Phallic Jouissance

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (165)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.111

   Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > The act as 'subjectivation without subject'

   Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Kant's exclusion of 'diabolical evil' and 'highest good' as impossible for human agents stems not from intellectual courage but from a flawed conceptualization that links the Real to the will; following Lacan, she proposes that Acts do occur in reality precisely because jouissance (as the real kernel of the law) operates independently of will, introducing a 'fundamental alienation of the subject in the act' that dissolves the requirement for a holy or diabolical will and grounds ethics in the irreducible split between subject of enunciation and subject of the statement.

   it is precisely this operation which, on the one hand, brings Kant close to Sade and his volonte de jouissance, 'will to enjoyment'

2. #02

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

   The Act and Evil in Literature

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

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

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.120

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the literary case of Valmont and Merteuil in *Les Liaisons dangereuses* to dramatize the Lacanian thesis that there is no sexual relation — that love (identification, the formula of One) and jouissance (always partial, never whole) are fundamentally incompatible — while also arguing that the path to autonomous subjectivity, in eighteenth-century ethical thought, runs through Evil as a deliberate project rather than mere knowledge.

   although 'in the real world' jouissance, enjoyment, is always only a half-enjoyment, in the case of Merteuil and Valmont there was an 'absolute self-abandon' and 'ecstasy of the senses, when pleasure is purified in its own excess'.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.261

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

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "ethics of the Real" is grounded not in finitude but in the infinite's unavoidable parasitism of the finite—identified as jouissance/death drive—and that this opens two distinct figures of the infinite (desire vs. jouissance) corresponding to two paradigms of ethics (classical/Antigone vs. modern/Sygne), a distinction that reframes the death drive as radically indifferent to death rather than oriented toward it.

   Lacan, 'The Signification of the Phallus', in Ecrits: A Selection, p. 287.

5. #05

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

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

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

   Lacan relies on these two options— what might be called external exception versus internal excess— to posit two forms of enjoyment, so-called phallic jouissance versus a feminine jouissance that Lacan calls the 'jouissance of the Other.'

6. #06

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.129

   I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

   Theoretical move: Against Heidegger's anxiety-as-confrontation-with-nothing, McGowan (via Lacan) argues that anxiety is ethical precisely because it arises from the overwhelming presence of the other's jouissance rather than from absence; the genuinely ethical response is to tolerate and endure this anxiety rather than flee it through cynicism or fundamentalism.

   Whereas the cynical subject sees no enjoyment in the revelation of an almost-naked body, the fundamentalist subject sees enjoyment proliferating with the baring of a small patch of skin.

7. #07

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

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

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

   Male subjectivity always strives for the ultimate enjoyment that it posits in the unattainable position of exceptionality. Its enjoyment is always futural, and it depends on the act of obtaining or having its object.

8. #08

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.196

   I > Against Knowledge > Th e Form of the Superego

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian retheorization of the superego — from Freud's internalized prohibiting authority to an imperative to enjoy — tracks a historical shift from the regime of the master (whose idiotic, unjustified authority externalizes the law's irrationality) to the regime of expert knowledge (which evacuates external idiocy and thereby intensifies the superego's tyrannical internal demand to enjoy).

   The superego, as Lacan understands it, constantly reminds the subject of its failure to enjoy, and it promulgates an ideal of the ultimate enjoyment as a measuring stick against which the subject can contrast its own failures.

9. #09

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.334

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 7. Against Knowledge

   Theoretical move: This endnotes section performs several theoretical micro-moves: it distinguishes the master signifier's exceptional status from the general equivalent in capitalism, argues that knowledge-intrusion converts pleasure into jouissance, and clarifies how hysterical discourse structurally returns to the discourse of the master, while also linking sexuation to the asymmetry of the superego between male and female subjects.

   The male ideal of the ultimate enjoyment — the image of the noncastrated primal father — is the source of energy for the male superego

10. #10

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part20.xhtml_ncx_99"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part20.xhtml_page_0117"></span>***J***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the conceptual development of jouissance in Lacan's work from a simple Hegelian notion of enjoyment to a complex articulation of the paradoxical "painful pleasure" beyond the pleasure principle, culminating in the distinction between phallic jouissance and the Other (feminine) jouissance, while anchoring the concept in the prohibition inherent to the symbolic order, castration, and the death drive.

    'Jouissance, insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such' (S20, 14).

11. #11

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    a specifically feminine jouissance which goes 'beyond the phallus'

12. #12

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_16"></span>**algebra**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's algebraic formalisation of psychoanalysis is theoretically motivated by three interlinked aims: scientific legitimacy, integral transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, and the prevention of imaginary (intuitive) understanding in favour of symbolic manipulation — the mathemes and associated symbols thus function as epistemic and pedagogical devices, not mere notation.

    Jö = phallic *jouissance*

13. #13

    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_149"></span>**phallus**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the phallus across Lacan's three registers (real, imaginary, symbolic), arguing that Lacan's terminological innovation—distinguishing phallus from penis—clarifies a logic implicit in Freud while elevating the phallus to the status of a privileged signifier that organises both the Oedipus complex and sexual difference, a move that invites both feminist defence and Derridean critique of phallogocentrism.

    the phallus is described as 'the signifier of the desire of the Other' (E, 290), and the signifier of jouissance (E, 320).

14. #14

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_19"></span>**anxiety**

    Theoretical move: Lacan radically reorients Freud's two theories of anxiety by tying it to the Real, the objet petit a, and the logic of lack—arguing that anxiety is not caused by separation from the mother but by the failure to separate, and that it is the only non-deceptive affect, arising specifically when lack itself is lacking (i.e., when objet petit a fills its place).

    anxiety is that which exists in the interior of the body when the body is overcome with phallic jouissance (Lacan, 1974–5: seminar of 17 December 1974).

15. #15

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

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

    Although we are permitted to indicate its possible function in the sex where there is only any phallic reality in the form of a shadow, it is also in this same sex that orgasm remains most enigmatic for us

16. #16

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    **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 jouissance of orgasm coincides with the instrument's sidelining, hors de combat, out of the game, on account of detumescence... anxiety is promoted by Freud in its quintessential function right where the accompaniment to orgasmic build-up is precisely uncoupled from the engagement of the instrument.

17. #17

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses clinical material and the figure of Don Juan to argue that feminine jouissance is structurally distinct from masculine desire: whereas man's anxiety is tied to the (–φ) and the lost object, woman's relation to jouissance is mediated by the desire of the Other rather than by lack, making her "truer and more real." Women's masochism is consequently reframed as a male fantasy, and the male "imposture" is contrasted with the female "masquerade."

    the presence of the object is not linked to the lack of the object cause of desire, to the (-φ) to which it is bound in men.

18. #18

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.272

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration anxiety is constituted by the *fading* of the phallic function precisely where it is expected to operate (the phallic stage), denoted (−φ), and uses the Wolf Man's primal scene—where the phallus is everywhere yet invisible, freezing the subject into a phallic-erect state—to show that objet petit a, jouissance, gaze, and anxiety converge at this structural moment; orgasm is then posed as the functional equivalent of anxiety because both confirm that anxiety is not without object.

