Phallus

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (607)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.271

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

   Theoretical move: Zupančič distinguishes two modes of "realizing desire" - Antigone's sublimation through which she becomes the phallic signifier of desire (the Φ), and Sygne de Coufontaine's drive-logic that short-circuits the infinite/finite opposition by sacrificing even the absolute condition itself, rendering the finite not-whole and making visible the Real of desire (the real residue of castration) rather than the Symbolic/Imaginary phallus.

   Antigone starts to incarnate the Φ, the signifier of desire, the phallus as distinct from the penis.

2. #02

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Analysis***

   Theoretical move: The passage performs a first-person Freudian dream analysis that pivots on the Lacanian mirror stage and the Oedipal complex, arguing that the dreamer's wish to befriend the phallic-mother-lobster enacts a feminist assertion of feminine power as compensation for the perceived lack of the paternal phallus, while Lacanian recognition through the gaze establishes a moment of reciprocal equality.

   I consistently enact protective measures to compensate for what I perceive as lacking in my mother—that is, the phallus of a father.

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Analysis***

   Theoretical move: The passage performs a Lacanian-Freudian dream analysis that maps the phallic mother and imaginary father onto dream figures, locating the dreamer's desire for autonomy at the threshold between the Imaginary and the Real, where self-nomination and self-creation begin to emerge as a wished-for but deferred psychic position.

   the lobster, the phallic creature that I first fear and then deflate through equalization

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that typical dreams (Oedipus dreams, parturition dreams, anxiety dreams) encode unconscious sexual and infantile content through a stable symbolic vocabulary that belongs not to dreaming per se but to the unconscious thinking of the masses, and demonstrates how this symbolism operates through displacement, reversal, and condensation.

   All elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, and umbrellas ... all elongated and sharp weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes, are intended to represent the male member.

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: The passage deploys a series of clinical dream examples to demonstrate that dream symbolism (particularly of the genitals, castration, and sexual intercourse) is indispensable to interpretation and cannot be reduced to the dreamer's own associations alone; it illustrates how condensation, displacement, and symbolic substitution operate in typical dreams.

   The Rotunda is my genital, the captive balloon in front is my penis, about the weakness of which I have worried.

6. #06

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

   [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The imaginary in neurosis and object relations

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic impasses (hysterical and obsessional) are constituted entirely within the imaginary register—between little others and ego-images—and therefore cannot be resolved from within that register; the hysteric perpetuates an alienated desire mediated through the other's image while the obsessive deploys his ego as a puppet to stave off death, both strategies ultimately annulling desire and blocking genuine subjective engagement.

   Her own embodiment is defined (by the man/obsessive but for her) as a lack (being what the man lacks—see 452, 2—and lacking what the man has, i.e., the phallus).

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.176

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

   Theoretical move: Lacan critiques post-Freudian (especially Katan's and Macalpine's) reductions of psychosis to ego-level defence mechanisms and affective projection, arguing that the decisive theoretical failure is the neglect of symbolic structure—specifically the logic of the signifier, the Oedipus complex, and the concept of the big Other—in favour of imaginary, ego-centred frameworks.

   Other points that post-Freudian authors seem confused about concern the status of the phallus; the castration complex; the Oedipus complex and the splitting in love life.

8. #08

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.182

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.

   at the level of the imaginary, S is covered by the phallic image, represented by the symbol φ... the subject identifies with the phallic image

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.185

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

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

   The concept of the symbolic phallus is a synonym for the ultimate characteristics that makes the object of maternal desire desirable... the symbolic phallus refers to the partial qualities the (m)Other presumably appreciates.

10. #10

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.188

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternity is constituted not by imaginary or biological reality but by the signifier — the paternal metaphor — and that this symbolic dimension grounds both paternity and the concept of death, a connection that becomes especially legible in obsessional neurosis (as in Freud's Rat Man).

    Lacan indicates that Freud qualified the imaginary phallus as central to the castration complex of the boy and the girl... In subjective functioning the status of the phallus is a direct effect of the paternal metaphor

11. #11

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.189

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.

    a parallel hole in the imaginary, where phallic signifiers remain lacking, denoted by the symbol Φ0.

12. #12

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.193

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's reading of Schreber's psychosis through the I-schema, arguing that foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father produces a parabolic, delusional reality in which Schreber reconstructs subjectivity by occupying the position of God's phallus/wife—a process structured by the interplay of foreclosure, imaginary regression to the mirror stage, and the absence of fundamental fantasy.

