has no specular image) leads the neurotic astray—and it is this structural confusion, not narcissism per se, that accounts for neurosis and radically distinguishes it from perversion and psychosis.

     it is also the only reference which allows us radically to differentiate the structure of the neurotic from neighbouring structures, namely from those which are called perverse

196. #196

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical commentary on Mme Aulagnier's presentation to advance his own theoretical positions: that the subject must be defined purely through its exclusion from the signifier (not as a person), that affect cannot be understood outside its relation to the signifier, that perversion must be rethought as the subject making himself object for the jouissance of a phallic god, and that anxiety is properly situated as a sensation of the desire of the Other at the level of the ideal ego rather than as a word/affect antinomy.

     the pervert is someone who makes himself object for the jouissance of a phallus whose ownership (appartenance) he does not suspect: he is the instrument of the jouissance of a god.

197. #197

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     *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.

     The pervert neither has nor is the phallus: he is this ambiguous object which serves a desire which is not his: his Jouissance is in this strange situation where the only identification possible to him is as an object which procures the Jouissance of a phallus, but he doesn't know to whom this phallus belongs.

198. #198

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     *Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that the breast as signifier is not a mammary object but a stand-in for the phallus, and uses the Fort-Da alternation (o / -o) to show that subjectivity and identification are constituted not by presence or absence alone but by their conjunction—the cut—which requires the imaginary unit √-1 as the formal root of desire's structure.

     the function on the ladder of perversity of producing this something else which is the evocation of the object phallus

199. #199

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.120

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion (specifically fetishism) inverts the structure of fantasy: where the neurotic subject constitutes itself in relation to the object a as an externalized image of loss, the pervert positions himself as the object a in its real form, becoming the instrument of the Other's enjoyment rather than a desiring subject—and Clerambault's fetishistic photographs thereby expose, rather than obscure, the utilitarian fantasy's dependence on the supposition of an obscene Other jouissance.

     perversion, he said, is 'an inverted effect of the phantasy. [In the perversion] the subject determines himself as object in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.'

200. #200

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.118

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

     he isolated this passion as a definable clinical entity: a specifically female perversion that resembled, in many respects, the male perversion of fetishism

201. #201

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud elaborates narcissism as the economic ground of self-feeling, arguing that the ego's libidinal economy—structured by the tension between primary narcissism, ego-ideal, and object-cathexes—determines both psychic health and the dynamics of love, repression, and social feeling (guilty conscience as displaced homosexual libido).

     Where no such ideal has developed, the relevant sexual urge enters the individual's personality in unmodified form as a perversion.

202. #202

     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.

     this component can develop a life of its own and turn into a perversion that dominates a person's entire sexual life

203. #203

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs the concept of primary narcissism by tracing it through three convergent sources—clinical perversion, schizophrenic withdrawal, and child/primitive omnipotence of thought—and uses it to justify the theoretical separation of ego-libido from object-libido and sexual drives from ego drives, while defending psychoanalysis as an empirical rather than speculative science.

     In this formulation the term 'narcissism' means a perversion that has swallowed up the entire sexual life of the individual

204. #204

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.37

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's anti-Erasmus argument through a Lacanian-Hegelian lens, Ruda shows that the doctrine of predestination functions as a 'forced choice' that abolishes free will precisely to open the space for genuine faith: the very structure of 'no Other of the Other' (no cause behind God's cause) and the gap between revealed God and hidden God enact a logic homologous to Lacanian alienation and the Real, reframing predestination as an emancipatory, anti-perverse position.

     Erasmus the pervert... 'thoroughly perverse use of language' that is a direct manifestation of this problem and makes him a 'perverter of Scripture'.

205. #205

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.

     perversion, he said, is 'an inverted effect of the phantasy. [In the perversion] the subject determines himself as object in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.'

206. #206

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 4**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing scholarly citations and brief glosses for key theoretical moves in the chapter, including references to Lacan's "Kant with Sade," extimacy, enunciation vs. statement, fetishism, and perversion — but doing no primary theoretical work itself.