    The subject is no more than an erection in this grip that makes him a phallus, that freezes him from head to toe, that arborifies him.

19. #19

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.212

    **x** > **xv**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "men's business" designates a structural asymmetry in desire: what lacks for the man is (-φ), primary castration as something he must actively mourn and detach from narcissism, whereas for the woman lack is pre-castratively constituted through demand and the object a in its relation to the mother — this asymmetry reframes the debate on female phallicism and reorganizes the clinical vignette of Lucia Tower's countertransference around the distinction between the Other and the object a.

    The fundamental dissatisfaction that's involved in the structure of desire is, if I may say so, pre-castrative. If it comes about that she takes an interest in castration as such, (φ), it's to the extent that she will venture into men's problems. It's secondary.

20. #20

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.321

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.

    the fundamental impossibility, the impossibility that divides desire and jouissance at the sexual level

21. #21

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    **xx** > **WHAT COMES IN THROUGH THE EAR**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a "deceptive might" — never present where expected — such that anxiety is the truth of sexuality, and the subject-Other relation (S→A) is primordial over communication, with the subject first receiving his own message in broken, inverted form via the Other, a structure confirmed by the infant's pre-mirror-stage monologue.

    she can only take the phallus for what it isn't - either as a, the object, or as her own over-small phi, which only gives her an approximate jouissance in relation to what she imagines of the Other's jouissance

22. #22

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.277

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

    it is to offer man's desire the object behind the phallic claims, the non-detumescent object to sustain his desire, namely, to make her feminine attributes the signs of man's almightiness.

23. #23

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.194

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that woman's relation to jouissance is structurally superior to man's because her bond with desire is looser — she is not knotted to the phallic negative (-φ) in the same essential way — and uses mythological (Tiresias), philosophical (Sartre/Hegel), and topological (the pot/void) resources to articulate how the real is not lack but fullness, while the hole/void that structures desire is specifically man's burden.

    Lack, the minus sign that stamps the phallic function for man and means that his nexus with the object has to pass via the negativizing of the phallus and the castration complex, the status of the (- φ) at the centre of man's desire

24. #24

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and Klein bottle to theorize jouissance as structurally analogous to the symptom, arguing that orgasm is merely one privileged surface-point of jouissance rather than its essence; this allows him to critique "psychoanalytic mysticism" around female orgasm, reframe aphanisis as the fading of the subject (not desire), and follow Jones's account of the father-daughter couple to argue that feminine sexuality resolves into the woman taking the place of the objet petit a.

    for her, there is no problem. To make love... implies that she should go to the one who has it.

25. #25

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by arguing that jouissance remains with the slave, not the master, and uses this to reframe castration as the operation that introduces a negative sign onto the phallus—making possible the (always asymmetric) encounter between masculine and feminine jouissance. He then previews the tripartite RSI framework and the 'logic of fantasy' as the conceptual architecture needed to account for the subject's relation to desire, jouissance, and the real.

    it is necessary for the man to perceive that masturbatory jouissance is not everything, and, inversely, that the woman should open out to the dimension that this particular jouissance is lacking to her.

26. #26

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by locating jouissance on the side of the slave, then uses this inversion to ground a critique of Freudian obscurantism around feminine jouissance, the phallic function as negativity, and the three registers (imaginary/symbolic/real) as orientating instruments for a forthcoming 'logic of phantasy'.

    it is necessary for the man to perceive that masturbatory jouissance is not everything, and, inversely, that the woman should open out to the dimension that this particular jouissance is lacking to her.

27. #27

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.280

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless it is re-articulated as the foundation of desire through the phallic function, and that feminine jouissance is structurally located at the place of the big Other (O), while the minus-phi (−φ) serves as the mediating organ-as-object between male and female jouissance — against any naïve notion of genital maturation or "oblativity" as explanatory.

    This being placed completely at the expense of male jouissance, not simply because the male cannot accede to it, except by allowing the penile organ to fall to the rank of an o-object function

28. #28

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Jones on female homosexuality, argues that the phallus functions as an unmarked signifier of the loss of jouissance produced by the law, and that femininity is paradoxically constituted through the homosexual's retention of the father-object — with the woman's not-having the phallus raising signification (signifiance) to its highest power, i.e. castration itself.

    the privileged organ of jouissance should be employed here... it is with this penis that there is going to be made something much more interesting, namely, a signifier, a signifier of the loss that occurs at the level of jouissance through the function of the law.

29. #29

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.280

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless articulated through the phallic function and the (-phi), and that sexual jouissance must be mapped through the structure of the Other — locating feminine jouissance at the place of the Other (O) while exposing "Hegel's error" of placing jouissance on the side of the master.

    This being placed completely at the expense of male jouissance, not simply because the male cannot accede to it, except by allowing the penile organ to fall to the rank of an o-object function, but with this quite special sign which is the negative sign

30. #30

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (torus, Klein bottle) to theorise jouissance as structurally coextensive with the body and irreducible to orgasm, and then pivots to Jones's concept of aphanisis and the father-daughter couple to argue that feminine subjective impasse culminates in the woman being forced to occupy the position of objet petit a — a move that exposes what Riviere named womanliness as masquerade.

    if the specificity of a certain sort of living being is that an organ which is at once erectile and as such privileged as a support for jouissance, is its ambocepteur

31. #31

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by locating jouissance on the side of the slave, then reframes castration not as a prohibitive structure but as the operation of negativing the phallus so that desire and jouissance can be articulated across sexual difference — a move he introduces as preliminary to the 'logic of phantasy' and organises around three registers (imaginary, symbolic, real/torsion).

    it is necessary for the man to perceive that masturbatory jouissance is not everything, and, inversely, that the woman should open out to the dimension that this particular jouissance is lacking to her.

32. #32

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

    Mademoiselle Grazien

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

    it is to be able to raise the function of significance to this point by not being marked.

33. #33

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fails to explain social cohesion, whereas Freud's account grounds it in the homosexual bond and the prohibition of feminine jouissance; this leads to a recasting of castration not as prohibition but as the operation by which the phallus receives a negative sign, enabling the (non-)relationship between masculine and feminine jouissance — a problem Lacan frames as requiring a logic of fantasy and introduces through three registers (imaginary/symbolic/real) oriented around negativity and torsion.

    it is necessary for the man to perceive that masturbatory jouissance is not everything, and, inversely, that the woman should open out to the dimension that this particular jouissance is lacking to her

34. #34

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.230

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan re-grounds the locus of the Other in the body (as the site where the signifier is originally inscribed), then pivots to argue that jouissance—distinguished from pleasure as its beyond—cannot be derived from Hegelian self-consciousness or dialectics but must be theorised through the structural impossibility of the sexual act, with the signifier's reference found not in thought but in its real effects.