    Schreber does not transform into a woman with the aim of getting rid of his penis, but with the aim of becoming God's phallus (471, 5): Schreber aims to be the point around which God's desire, which is chaotic up until then, is organized.

13. #13

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.225

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

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

    For Lacan, on the other hand, the phallus has a privileged function as a signifier in the constitution of the subject's desire and as such grounds the symbolic order; it is the signifier that designates the difference between the sexes

14. #14

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques reality-benchmarked analytic technique (as exemplified in Lebovici's case) by arguing that confining transference, the drives, and Freudian topographies within the imaginary dyad reduces being to a fact of reality, alienates the subject further, and forecloses the symbolic coordinates where analytic effects properly reside.

    Lebovici considers the man in armour as symbolizing the phallic mother with which the analyst is identified

15. #15

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

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > IV. How to act with one’s being?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's proper mode of being cannot be derived from technical rules, happiness, or comprehension, but must be grounded in the ethics of desire — specifically the desire of the analyst — and that the analyst's stance toward the analysand's demand (intransitive, without object) is the pivot around which the direction of treatment turns.

    apart from referring to the phallus that plays a central role as a signifier beneath a transparent veil in the literary works that Sharpe recommends

16. #16

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.232

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > IV. How to act with one’s being?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's function is not to fulfil the analysand's demand but to allow the signifiers bound up with frustration to reappear, thereby distinguishing need, demand, and desire, while also warning against identification-based or "good-for-the-subject" treatments that merely compel repetition or install the superego in place of the analytic relation.

    As Lacan articulates in 'The Signification of the Phallus' (1958/2006: 579), desire is what stems from the leftover of need after it has been articulated in the signifiers of the demand.

17. #17

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.241

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.

    The phallus as such is thus nothing more than the signifier of the metonymical nature of desire… the phallus as the signifier for the lack in the Other, which will appear in the graph of desire as Φ

18. #18

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

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the direction of treatment must preserve a place for desire by refusing to respond at the level of demand; the phallus as signifier of lack structures the subject's desire metonymically, and analysis must lead the subject to confront the lack in the Other rather than offering new identifications that only deepen alienation.

    it is not having a phallus that restores her erotic value, but despite her having a phallus (in her dream), the mistress still desires the phallus and thus is still lacking something.

19. #19

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

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

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

    phallus [89], [146], [176], [184]–[187], [193]–[194], [225], [228]–[229], [231], [234], [239]–[242], [246], [279], [285]

20. #20

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.36

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* — the Thing — is not primarily a Kantian noumenal kernel of objects but the inaccessible, anxiety-generating core of the mother's desire encountered in the primordial relation with the fellow human being, making the (m)Other's unknown desire the constitutive ground of subjectivity and the original template for all subsequent object-relations.

    likening the mother to a crocodile and the phallic signifier to a stick with which to keep its jaws from snapping shut

21. #21

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.149

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

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

    Cutting the penis establishes the signifier of the phallus, which for Lacan means pointing toward a signified that cannot be fully specified.

22. #22

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.227

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Part 2

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2) providing citations and brief clarifications supporting the main argument; it is largely non-substantive apparatus, though it contains scattered theoretical anchors linking Lacan, Žižek, Hegel, and Freud to the book's argument about religion, the sacred, and the neighbor.

    Lacan, especially in his early work, posited the phallus as a master signifier, a signifier with no clear signified.

23. #23

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.249

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage (pages 248–249) listing key terms, persons, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but surfaces the book's central conceptual architecture through its entry clusters.

    phallus as signifier, 140–41, 218n27

24. #24

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.283

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > What's Missing in *Th e Da Vinci Code*

    Theoretical move: The passage uses *The Da Vinci Code* as a cultural case study to map two symmetrical ideological failures—fundamentalism and positivism—both of which refuse to sustain the constitutive gap in signification (the missing binary signifier of the feminine), whereas psychoanalysis insists this gap is ontological and irreparable, underwriting the nonexistence of the sexual relationship and the subject's enjoyment.

    the mother figure, as the complement of the father or master signifier, heals the incompleteness in the social structure.

25. #25

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.331

    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 phallus is the general equivalent of objects, and the father is the general equivalent of subjects, in the same way that gold is the general equivalent of products

26. #26

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.350

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 11. The Case of the Missing Signifier

    Theoretical move: This passage's endnotes collectively argue that the missing (binary) signifier is an internal gap within the signifying structure rather than an external absence, and that genuine political transformation requires identification with this internal structural position rather than its replacement—a claim developed through engagements with Hegel, Lacan, Badiou, Derrida, and feminist theory.