     Jean Clavreul, 'The Perverse Couple,' in Returning to Freud, p. 224.

207. #207

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.138

     <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 > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p134" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 134. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Formative Power of the Image

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Imaginary—centered on the unifying power of the mirror-stage gestalt—is the indispensable complement to the Symbolic, and that it is precisely this imaginary function (the organism's detachment from instinct via perceptual form) that explains the constancy, variability, and "perverse" character of the human drive as distinct from animal instinct.

     It is in this sense that the entirety of human sexuality may be said to be perverse. By virtue of its insertion into the imaginary, the sexual impulse is deviated from any purely natural aim and object.

208. #208

     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.

     this component can develop a life of its own and turn into a perversion that dominates a person's entire sexual life.

209. #209

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.82

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_pg_82" class="pagebreak" title="82"></span>**The Immanence of Reduction, or: Lacking (Animal) Lack**

     Theoretical move: By reading Marx through Hegel's dialectic of the human-animal distinction, the passage argues that capitalist alienation reduces the worker to a figure who lacks even the animal's lack—knowing his limitations but not knowing that he knows them—thus producing an "unconscious lack" that forecloses resistance from within ideology itself.

     This indicates a structural perversion: the worker becomes the mere instrument of another whose will he realizes

210. #210

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.391

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that true freedom paradoxically coincides with necessity—through a dialectical reading of Luther's Protestantism and Lacan's objet a, Žižek contends that radical freedom emerges not from unconstrained choice but from the unbearable situation of predestination where one must choose without knowing which choice is predetermined, thereby collapsing the opposition between freedom and determinism.

     the danger of succumbing to the perverse position of perceiving oneself as the direct instrument of the big Other's will

211. #211

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.91

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Buddha, Kant, <span id="scholium_11_buddha_kant_husserl.xhtml_IDX-235"></span>Husserl

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Husserl's phenomenological epoché enacts a "splitting of the Ego" structurally homologous to Buddhist anatman and, paradoxically, to a perverse de-subjectivization — the subject becoming the transparent instrument of the Other's will — thereby exposing the politically dangerous underside of any stance that dissolves subjectivity's constitutive hysteria.

     we get here the perfect description of a perverse desubjectivization: the subject avoids its constitutive splitting by positing himself directly as the instrument of the Other's will.

212. #212

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.236

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

     Theoretical move: The Möbius-strip topology of the "inner eight" (self-reflecting hierarchical inversion) is deployed to argue that true materialist dialectics requires acknowledging that the Universal is *already* barred/voided from within—not sublated into the Idea—and that fantasy, repression, and the Form/content split all operate according to this same logic of a loop immanent to hierarchy.

     The standard wisdom tells us that perverts practice (do) what hysterics only dream about (doing), i.e., 'everything is allowed' in perversion… and nonetheless, as Freud emphasizes, nowhere is repression as strong as in perversion

213. #213

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.415

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Wagner's *Parsifal* — framed against historicist contextualization — Žižek argues that the opera's central ethical and libidinal drama turns on the obscene superego-jouissance of the father (Titurel as père-version), hysterical feminine subjectivity (Kundry), and the paradox of a wound that is simultaneously the mark of corruption and the source of immortal life-energy; Parsifal's salvation-gesture is grounded not in simple purity but in hysterical identification with the very suffering he refuses.

     Titurel's superego authority is a true perversion or, as Lacan liked to write it, père-version, the 'version of the father'

214. #214

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology functions through a surplus-enjoyment generated by renunciation itself (structurally homologous to Marxian surplus-value), and that this enjoyment must remain concealed to operate—since ideological form is its own end; further, it theorizes how ideological fields achieve unity through the 'quilting' function of the point de capiton (nodal point), which arrests the sliding of floating signifiers and retroactively fixes their identity.

     This is the hidden perverse, obscene dimension of Kantian moral formalism finally appearing in Fascism

215. #215

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

     the perverse position, for example, in which the subject identifies himself immediately with the object and thus relieves himself of the burden of the question.