    Jouissance, after the end of this fight to the death, of pure prestige, we are told, is going to be the privilege of the master

35. #35

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.246

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act installs the subject precisely at the disjunction between body and jouissance: the body of the woman becomes the metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinguished from the penis) functions as the symbol of a withdrawn jouissance that underlies social exchange — yet this structural arrangement leaves feminine jouissance unresolved and adrift, mirroring the slave's displaced jouissance in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

    this embargo, huh, on masculine jouissance, in so far as it is graspable somewhere, is something which is structural - even though hidden for the foundation of value.

36. #36

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    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.

    The jouissance, sought for in itself, of a part of the body … masturbatory … an organ, and a quite specific one.

37. #37

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.270

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation cannot be reduced to mere "discourse-effect" (suggestion) without a constitutive relation to truth; and that desire, being a sub-product of demand and essentially lack, must be rigorously distinguished from jouissance (erection/auto-erotic jouissance) in order to correctly situate unconscious desire's relation to the sexual act and to feminine desire.

    It is auto-erotic jouissance. One does not see, if it were otherwise, why this jouissance should be marked by this sort of veil.

38. #38

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.144

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and creation are structurally tied to identification with the feminine position—specifically to the logic of the "gift of what one does not have"—while masculine jouissance is defined by the fainting/aphanisis of the subject at the phallic moment, which in turn grounds the illusory "pure subjectivity" of the knowing subject and the denial of castration that constitutes idealist thinking.

    this fainting function... directly experienced, in masculine jouissance - is what gives the male the privilege from which has emerged the illusion of pure subjectivity.

39. #39

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates in the structural lack inaugurated by the castration complex, which reverses subjective enjoyment into objectal libido — irreducible to narcissistic libido — and that the objet petit a is the product ('waste-product') of the operation of language on the One/Other dyad, serving as the cornerstone for rethinking logic, the subject, and the analytic act.

    the sexual partner a phallic object. A point I am only highlighting here, in the direction of the 'man' to the 'woman'... in so far as it is here that the operation is, as I might say, most scandalous.

40. #40

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.223

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is structured around a constitutive gap—the castration complex—such that jouissance beyond the pleasure principle is only oriented negatively, through the suspense (detumescence/castration) of the phallic organ; there is no phallic object, only its absence, which is the very condition of possibility for the sexual act, and feminine jouissance can only be oriented from this same reference point of castration.

    feminine jouissance itself can only pass by way of the same reference point! And that this is what is called, in the case of the woman, the castration complex!

41. #41

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as the structural analogue of exchange-value in the Marxist commodity form, arguing that castration is the subtraction of penile jouissance that produces woman as the 'object of jouissance'—thereby rewriting the Lévi-Straussian exchange of women and the psychoanalytic theory of castration through a unified logic of value.

    If jouissance - I mean penile jouissance - carries the mark described as that of castration, it seems that it is in order that, in a way that we will call with Bentham, 'fictional', the woman should become what one enjoys.

42. #42

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.270

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic interpretation is only non-suggestive insofar as it maintains a relation to truth, and that this same truth-structure reveals desire as constitutively unsatisfied — a subproduct of demand rather than a physiological phenomenon — while distinguishing desire from jouissance (erection as auto-erotic jouissance) to clarify the asymmetry between masculine and feminine sexual positions.

    It is auto-erotic jouissance. One does not see, if it were otherwise, why this jouissance should be marked by this sort of veil.

43. #43

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration is not an empirical but a logical-structural fact: at the level of Bedeutung (meaning), language constitutively fails to articulate sexual reality, reducing sexual polarity to having/not-having the phallus, and this failure—the "minus phi" of phallic signification—is precisely what the analytic operation of alienation reveals, pointing toward the logical status of the objet petit a as the core-object around which the subject turns.

    Die bedeutung des Phallus … it is starting from there that there ought to be posed the question of what is involved in what distances these two equally alienating operations

44. #44

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.223

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act cannot be grounded in the pleasure principle or in any imaginary phallic object; rather, jouissance-beyond is structurally evoked by detumescence as its negative limit, and castration means precisely that there is no phallic object — which is the condition of possibility, not the obstacle, for the sexual act. Feminine jouissance can only orient itself through the same castration reference-point as masculine jouissance, making the 'sexual relation' constitutively non-existent except as good intention.

    it is from there that the idea arises … of a jouissance of the feminine object … And that this is what is called, in the case of the woman, the castration complex!

45. #45

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.253

    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.

    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, to the phantasy as it is given to us in the closed state… the function of this phantasy which cannot as such present, be anything other, than strictly this formula, ein Kind ist geschlagen.

46. #46

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.200

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the sexual act by truth—the locus of the Other is the site where jouissance questions itself in the name of truth, but truth cannot be heard in the field of the sexual act without causing it to collapse. Lacan re-reads the Oedipus myth (and Freud's primal-father myth) to establish that originary, absolute jouissance only functions as already "canned" (killed-off, asepticised), and that this transformation of jouissance is the prerequisite for all psychoanalytic economy of exchange and reversal.

    the myth of the original father and of his murder, designates for us as being the original function without which we cannot even advance in conceiving of what is now going to be our problem.

47. #47

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.173

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as structurally homologous to exchange-value in Marx's commodity analysis, arguing that castration operates as the subtraction of penile jouissance that transforms woman into the 'object of jouissance' (the homme-elle), thereby grounding the sexual act in a logic of value equivalence that founds the social/symbolic order.

    If jouissance - I mean penile jouissance - carries the mark described as that of castration, it seems that it is in order that, in a way that we will call with Bentham, 'fictional', the woman should become what one enjoys.

48. #48

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    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.

    The jouissance, sought for in itself, of a part of the body … namely, an organ, and a quite specific one.

49. #49

    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.

    there is negatived the function of a certain organ, the very organ through which nature, by the offer of pleasure, assures the copulating function, but in a fashion which is completely contingent, subordinate.

50. #50

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.142

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the mathematical structure of the golden ratio (objet petit a as mean and extreme ratio) to theorize sexual difference and genital satisfaction: the irreducible remainder (small o / objet petit a) produced in the subject's confrontation with the maternal unity of "one flesh" is what structures jouissance, phallus, and love as the gift of what one does not have — with detumescence as the illusory elimination of remainder, and feminine love as causa sui arising from giving what one lacks.

    the whole schema which supports, fantastically, the idea of discharge … is in reality supported by this schema, where one sees there being imposed this limit to jouissance, on the basis of the function of detumescence

51. #51

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.246

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is constitutively structured by the disjunction between body and jouissance, with the subject emerging precisely at that gap; the woman's body functions as a metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinct from the penis) marks the withdrawal of jouissance into exchange value — yet feminine jouissance remains radically unresolved and adrift, beyond any structural accounting.

    this embargo, huh, on masculine jouissance, in so far as it is graspable somewhere, is something which is structural - even though hidden for the foundation of value.

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.144

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the illusion of pure subjectivity are gendered formations: feminine jouissance creates through lack (the vanishing phallus), while masculine jouissance generates the delusion of pure knowing by taking the 'minus something' of castration for zero—making the 'subject of knowledge' a male forgery founded on the denial of castration.