    French feminists produced the concept of écriture féminine as a type of writing foreign to the phallocentric chain of signifiers, emerging from the gap within that chain

27. #27

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_148"></span>**perversion**

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

    'The whole problem of the perversions consists in conceiving how the child, in his relation to the mother…identifies himself with the imaginary object of [her] desire [i.e. the phallus]'

28. #28

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_181"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0205"></span>**sexual difference**

    Theoretical move: Sexual difference cannot be grounded in anatomy or biology but is constituted by a fundamental dissymmetry in the signifier: the phallus is the only sexual signifier with no feminine equivalent, so sexual positions (masculine/feminine) are symbolic constructions determined by one's relation to the phallus and formalised through the formulae of sexuation, with the result that no fully 'finished' sexual identity is achievable and the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

    The only sexual signifier is the phallus, and there is no 'female' equivalent of this signifier: 'strictly speaking there is no symbolization of woman's sex as such…the phallus is a symbol to which there is no correspondent, no equivalent. It's a matter of a dissymmetry in the signifier'

29. #29

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    as Lacan develops his distinction between the penis and phallus, he emphasises that the fetish is a substitute for the latter, not the former.

30. #30

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_154"></span>**preoedipal phase**

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

    The third element in the preoedipal triangle, which mediates the dual relation between the mother and the child, is the PHALLUS, an imaginary object which circulates between them in a series of exchanges.

31. #31

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    the partial objects already discovered by psychoanalytic theory before Lacan (the breast, the faeces, the PHALLUS as imaginary object, and the urinary flow)

32. #32

    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.

    'Castration means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l'échelle renversée) of the Law of desire' (E, 324).

33. #33

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    the mother is considered, by both sexes, as possessing the phallus, as the phallic mother… this 'relationship to the phallus…is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes'

34. #34

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_112"></span>**lure**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes animal lures (operating purely in service of need, within the imaginary) from the properly human lure, which involves a "double deception" made possible only by language, thereby grounding the specifically human dimension of deception in the Symbolic rather than the Imaginary.

    the seductive manoeuvres of the child in the preoedipal triangle (when the child tries to be the phallus for the mother) are described as lures

35. #35

    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_147"></span>**paternal metaphor**

    Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor is established as the founding metaphoric substitution (Name-of-the-Father for the desire of the mother) that structures the Oedipus Complex, grounds all signification as phallic, and whose foreclosure in psychosis abolishes phallic signification entirely.

    for this reason, all signification is phallic

36. #36

    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.

    there is no symbolisation of woman's sex as such', since there is no feminine equivalent to the 'highly prevalent symbol' provided by the phallus

37. #37

    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.

    Ð = the real phallus Ö = the symbolic phallus \[upper-case phi\] ö = the imaginary phallus \[lower-case phi\]

38. #38

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    The presence of the imaginary phallus as a third term in the preoedipal imaginary triangle indicates that the symbolic father is already functioning at the preoedipal stage.

39. #39

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    It is around the presence and absence of the PHALLUS that sexual difference is symbolically apprehended by the child.

40. #40

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_ncx_5"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_page_0010"></span>***Preface***

    Theoretical move: This preface to an introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis establishes its methodological framework: Lacan's discourse constitutes a unique, topologically structured language whose terms are mutually defining, and the dictionary form—itself a synchronic, self-referential, metonymic system—is the appropriate vehicle for exploring it, while the preface also theorises the dangers of ignoring the diachronic evolution of Lacan's concepts.

    the debate around a particular term has seemed to be so important that it would be misleading to omit all reference to it (e.g. 'phallus', 'gaze')

41. #41

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_151"></span>**phobia**

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

    the preoedipal triangle (mother-child-imaginary phallus) is transformed from being Hans's source of enjoyment into something that provokes anxiety in him

42. #42

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_53"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0068"></span>**disavowal**

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

    Whereas Freud relates disavowal to the perception of the absence of the penis in women, Lacan relates it to the realisation of the absence of the PHALLUS in the Other.

43. #43

    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.

    Lacan generally prefers to use the term 'phallus' rather than 'penis' in order to emphasise the fact that what concerns psychoanalytic theory is not the male genital organ in its biological reality but the role that this organ plays in fantasy.