216. #216

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.49

     Mladen Dolar > Freud's Materialism

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Freud's departure from scientific materialism is not a rejection but a radicalization of it: by pushing mechanism, determinism, monism, reductionism, and scientism to their outermost consequences, psychoanalysis discovers a crack or inner break within each—a 'less than nothing' that persists without ontological substance—thereby converging, by an entirely different route, with Hegel's 'substance is subject.'

     What are all these perversions, deviations from the usual sexual object or goal, in comparison with sexuality as such, which is in itself nothing but a massive deviation, more spectacular than any perverse aberrations?

217. #217

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.66

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **A Utopia Without Disavowal** > The Excesses of W¡/d ot Heorl

     Theoretical move: McGowan reads *Wild at Heart* as a filmic staging of unrestrained jouissance: by denying any space of narrative normalcy against which excess could be measured, Lynch shows that a world without lack produces not liberation but suffocation, figured through the perverse authority of a maternal superego and an anal father of enjoyment who command the subject to enjoy.

     they represent the contemporary world's perversion of authority—the maternal superego and the anal father of enjoyment.

218. #218

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.48

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged > Inside Is Outside

     Theoretical move: The figure of Baron Harkonnen functions as the necessary obverse of classical Hollywood fantasy: by removing symbolic prohibition, the fantasy that grants access to total enjoyment must also produce an unrestrained obscene enjoyer, making visible the excess that normative fantasy disavows. Lynch's refusal to restrain this depiction forces the spectator to confront the obscenity integral to their own enjoyment.

     For the Baron, this type of perverse enjoyment occurs publicly and at the expense of others who are not sharing his enjoyment (and who even die as a result of it), and yet he experiences no shame in his acts.

219. #219

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.129

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > 5· The Absence of Desire in WHd at Hearl

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it distinguishes Lynch's critique of publicly displayed enjoyment from Oliver Stone's (Lynch diagnoses a failure of fantasy-commitment rather than excess fantasy); it defines fantasy's structure as predicated on the initial loss of the impossible object; and it links the appearance of freedom/lawlessness through the signifier to its dialectical reversal into necessity.

     The subsequent development of a perversion is a response to a failure to enjoy, not an indication of a commitment to fantasy.

220. #220

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.70

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Refusing Any Absence

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the pursuit of complete enjoyment is structurally self-defeating: enjoyment requires loss/absence as its condition, so subjects compulsively self-sabotage to recreate the constitutive lack, a dynamic that drives the transition from the pleasure principle to the death drive and explains the perverse/masochistic turn as the unconscious path desire takes when blocked by the suffocating presence of the privileged object.

     Even though this seems like a bizarre and extreme perversion, it follows logically from Jingle Dell's starting point... Dell's turn to perversion provides exactly what his investment in the spirit of Christmas could not—actual enjoyment.

221. #221

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.17

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a preface/road map for the book, outlining its scope, methodology, and interpretive stance—it is non-substantive theoretical content, serving primarily as an editorial and navigational frame rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     neurosis, psychosis, and perversion

222. #222

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.33

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

     the different clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, and perversion) and their subcategories

223. #223

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.313

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

     Theoretical move: The Matrix trilogy is read as a political allegory in which jouissance functions as the ultimate stake of both oppression and liberation: the Matrix's true need is not energy but human jouissance, making any genuine revolution a transformation in the regime of jouissance-appropriation rather than a mere exit from illusion into reality.

     it is the ultimate perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the Other's (Matrix's) jouissance, sucked out of our life-substance like batteries.

224. #224

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.303

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.

     its agent, the masochist pervert (the pervert pas excellence), occupies the position of the object-instrument of the other's desire, and, in this way, through serving his (feminine) victim, he posits her as the hystericized/divided subject who 'doesn't know what she wants'

225. #225

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.368

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Welcome to the Desert of the American Subculture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Abu Ghraib tortures were neither isolated criminal acts nor directly ordered, but rather the necessary obscene underside of official ideology — a "Code Red" transgression that is the constitutive supplement to public values of democracy and dignity, revealing how Power systematically generates and requires its own excess.

     they adopt the perverse position of a direct instrument of the big Other's will.