    That phallic failure takes on the ever renewed value of a fainting of the being of the subject, is something that is essential to masculine experience, and what makes this jouissance be compared to what is called the return of the little death.

53. #53

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.185

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates from the lack instituted by the castration complex, which produces an irreversible reversal: jouissance becomes objectal (not narcissistic), the phallus functions as the unit marking the distance between Objet petit a and sex, and the o-object itself is revealed as the product of the operation of language — the "metaphorical child" of the One and the Other, born as refuse from inaugural repetition, and the foundational starting-point for rethinking logic and the analytic act.

    the jouissance-value prohibited at the precise point, at the organ-point constituted by the phallus, is what is brought forward as 'objectal libido'

54. #54

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.256

    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.

    The man is found, more electively than the woman, to be caught in the consequences of this structural subtraction of a part of his jouissance. The man is effectively the first to support the reality of the hole introduced into jouissance.

55. #55

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.120

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical frame that psychoanalysis uses to contain and regulate the irreducible gap between male and female jouissance, while the 'o-object' (objet petit a) — not castration itself — is the structural operator through which subjectification of sex is accomplished, with castration being merely the elegant sign of a remaining outside jouissance that psychoanalysis cannot access.

    for masculine enjoyment, at least as regards analytic experience, it is a strange thing, no one has ever seemed to notice that it is very precisely reduced to the Oedipus myth.

56. #56

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.120

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical framework that contains and limits psychoanalytic operations rather than explaining masculine enjoyment, and that the structural logic of the analytic act culminates in the relation $◇a — where castration is the sign of an irreducible gap between male and feminine enjoyment that psychoanalysis cannot close.

    what makes us think that it is rather masculine, is that, from the side of enjoyment, as regards the man, this means again going back much further, since feminine enjoyment, we still have it there from time to time within reach of what you know.

57. #57

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.328

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is radically foreclosed from symbolization and can only reappear in the real; the castration complex, illustrated through the case of Little Hans, marks the precise joint between the imaginary and symbolic where this structural lack is registered, with the phobia functioning as a symptomatic "paper tiger" that mediates the subject's intolerable anxiety before the phallic mother.

    the birth of a neurosis emerges... the positive intrusion of an auto-erotic enjoyment that is perfectly typified in what are called the first sensations more or less linked to onanism

58. #58

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.343

    Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) stages the fundamental aporia between knowledge and enjoyment, and that the neurotic's testimony—not therapeutic benefit—is what gives psychoanalysis its historical and theoretical stakes, particularly within capitalism's structuring of enjoyment.

    the position of virile enjoyment in what is involved in sexual conjunction is mythical

59. #59

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.273

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of desire—grounded in the impossibility of the sexual relation and the barrier jouissance poses to Other jouissance—is homologous to formal logical flaws (the undecidable, Gödelian incompleteness), and that psychoanalytic stagnation consists in analysts becoming hypnotized by the patient's demand rather than dissolving the neurotic knot at its structural root.

    The enjoyment of the instrument creates a barrier to the enjoyment that is the enjoyment of the Other

60. #60

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.128

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 22 January 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio (φ, written 'o') and the Fibonacci series to demonstrate the structural reciprocity between the divided subject and objet petit a, arguing that the 'I' of enjoyment is necessarily excluded from any totalised field of knowledge, and that the question of subjective existence must be posed impersonally — 'does it exist?' rather than 'I exist'.

    That the mystics should have attempted along their path this relationship of enjoyment to the 1, is not a field that I will be tackling here for the first time

61. #61

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.389

    Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the subject's constitution through the fantasy ($◇a) and the Four Discourses schema, arguing that knowledge born from the slave serves the master, that the objet petit a as surplus-jouissance is the structural stake in the Master/Slave dialectic, and that the Discourse of the University is the hommelle (alma mater) whose subjection effects on students mirror the hysteric's truth-telling function—making the political question of revolution inseparable from the psychoanalytic question of knowledge and the subject.

    the signifier at the end, this Φ, the sign of what is assuredly lacking to the woman in the affair, and that is why he must furnish it.

62. #62

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.326

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" of the sexual relation precisely because sexual jouissance is outside the system of the subject — there is no subject of sexual enjoyment — and this impossibility is demonstrated by the untraceable, non-coupled nature of the male/female distinction at the level of the signifier.

    what one could call the enigma of absolute enjoyment... sexual enjoyment qua outside the system, namely, absolute.

63. #63

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.92

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phallic enjoyment is structurally excluded from the social-libidinal economy, and that this exclusion—not biological sexuality—is what Freudian discourse is fundamentally about; the repetition compulsion discovered in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is reread as the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance, while surplus-jouissance is positioned as the substitute system that operates in place of prohibited phallic enjoyment.

    the prohibition of phallic enjoyment, something is contributed whose origin we have defined by something quite different to phallic enjoyment, which is situated...by the function of surplus enjoying.

64. #64

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.117

    *[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to argue that Freud's substitution of the Oedipus complex for the truths offered by hysterical experience was a defensive idealization that masked the fundamental truth — audible in the hysteric's discourse — that the father/master is castrated from the start; this leads to a critique of the Oedipus myth as an unworkable, quasi-religious fiction that displaces the proper analytic relation between knowledge and truth.

    if the only enjoyment to represent happiness, which I defined the last time as perfectly closed, that of the phallus, dominated this master

65. #65

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Master structurally generates surplus-jouissance as the extracted 'tithe' from the slave's knowledge, and that Marx's critique of surplus value is the memorial of this prior extraction of enjoyment — a process whose secret lies in knowledge itself, not in labour, thereby subverting Hegel's claim that labour culminates in Absolute Knowledge.

    the avoidance of absolute enjoyment, in so far as it is determined by the fact that in fixing the child to the mother, social complicity makes of her the elective site of prohibitions.

66. #66

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.184

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that all language functions through metaphor and metonymy with the phallus as the sole Bedeutung (denotation) that language gestures toward but never reaches, and uses Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction to reframe the paternal metaphor: the Name of the Father is efficacious not as a signifier producing sense alone, but as a name that summons someone to speak — revealing the Father as ultimately a numeral (a position in a series) rather than a presence, and castration as the reduction to number.

    enjoyment, this variable in the function written in x, is not situated from this relationship with the capital <j> that here designates the phallus... it is very precisely, in effect, that it is to the semblance of the phallus that there is referred the pivotal point, the centre of everything that can be organised, be contained in terms of sexual enjoyment

67. #67

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

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

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

    it is not of every woman that it can be said that she is a function of the phallus... That this is the case with every woman is what constructs her desire and that is why this desire is sustained by being unsatisfied.

68. #68

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.31

    **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that there is no sexual relationship because sexuality at the level of discourse is constituted as semblance, with surplus-jouissance (not biology) as its operative term; the phallus functions as the signifier of sexual enjoyment precisely insofar as it is identical with the Name of the Father, and the Oedipus myth is the discourse's necessary fiction for designating the real of an impossible enjoyment.

    this is what it is rather strange to see all the analysts striving to turn their gaze from... the truth... which is that there are some of them who do not have the phallus.