44. #44

    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).

    he can now measure the difference between that for which he is loved by the mother (his position as imaginary phallus) and that which he really has to give (his insignificant real organ)

45. #45

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_191"></span>**specular image**

    Theoretical move: The specular image is theorized as the founding mechanism of ego-formation in the mirror stage, while simultaneously marking out a class of non-specularizable objects (phallus, erogenous zones, objet petit a) that structurally escape the imaginary register.

    There are certain things which have no specular image, which are not 'specularisable'. These are the phallus, the erogenous zones, and objet petit a.

46. #46

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_182"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0208"></span>**sexual relationship**

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

    There is only one signifier, the PHALLUS, which governs the relations between the sexes… 'the sexual relationship cannot be written'

47. #47

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_56"></span>**dual relation**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary order is constituted by dyadic relations while the symbolic order is essentially triadic, and that the failure to theorise this distinction reduces psychoanalytic treatment to an imaginary power struggle; Lacan's broader theoretical preference for triadic over binary schemes follows from this structural principle.

    refers to the moment preceding the Oedipus complex, when a third element (the imaginary phallus) circulates between the mother and infant.

48. #48

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    at other times he argues that it is the PHALLUS (S3, 319)

49. #49

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_138"></span>**Oedipus complex**

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

    prior to the invention of the father there is never a purely dual relation between the mother and the child but always a third term, the phallus, an imaginary object which the mother desires beyond the child himself

50. #50

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_126"></span>**mother**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's theory of the mother across three registers (real, symbolic, imaginary) and traces how the child's relation to the mother's desire—structured around the phallus—generates anxiety, drives the entry into the symbolic order, and ultimately requires the paternal function to resolve the imaginary deadlock of the Oedipus complex.

    Lacan follows Freud, arguing that the child always represents for the mother a substitute for the symbolic phallus which she lacks… The answer the child comes up with is that what the mother desires is the imaginary phallus.

51. #51

    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_155"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0177"></span>**privation**

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes 'privation' as a specific type of lack—the lack in the real of a symbolic object (the symbolic phallus)—to rigorously reformulate Freud's account of female castration and penis envy, locating the agent of this lack in the imaginary father and arguing that the mother's unsatisfied desire for the phallus is what first introduces the dialectic of desire into the child's life.

    what is lacking is not the real organ, for, biologically speaking, the vagina is not incomplete without one; what is lacking is a symbolic object, the symbolic phallus.

52. #52

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_111"></span>**love**

    Theoretical move: Love is constituted as an imaginary, narcissistic, and fundamentally deceptive phenomenon whose relationship to transference, desire, and demand reveals both its structural opposition to and its entanglement with desire — love as metaphor versus desire as metonymy — while simultaneously functioning as an illusory substitute for the absent sexual relation.

    It is deceptive because it involves giving what one does not have (i.e. the phallus); to love is 'to give what one does not have' (S8, 147).

53. #53

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans · p.67

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_52"></span>**dialectic**

    Theoretical move: Lacan appropriates the Hegelian dialectic—particularly through Kojève's reading—to frame psychoanalytic treatment as a dialectical experience, while decisively breaking with Hegel by denying any final synthesis (Absolute Knowing), replacing the telos of progress with 'the avatars of a lack' anchored in the irreducibility of the unconscious.

    the phallus then becomes 'the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates by its disappearance' (E, 288)

54. #54

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.146

    **XI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the optical schema to articulate the structural difference between the Ideal Ego (Idealich) and the Ego-Ideal (Ichideal): the imaginary is regulated by the symbolic (governed by the voice/speech of the Other), and love/transference are theorised as perturbations of that symbolic regulation—love confusing the two registers, transference exploiting the same imaginary mechanism but within the analytic symbolic frame.

    How does the primitive mouth get transformed, in the end, into a phallus? - it would perhaps be easy to knock up a little model of entertaining physics for this problem.

55. #55

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.154

    **xn**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mirror-apparatus schema to articulate how the imaginary specular dialectic introduces the death drive as a structural (not merely biological) dimension of human libido, and then extends this via Freud's 'Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams' to show how topographical and temporal regression correspond to shifts in the plane of reflection, with narcissism functioning as the libidinal complement of the egoism of the dream.

    the image that the subject... will see in this mirror, will pass from having the form of a mouth to that of a phallus, or from a more or less complete desire to that type of desire which a moment ago I called fragmented.