226. #226

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.379

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

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

     the difference between the perverse social link (in which the pervert knows what the other really wants) and the discourse of the analyst

227. #227

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.96

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

     today's desperate neoconservative attempts to reassert 'old values' are ultimately a failed perverse strategy of imposing prohibitions which can no longer be taken seriously

228. #228

     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.

     Perversion occurs when the 'pound of flesh,' the partial object which stands for what is 'in me more than myself,' is taken literally

229. #229

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.234

     29 > **5. The Coldness of Kubrick**

     Theoretical move: This is a footnotes/endnotes section for a chapter on Kubrick, containing bibliographic references and discursive annotations. The only substantive theoretical moves are: a defence of the erotic logic of coldness in *Eyes Wide Shut* (note 5), and a claim that HAL's perversity in *2001* flows from the structural contradictions inhering in symbolic authority (note 7).

     the contradictions that inhere in the position of symbolic authority produce the perversity that symbolic authority figures constantly display in Kubrick's films.

230. #230

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.61

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Nietzsche to argue that guilt and surplus-enjoyment are co-originary articulations of immeasurability rather than causal sequence, and that "forgetting" (as distinct from repression or forgiveness) is the condition of possibility for the act, since it is not a prior closure but the effect of a surplus passion that opens us toward life.

     This is the fundamental perversity of Christianity: while forgiving, it simultaneously brandishes at us the cross... Christianity forgives, but does not forget.

231. #231

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.35

     **Fantasy** > **Gaze**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the Lacanian gaze not as subjective mastery over the visual field but as the objet petit a within that field—the point where the subject's unconscious desire distorts what is seen, implicating the subject in the very scene from which it imagines itself safely distant, and thereby exposing the unnatural, ideologically constituted character of apparent visual neutrality.

     He is there as pervert and he is situated only at the culmination of the loop.

232. #232

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

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

     perversion in which the subject actualizes its dirtiest fantasies is, as Lacan pointed out, the hidden part of any oppressive power.

233. #233

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.282

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     the hysterical stance is effectively re-appropriated by a perverse libidinal economy: as consumerists, we know well in advance that we will not get what we desired, so we are never really disappointed

234. #234

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.261

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

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

     something akin to Poe's 'imp of perversity'

235. #235

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.252

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly endnotes section for a chapter on Žižek's interpretation of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," providing bibliographic citations for key arguments about the Kant-Sade relationship, Lacan's ethics, desire, and perversion — it is primarily reference material but indexes the theoretical terrain of the chapter.

     Žižek refers to the Sadean perversion as 'pure reason.'

236. #236

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.241

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" as a three-ring itinerary, arguing that Žižek's key theoretical contribution is to foreground the more implicit and disturbing second principle—that Kant is the truth of Sade (Sade as closet Kantian)—over the better-known first principle (Sade as the truth of Kant), and connects this to the concept of the "second death" as a condition for radical creation ex nihilo.

     the Sadean perversion erupts as a result of Kant's unwillingness to acknowledge the ultimate consequences of his own ethical system

237. #237

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.222

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     Žižek, we have a diagnosis of postmodern culture, one of generalized perversion as he claims, in the wake of collapse of parental authority

238. #238

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.209

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc3_1" id="conclusion.xhtml_toc3-1"><span id="conclusion.xhtml_pg_207" aria-label="207" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>CONCLUSION</a>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the retreat from universality into identity politics and particularism is not a safe alternative to the dangers of universalist projects, but is itself more murderous and structurally complicit with capitalist domination; genuine emancipatory politics requires reclaiming universality as a constitutive absence (structural lack) rather than a realizable presence.

     Universalist projects always threaten to become seduced by the possibility of creating the universal into a full presence rather than discovering it as a necessary absence. In doing so, they succumb to terror. This is the perversion that universalism must constantly be on guard against.

239. #239

     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.

     images of canonized saints eating the excrements of another person—an action that is usually cataloged at the very peak of perversions.