69. #69

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

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

    What the myth of the enjoyment of all the women designates, is that there are not all the women. There is no universal of the woman. Here is what is posed by a questioning of the phallus, and not of sexual relationship, as regards what is involved in the enjoyment it constitutes, because I said that it was feminine enjoyment.

70. #70

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.158

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

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

    the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship among the beings that inhabit it... And let no one forget what I said, because speech, henceforth, is not the privilege of these beings

71. #71

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

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

    man as such in so far as he functions is castrated, and on the other hand, something exists at the level of the feminine partner that one can simply trace out by this feature... the woman has nothing to do with it, if she exists

72. #72

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

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

    what I put on the side of the Father in terms of original enjoyment, is something to which there corresponds a no less strictly equivalent avoidance of what is involved in castration

73. #73

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.154

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

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

    we have to believe that she has this enjoyment, that she has it herself, and that if by chance sexual relationships interest her, she has to be interested in this third element, the phallus.

74. #74

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.12

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

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

    it is clear that that excludes her from psychoanalytic discourse which she can barely stammer

75. #75

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.55

    Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logical necessity is not prior to but produced by discourse itself, and that this production retroactively posits its own ground as 'inexistent' — a structure illustrated by the symptom (truth as inexistent) and the automaton/repetition (jouissance as inexistent), both grounded in Frege's zero, and culminating in the claim that the Phallus as Bedeutung (denotation/reference) is what anchors signification to discourse's necessity.

    it is a local, accidental, organic production and very precisely linked to, centred on, what is involved in the male organ... Detumescence in the male has generated this special type of appeal which is articulated language

76. #76

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

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

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

    the jouisse-presence, if I can express myself in this way, of the woman, in this part which does not make her completely open to the phallic function

77. #77

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.27

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

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

    there exists this enjoyment called sexual enjoyment and which is properly what creates an obstacle to the relationship

78. #78

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

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

    sexual enjoyment is the pivot of all enjoyment... all men are defined by the phallic function

79. #79

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.58

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus is the singular meaning (Bedeutung) through which language signifies, that this phallic function structurally prevents any harmonious sexual relation, and that the objet petit a — as metonymical cause of desire — is what determines the speaking being as a divided subject within discourse, with the semblance-pole (analyst's position) and enjoyment-pole standing as the two irreducible terms of the quadripode.

    enjoyment, which is right at the end of the right hand branch, is certainly a phallic enjoyment. But that one cannot say sexual enjoyment

80. #80

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

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

    there is nothing other than this something that the 'not-all' formulates in the position of the woman in the place of the phallic function. It is in effect, for her, 'not-all' (Pas toute). Which does not mean that she denies it under any incidence whatsoever.

81. #81

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.24

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mathematical incomprehension is not a flight from truth but an over-sensitivity to it, and uses this to pivot toward the claim that there is no sexual relationship for speaking beings — because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) can only be approached through lalangue and castration, never directly articulated, requiring the mathème as its proper formalization.

    everything depends on this pivotal point that is called sexual enjoyment and which finds itself not being able to be articulated in a copulation that is a little sustained, even a fleeting one except by requiring to encounter something which only has a dimension from the lalangue and which is called castration.

82. #82

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.13

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that there is no sexual relationship in the speaking being—not as mere wordplay, but as a structural impossibility grounded in the constitutive failure of jouissance and the irreducibility of lack at the centre of sexuality—while positioning the psychoanalyst's knowledge as the knowledge of impotence, distinct from both scientific and religious discourses.

    castration for masculine enjoyment, division for what is involved in feminine enjoyment.

83. #83

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.137

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

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

    as this is stated in Freudian doctrine, that there is no desire, libido - it is the same thing - except masculine. This is in truth, an error which has all its value as a reference point

84. #84

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.86

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

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

    she conceals a different enjoyment to phallic enjoyment, enjoyment that is described as properly feminine which in no way depends on it.

85. #85

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

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

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

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

86. #86

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

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

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

    the satisfaction that answers to phallic jouissance. Note here the modification that is introduced by the word 'barely' (juste).

87. #87

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that knowledge is grounded in the Other as a locus of the signifier, and that its true nature lies in the identity between the jouissance of its acquisition and its exercise — not in exchange value but in use — while the analyst, by placing objet petit a in the place of semblance, is uniquely positioned to investigate truth as knowledge; this culminates in a meditation on the not-all, the Other's not-knowing, and the link between jealouissance, the gaze, and das Ding as the kernel of the neighbor.

    if libido is only masculine, it is only from where the dear woman is whole... that the dear woman can have an unconscious.

88. #88

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.122

    **IX**

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

    we must situate the false finality as corresponding to the pure fallacy of a jouissance that would supposedly correspond to the sexual relationship.

89. #89

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

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

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

    Phallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n'arrive pas), I would say, to enjoy woman's body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.

90. #90

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.112

    **VII** > 92 Complement

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

    everything that can be used in the function Ox, is in the realm of the infinite

91. #91

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

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

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

    There is a jouissance of the body that is, if I may express myself thus... "beyond the phallus."

92. #92

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

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

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

    it will lead us to the level of phallic jouissance.

93. #93

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

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

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

    she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance.

94. #94

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.90

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

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

    I designate 4> as the phallus insofar as I indicate that it is the signifier that has no signified, the one that is based, in the case of man, on phallic jouissance. What is the latter if not the following, which the importance of masturbation in our practice highlights sufficiently - the jouissance of the idiot?

95. #95

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.44

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

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

    man is but a signifier because where he comes into play as a signifier, he comes in only quoad castrationem, in other words, insofar as he has a relation to phallic jouissance.

96. #96

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.68

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

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

    it is the jouissance that shouldn't be/could never fail (qu'il ne faudrait pas) - ... That is the correlate of the fact that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship, and it is the substantial aspect of the phallic function.

97. #97

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.12

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

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

    Enjoyment qua sexual is phallic. Namely, it is not referred to the Other as such

98. #98

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

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

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

    If there were another one, it would not be required/failed that it should be this one... there is no other of them than phallic enjoyment. Except that about which the woman does not breathe a word.

99. #99

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

    J.Lacan-... of this?

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

    a subsidiary question to Dr. Lacan about the relationship between the enjoyment of Don Juan presented as this, and on the other hand the constituting function of what he called the enjoyment of the idiot, namely, masturbation.

100. #100

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.159

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

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

     what best symbolises it, what is it after all, if not something that the importance of masturbation sufficiently underlines in our practice, what is it, except something which is nothing other... than the enjoyment of the idiot?

101. #101

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

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

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

     the father function as supporting the universality of the phallic function in man

102. #102

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     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.

     with respect to what I designate as the enjoyment of the phallic function they have, as I might say, a supplementary enjoyment.

103. #103

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.208

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

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

     the woman is for man the signifier of the Other in so far as she is not-all in the function φ

104. #104

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

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

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

     That everything turns around phallic enjoyment is very precisely what all analytic experience bears witness to, and bears witness to in the fact that the woman is defined by a position that I highlighted as not all (pas-toute) with respect to phallic enjoyment.