56. #56

    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.

    the end of analysis runs aground on the sign implied in the phallic relation, the (φ), inasmuch as it functions structurally as (-φ), which makes it take this form as the essential correlate of satisfaction.

57. #57

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.100

    BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

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

    I've been foregrounding the phallus because it's the most illustrious one, due to the fact of castration, but there also exist the equivalents of this phallus, among which you are familiar with those that precede it, the scybalum and the nipple.

58. #58

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

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

    that there is a glory of the father, an absolute phallus. Without doubt, resentment and revenge are decisive... This is where I place the capital φ.

59. #59

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.48

    BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

    Theoretical move: By tracing Hamlet's two modes of identification—with the specular image i(a) and with the lost object a—Lacan distinguishes the imaginary register from a remainder that escapes specularization, using the cross-cap topology to show that minus-phi (the phallus as lack) and objet petit a share a status irreducible to the specular image, thereby framing anxiety as the privileged passageway between cosmism and the object of desire.

    how this function is privileged in the mode of the phallus... the phallus appears as a minus, as a blank... it is circumscribed and, in a word, cut out of the specular image

60. #60

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.243

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

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

    the join between the a functioning as (- cp), that is, the castration complex, and the level we shall call visual or spatial

61. #61

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object but has a distinct object structure: it is the cut that precedes and grounds signification, and as "that which deceives not," it is the cause of doubt rather than doubt itself—the only phenomenon that escapes the signifier's constitutive capacity for deception. This leads to the claim that action borrows its certainty from anxiety by transferring it, and that jouissance-on-command (as in Ecclesiastes/circumcision) marks the originary site of anxiety.

    Little Hans, who is as much of a logician as Aristotle, postulates the equation All animate beings have a phallus.

62. #62

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.121

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *passage à l'acte* is constituted by the subject's absolute identification with *objet a* — her reduction to and ejection from the scene as that object — and that this structural logic, rather than tactlessness or countertransference, explains why Freud himself enacts a *dropping* (passage à l'acte in reverse) when he terminates the treatment of the young homosexual woman. The topology of *a* in the mirror of the Other is shown to illuminate both hypnosis and obsessional doubt as different modalities of the object's structural invisibility to the subject.

    In the case of the young homosexual woman, what's at stake is a certain promotion of the phallus, as such, in the place of a.

63. #63

    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.

    Subjectivity is focalized in the falling-away of the phallus... The fact that the phallus is more significant in human experience through its possibility of being a fallen object than through its presence

64. #64

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    **x** > **xv**

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

    It would seem that this is *a forme fruste* of the determinative for the phallus that we can find much more sharply chiselled in other inscriptions.

65. #65

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.303

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

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

    The third level is the phallus. Here you will find the entire dialectic I taught you to recognize in the function of the (-φ), a unique function in relation to all the other functions of the a inasmuch as it is defined by a lack, the lack of an object.

66. #66

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.332

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anal object (objet a) functions as the *cause* of desire rather than its goal, and that inhibition is the structural locus where desire operates; this grounds a theory of the obsessional's recursive desire as a defence against genital/castration anxiety, whereby the excremental *a* acts as a "stopper" substituting for the impossible phallic object.

    At the level of genital desire the function of the *a* is symbolized analogically... by the (-cp) which appears as a subjective residue at the level of copulation.

67. #67

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    **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 function of the phallus as imaginary functions everywhere, across all the levels that I qualified as a certain relationship between the subject and the a. The phallus functions across the board, in a mediating function, except where we expect it to, namely, at the phallic stage.

68. #68

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.213

    **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 Don Juan fantasy is a woman's fantasy because it corresponds to a woman's wish for an image that would fulfil its function…that there be one of them, one of these men, who has it — which, from experience, is clearly a misrecognition of reality.

69. #69

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that anxiety is "not without an object" — specifically objet petit a — and that this object's status is established through the logic of "not without having it," linking castration anxiety to the phallus's sociological function, the cut as operator of detachment, and the phenomenological transformation of the bodily object into a detachable, exchangeable thing.

    the male subject roams around reduced to being the bearer of the phallus. That's what makes castration necessary for a socialized sexuality... The phallus mustn't be seen to be involved. If it gets seen, then there's anxiety.

70. #70

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

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

    Presenting the shofar and the voice that it supports as analogies of the phallic function is not adequate for us. And why not, indeed? But how, and at what level?

71. #71

    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.

    The phallus is what, for everybody, when it is reached, precisely alienates one from the other.