105. #105

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

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

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

     the one that corresponds to the enjoyment that had to be just right (juste). Just right for it to happen between what I will abbreviate by calling them the man and the woman, and which is phallic enjoyment.

106. #106

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

     What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

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

     this will lead us to the level of phallic enjoyment. And that what I am properly calling the enjoyment of the Other, in so far as here it is only symbolised, is again something quite different

107. #107

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

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

     man is only a signifier. Because where he enters into operation as a signifier, he only enters into it quoad castrationem. Namely, in so far as he has a relationship, some relationship or other with phallic enjoyment.

108. #108

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.104

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Names-of-the-Father as identical to the RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), argues that the phallus furnishes the consistency of the Real while enjoyment ek-sists with respect to it, and situates naming/the Borromean knot as the structural answer to the philosophical impasse between realism and nominalism about language and the Real.

     Hence the special accent that the speaking being puts on the phallus, in this sense that enjoyment ek-sists in it, that this is the emphasis proper to the Real.

109. #109

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is not a model (which would be grounded in the Imaginary) but rather a writing that directly supports the Real; the three registers (R.S.I.) achieve consistency only by holding together, and jouissance ek-sists to the Real as a hole, with phallic jouissance functioning as the nodal term that analytic experience discovers as primary.

     It is to the Real as making a hole that enjoyment ek-sists…There is in Freud a kow-towing, as I might say, before phallic enjoyment as such. This is what analytic experience discovers, the nodal function of this enjoyment qua phallic.

110. #110

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan assigns the Borromean knot to the Imaginary register (grounded in three-dimensional space), then uses it as a topological framework to redistribute Freud's triad of Inhibition/Symptom/Anxiety across the three registers: Inhibition as arrest in the Symbolic, Anxiety as arising from the Real, and the Symptom as the effect of the Symbolic in the Real—with Jouissance locatable at the intersections of the knot.

     what about this other mode of enjoyment, the one depicted by an overlapping, a squeezing where the Real comes here to squeeze it at the periphery of the two other rings of string?

111. #111

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.45

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 3: Tuesday 14 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Borromean knot topology as the minimal structure of existence (ek-sistence), arguing that Freud's Oedipus complex functions as a fourth term (psychical reality) needed to knot the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real because Freud lacked the three-ring Borromean solution; analysis itself operates by making the Real surmount the Symbolic at two crossing points, rendering the fourth term (Oedipus complex / Name-of-the-Father) superfluous.

     we have something that is called phallic enjoyment. There you are! Why do we call it phallic enjoyment? Because there is something called ek-sistence.

112. #112

     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.

     the association of a body and a phallic enjoyment. If Little Hans rushes into phobia, it is obviously to give body… to the embarrassment that he is in about this phallus

113. #113

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

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

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

     the affliction of the phallic Real because of which he does not know how to be anything but the semblance of power

114. #114

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.65

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

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

     If phallic enjoyment is there, it must be that the phallus must be something else, huh? So then, the phallus, what is it? In short, I am asking you the question because I cannot go into it today for very long. It is enjoyment without the organ, or the organ without enjoyment?

115. #115

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 8: Tuesday 18 March 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot—understood through the topology of the torus—displaces the insoluble question of objectivity and grounds the three consistencies (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) as irreducible, such that their triple points generate meaning, phallic jouissance, and the Name-of-the-Father respectively; identification is then reformulated as three distinct operations corresponding to the three registers of the knot's real Other.

     at this other triple point which is defined by this corner, it is enjoyment qua phallic that implies its liaison to the Imaginary as eksistence, the Imaginary is the pas-de-jouissance

116. #116

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot structures the three registers (R.S.I.) such that phallic enjoyment, ek-sistence, and the hole are each topologically grounded: phallic enjoyment is produced through the knotting of the Symbolic ring; the Real is made by jouissance that ek-sists; and the sexual non-relationship is inscribed in language rather than filled by it, with anxiety marking the limit of enjoyment of the other body.

     Phallic enjoyment always involves the knot that is made with the ring of the Symbolic, to name it only in the way as it ought to be.

117. #117

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

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

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

     the enjoyment described as phallic is situated there, at the conjunction of the Symbolic with the Real.

118. #118

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads "The Purloined Letter" through the figure of Bozef (introduced by Alain Didier Weill) as an incarnation of Absolute Knowledge — knowledge that is in the Real but does not speak — to argue that the Borromean topology of RSI, the structure of the Passe, and the objectification of the unconscious all hinge on the same redoubling of knowledge ("I know that he knows that I know that he knows"), while distinguishing the silent, real truth from the lying Symbolic and the false-but-consistent Imaginary (consciousness).

     the fact of being in short in a state of dependency on this letter feminizes a personage who – one could put this otherwise – is not precisely lacking in pluck

119. #119

     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.

     the mother maintains, at varying degrees depending on the subject, her Penisneid. Her child may fulfil her or not, but the question is posed.

120. #120

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Id (Es) is not a brute physical or energic reality but is organized and articulated like a signifier, thereby reframing the analytic notion of libido as a purely abstract measure (akin to energy) that operates at the level of the imaginary, and situating the body image and clinical objects (phobia, fetish) within the signifier/signified relation rather than within developmental-stage object theory.

     Freud comes to indicate that, ipso facto, libido takes on an aspect that presents only in this effective and active form... invariably rather akin to the masculine position. He goes so far as to say that only the masculine form of libido is within our reach.

121. #121

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.

     Clitoral jouissance, to call it by its name, can be prohibited at a given moment in its evolution. What is prohibited rejects the subject, throwing her into a situation in which she can no longer find anything suited to signify herself.

122. #122

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.361

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: The Oedipus complex's dissolution (Untergang) is structured as a mourning of the phallus, which Lacan re-articulates through the triad of castration/frustration/deprivation: symbolic castration marks the barred subject as speaking subject, and the imaginary subtraction of the phallus (−φ) is what generates Objet petit a as the object that sustains the subject precisely in his position as "not being the phallus."

     rather than abandon the phallus, he prefers to abandon, as it were, a whole part of himself, which will henceforth and forever be prohibited to him.

123. #123

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.387

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan presents a synchronic schema of the dialectic of desire that articulates how the subject is constituted through the structural failure of the Other as guarantor, establishing objet petit a as the remainder produced by the division of the Other by Demand—a mortified lost object that desire aims at only as hidden, always beyond the nothing to which the subject must consent through castration.

     If the subject has mourned the loss of the phallus - which, as I have indicated, is a necessary stage - from then on he can only aim at the phallus as a hidden object.

124. #124

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a critique of psychoanalytic congress discourse to articulate the structural relationship between anxiety, desire, jouissance, and the Other: the prohibition of jouissance (its Aufhebung) is the supporting plane on which desire is constituted, the Other is the metaphor of this prohibition, and anxiety must be understood through the desire of the Other rather than as the jouissance of a mythical self—a move that corrects both Jones's aphanisis and a Jungian-inflected misreading of the drive.

     a fundamental access to jouissance qua jouissance of the thing is prohibited

125. #125

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     *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.

     Sadism becomes a perversion when the beating is no longer sought or given as a sign of love but when it is perceived by the subject as the only possibility of procuring Jouissance for a phallus.

126. #126

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

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Phallic Function

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

     Each side is defined both by an affirmation and a negation of the phallic function, an inclusion and exclusion of absolute (nonphallic) jouissance.

127. #127

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.167

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is fundamentally incomplete because it lacks a psychoanalytic account of jouissance: the "mild and provident" ideal father (Name of the Father) does not simply neutralize power but installs interdiction of jouissance as its operative principle, which drives the escalation of surveillance and ultimately precipitates the return of totalitarianism as the primal father's revenge — a structural trajectory Foucault cannot see because he expelled psychoanalysis from his framework.

     Every sacrifice of pleasure strengthens the demand for sacrifice. In a society ruled by a provident power an ideal father interdictions grow more and more numerous.

128. #128

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.239

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

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

     'All x's are submitted to the phallic function' are both taken to be true, despite the fact that the antithesis's claim to inclusiveness is obviously falsified by the thesis

129. #129

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.34

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The "Undeadness" of the Drives*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity is constitutively aligned with the excess jouissance of the drives and the death drive, such that what makes a subject irreplaceable is not a positive personality attribute but a non-relational "undeadness" — a dense core that resists symbolic and imaginary assimilation and links the subject to the deadly yet indestructible pulsation of the drives.

     singularity resides within the shadowy interstices of the enigmatic region that (barely and inconsistently) separates life-giving vitality from the deadliness of the drives

130. #130

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.245

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

     Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

     the mystic's pursuit of jouissance is 'encumbered' by his or her attachment to phallic subjectivity

131. #131

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

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

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

     'All x's are submitted to the phallic function' are both taken to be true, despite the fact that the antithesis's claim to inclusiveness is obviously falsified by the thesis

132. #132

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

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

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

     Each side is defined both by an affirmation and a negation of the phallic function, an inclusion and exclusion of absolute (nonphallic) jouissance.

133. #133

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.83

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Comedy's "Character" form is theorized as the visible short circuit between the ego and the id/It — the unary trait as an enjoying incarnation — such that the comic character's structure reveals that jouissance belongs not to the subject but to the "It," exposing the missing link that normally sutures imaginary unity.

     we can clearly see that, for example, the happiness of the phallus is to be distinguished from the happiness of its bearer.

134. #134

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.236

     . Compare:

     Theoretical move: This passage is largely non-substantive, comprising endnotes, a comparative footnote on Agnes Heller's theory of comedy (relating it to an "existential tension" between social/cultural and genetic a prioris), a brief Lacanian citation on the isolatability of phallic jouissance, and a full bibliography. No major theoretical move is advanced beyond bibliographic and comparative context.

     what this organ has that is privileged is that in some way it is quite possible to isolate its jouissance. It is thinkable as excluded... a property that, within the entire field of what constitutes sexual equipment, we may consider to be very local, very exceptional.

135. #135

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.76

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Comedy's structural logic consists in the "impossible articulation" of two mutually exclusive realities within one frame—not simply exposing the Real of what happened, but staging the structural Real whose suppression constitutes ordinary reality's coherence; this is distinguished from irony by comedy's capacity to produce a "concrete universal" (singular universality) that includes the infinite within the finite, and is further illuminated by the Freudian/Lacanian split between ego and id as the engine of comic incongruity.

     Lacan intervenes with an abrupt statement that functions as a genuine psychoanalytic gag: there is only the happiness of the phallus. The emphasis, he explains, is on the fact that it is only the phallus that is happy—not its bearer.

136. #136

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

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

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

     The Kantian approach remains masculine: the In-itself is the exception to the universal (transcendental) laws that regulate our phenomenal reality

137. #137

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

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

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

     masculine sexual economy relies on a non-sexual (ethical, in Kant's case) exception which sustains its universality.

138. #138

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

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

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

     The left side ('masculine') is defined by the universality of the 'phallic function' (where phallus—Phi—stands for the signifier of desire/castration) and its constitutive exception

139. #139

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.438

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

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

     the agent of lalangue is Lust-Ich (an ego drowned in the pleasures in homophonies)

140. #140

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.192

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive — demonstrated through the Wolf Man's somatic symptom — escapes both correlationism and speculative realism by positing a strange materiality that "enjoys without thinking," locating the Freudian body as the inscription of drive upon organism, and positioning sexuality as the ontological lapse that anchors jouissance irreducibly in materiality without reducing it to mere physicality.

     configures Pankejeff within a libidinal dynamic with respect to the father's desire and the jouissance of the mother.

141. #141

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.110

     Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity from Kant to Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian answer to Schelling's mytho-feminine ontology is not the immediate unity of intellectual intuition (orgasmic One) but minimal reflexivity - the subject's self-distancing gaze that cuts into every immediate enjoyment - thereby framing the chapter's project of tracing reflexivity from Kant through Hegel as the core concept of subjectivity in German Idealism.

     The pivot of the scene is thus not male enjoyment (her sexual partner's or the spectator's); on the contrary, the spectator is reduced to a pure gaze.

142. #142

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.65

     ,'\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.

     Bobby's excessive enjoyment is not limited to what he does; his appearance registers his obscene enjoyment directly on the surface of his body.

143. #143

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.83

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that phallic authority (figured as BOB) is structurally dependent on the feminine enjoyment it can never possess, and that Lynch's *Fire Walk with Me* exposes this dependency by centering Laura's perspective rather than the male fantasy—thereby revealing the constitutive failure of phallic power rather than its triumph.

     Occupying the position of phallic authority provides a certain kind of enjoyment for the man, but at the same time it structurally deprives the man of access to feminine enjoyment.

144. #144

     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.

     Since enjoyment can only be partial and depends on the experience of absence, the subject disappointed with the attempt to achieve complete enjoyment soon works unconsciously to create the loss of the object whereby enjoyment will become possible.

145. #145

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.51

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

     Theoretical move: By reading the spice in Lynch's *Dune* as *das Ding*, McGowan argues that the film uniquely depicts—rather than merely promises—total (feminine) jouissance, showing how the Thing's presence within the fantasmatic world collapses the constitutive exclusion that founds social reality, and thereby reveals the identity of ultimate enjoyment and ultimate horror.

     Masculine enjoyment is tied to the social order because it occurs through an identification with the centre of this order—the master or phallic signifier. Enjoying like a man means getting off on the illusion of phallic potency.

146. #146

     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.

     phallic jouissance, Other jouissance, masculine structure, and feminine structure

147. #147

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.139

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > *Masculine!F eminine-Signifier!Signifierness*

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that sexual difference is grounded in a structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine modes of alienation in language: men are defined by the signifier of desire (Φ) and take the object (a) as partner, while women are defined by "signifierness" (the being of the signifier beyond signification) and take the phallus and S(Ⱥ) as partners—a dissymmetry so radical it forecloses any writable sexual relationship.

     shows up the paucity of phallic jouissance, which is the mere pittance of pleasure left after the drives have been thoroughly subjected (in the case of masculine structure) to the symbolic.

148. #148

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.15

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.

     sexual desire (the pleasure of desire or desiring, which he refers to as 'phallic jouissance,' or more felicitously as 'symbolic jouissance')

149. #149

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.142

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-140-0"></span>**Existence and Ex-sistence**

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing 'existence' (what can be said) from 'ex-sistence' (what can only be written, standing apart from the symbolic), Fink argues that the Other jouissance and objet petit a ex-sist in a way that renders Lacan's libidinal economy irreducibly open and untotalizable, foreclosing any complementarity between phallic and Other jouissance.

     no sense in which the Other jouissance makes up for or makes good the inadequacy or paucity of phallic jouissance-in a word, no complementarity or commensuration.

150. #150

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

     phallic, I 06; ... Phallus, 101-25; ... jouissance and, 106-7, 120

151. #151

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.213

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

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

     semiotic jouissance… the jouissance of meaning ('jouis-sense') derived from lalangue

152. #152

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.126

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

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

     Man's pleasures are limited to those allowed by the play of the signifier itself-to what Lacan calls phallic jouissance, and to what might similarly be called symbolic jouissance.

153. #153

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.236

     . Compare:

     Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of closing footnotes (including two Lacan citations on the phallus and jouissance, a comparative note on Agnes Heller's account of comedy, and a full bibliography), with no new theoretical argument developed.

     it has, precisely, a property that, within the entire field of what constitutes sexual equipment, we may consider to be very local, very exceptional.

154. #154

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.215

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's insistence on the phallus as the *signifier* of castration—rather than its anatomical embodiment—transforms phallic necessity into contingency: by spelling out the link between an anatomical peculiarity and the symbolic deadlock (the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment), psychoanalysis moves the phallus from the impossible-necessary register into the contingent, thereby dethroning it and exposing sexual difference as defined not by presence/absence of castration but by the mode of relation to its universal signifier.

     in its imaginary dimension of Potency incorporated, the phallus veils and sustains the very 'impotence' and impossibility

155. #155

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.208

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacanian castration is not merely an operator of lack but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment as an "encrusted" appendix with relative autonomy — and that comedy, unlike tragedy, stages this constitutive dislocation of enjoyment at the level of structure itself rather than through individual existential destiny.

     he runs out of the factory building and attempts to 'screw' a phallic hydrant until it starts spurting water

156. #156

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Comedy's deepest operation is not the exposure of a hidden "real" behind appearances but the impossible joint articulation of two mutually exclusive realities within a single frame—a "concrete universal" that includes the infinite within the finite, distinct from irony's mere pointing to the gap between universal statement and particular enunciation. This structure is further illuminated by the Lacanian split between Ego and Id/jouissance, where satisfaction follows its own autonomous logic indifferent to the subject.

     there is only the happiness of the phallus. The emphasis, he explains, is on the fact that it is only the phallus that is happy—not its bearer

157. #157

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.312

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

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

     Such 'transgressive' art confronts us directly with jouissance at its most solipsistic, with masturbatory phallic jouissance.

158. #158

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.192

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the postideological "desublimated" call of jouissance short-circuits the symbolic mediation constitutive of the Other's jouissance, so that the apparent opposition between pure autistic jouissance (drugs, virtual sex) and the jouissance of the Other (language, narrative, remembrance) secretly converges in the Hegelian infinite judgment: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are two sides of the same phenomenon.

     can we say that this melancholic position of futur antérieur is feminine, while the jouissance engendered by the thrill of pleasures to come is masculine?

159. #159

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.116

     **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

     Theoretical move: Claire Denis's films perform a systematic demolition of fantasy by staging and then deflating the image of the enjoying Other—revealing the lack and partiality that underlie any apparent complete enjoyment—thereby redirecting subjects away from the paranoid lure of fantasmatic jouissance and back toward the partial enjoyment proper to the path of desire.

     We can derive enjoyment from partial objects, objects that do not promise us completion. But when the idea of a whole or an ultimate enjoyment has a hold on us, the possibility for this kind of partial enjoyment recedes.

160. #160

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.118

     **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

     Theoretical move: Denis's *J'ai pas sommeil* dismantles the fantasy of ultimate/transgressive enjoyment by rendering the serial killer's acts ordinarily joyless, thereby redirecting desire away from fantasized full satisfaction toward an acceptance of enjoyment's constitutive partiality — a move the passage frames as both an aesthetic and political intervention against ideological fantasy and paranoia about the Other's enjoyment.

     Typically, cinema represents serial killers as enjoying themselves too much, as enjoying without any restraint... This becomes most evident with a figure such as Hannibal Lecter... for whom eating his victims is a mode of the ultimate transgressive enjoyment.

161. #161

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.61

     **Object Relations Psychoanalysis** > **The Other of the Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage assembles a keyword-style theoretical compendium covering four major Lacanian concepts — the Other of the Other, Orientalism, Phenomenology, and the Phallus — arguing above all that the Phallus is a paradoxical signifier of exception whose apparent mastery/phallic authority is illusory, dependent on a veil and collective obedience, and structurally tied to castration, lack, and the death drive.

     When Lacan speaks of 'phallic jouissance' we should always keep in mind that the phallus is the signifier of castration – phallic jouissance is therefore jouissance under the condition of symbolic castration that opens up and sustains the space of desire.

162. #162

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.44

     **Interpellation** > **Little Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage works through four related concepts—the little other as site of quasi-traumatic subjectivity-formation, the lost object as the structural condition of desire and enjoyment, phallic jouissance as the masculine structure of constitutive dissatisfaction, masochism as sadistic reversal, and the master signifier as the empty signifier that initiates the symbolic order and organizes enjoyment through exclusion—demonstrating that lack, loss, and emptiness are not failures of the system but its generative engine.

     Phallic jouissance is that form of enjoyment that most of us experience most of the time...we are still dissatisfied; we are disappointed and have a sense that our desire has not been fully satisfied. This sense of (dis)satisfaction that always leaves something wanting is precisely what Lacan calls phallic jouissance and defines the masculine structure.

163. #163

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Sublimation, Jouissance, and “Real” Satisfaction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against collapsing desire into the drive (as Žižek does), contending instead that a second, non-alienated form of desire—one that approaches but does not merge with the drive—is the basis of Lacanian ethics and provides the subject with "real," partial satisfaction through sublimation acting as a shield that transmits tolerable doses of jouissance.

     jouissance—the overagitation of the drives—represents

164. #164

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.24

     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.

     in its libidinal aspect the Christian religion massively relies on what belongs to the register of 'infantile sexuality' (defined by Freud as polymorphous perversity), that is, to the satisfaction and bonds derived from partial objects, with the exclusion of sexual coupling.

165. #165

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.64

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

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

     The relation with Φ—that is to say, the relation with the signifier—is the relation on which existence is founded (for any speaking being)