72. #72

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.133

    BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural distinction between acting-out and passage à l'acte by anchoring both to the object a and its cut-relation to the Other: acting-out is essentially a monstration (wild transference) that shows the a as cause of desire to the Other, while the symptom is self-sufficient jouissance that only requires interpretation through established transference. The originary cut is relocated from birth-separation to the embryonic envelopes, grounding a topological account of a as off-cut.

    She wanted the child as a phallus, that is, as it is spelt out in doctrine in the most developed fashion in Freud, as a substitute, as ersatz, as something that here falls squarely into our dialectic of cut and lack

73. #73

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.187

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

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

    Since the phallus functions in human copulation not only as an instrument of desire but also as its negative, it presents itself in the a function with a minus sign.

74. #74

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.109

    BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

    Theoretical move: By demonstrating that the cross-cap, once the Objet petit a is separated off, leaves a Möbius strip with no specular image, Lacan argues that the introduction of object a into the world of objects dissolves the stable specular image (ideal ego) and produces the uncanny double — topologically grounding the relation between a, the imaginary, and the Real.

    this ambiguity between one and two is a common ambiguity with regard to the appearance of the phallus in the field of the oneiric apparition, and not only oneiric, of the sexual member. Right where apparently there is no real phallus, its ordinary pattern of apparition is to appear in the form of two phalli.

75. #75

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration anxiety is not the neurotic's ultimate impasse; rather, what the neurotic shrinks from is making his castration into the positive guarantee of the Other's lack — a dialectical move that reframes castration's function and opens analysis beyond Freud's terminus. This is grounded by linking the Unheimliche structurally to the minus-phi position in the diagram, identifying the Heim as the site in the Other beyond the specular image where the subject's desire encounters itself as object.

    At this place of lack where something can appear, last time I put, in brackets, the sign (- φ). This indicates for you that there emerges here a relationship with the libidinal reserve

76. #76

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.315

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

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

    The phallus qua its vanishing, its aphanisis, to employ Jones's term... is in mankind the medium of the relations between the sexes.

77. #77

    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's because the phallus doesn't achieve any matching of the desires, save in its evanescence, that it becomes the common-place of anxiety.

78. #78

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY IN THE NET OF SIGNIFIERS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan constructs a coordinate matrix of inhibition/impediment/embarrassment (difficulty axis) and emotion/turmoil/anxiety (movement axis) to situate anxiety as a specific affect distinct from emotion, symptom, and turmoil—arguing that anxiety is not repressed but drifts, moored only by the signifiers that are repressed, and that psychoanalysis is an 'erotology' (discourse of desire) rather than a psychology of affects.

    what I linked to the last term concerning the very precise limit that narcissistic capture introduces with regard to what can be invested in the object, in so far as the phallus, for its part, remains auto-erotically invested.

79. #79

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.333

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

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

    the phallic hole at the centre of the genital dimension

80. #80

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.240

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

    Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Buddhist iconography (the Kanzeon/Avalokitesvara/Guanyin statues), Lacan argues that the object of desire (objet petit a) emerges precisely at the limit of the three stages (oral, anal, phallic-castration) as something radically separated off, and that castration's function in the object is illuminated by a culturally specific figure that appears as desire's object while remaining indeterminate with respect to sex—thus the mirror, as field of the Other, is the site where the place of the a first appears.

    the minus-phallus, the entry of negativity with regard to the instrument of desire when sexual desire as such emerges in the field of the Other

81. #81

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.50

    BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

    Theoretical move: Anxiety arises not from lack itself but from the failure of lack — when the minus-phi (imaginary castration) ceases to be absent, something appears in its place, which is the structure of the Unheimliche; the fantasy formula ($◇a) is reread as the detour through which desire becomes accessible only via a virtual image that systematically conceals the real object a.

    the place of (-φ), which corresponds, on the right-hand side, to the place that is occupied, on the left-hand side, by the a of the object of desire

82. #82

    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.

    the phallic object only comes in second place for her, and in so far as it plays a role in the desire of the Other.

83. #83

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.92

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and the law are not antithetical but identical — both functioning as a single barrier barring access to das Ding — and that this insight, masked in the Oedipus myth, is Freud's decisive answer to the philosophical question of desire's relation to law, which philosophy has always elided.

    On one side there's the wolf, on the other the shepherdess.

84. #84

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    WHAT IS A PICTURE?

    Theoretical move: Lacan positions the gaze as the form taken by the objet a in the field of the visible, situating it at the intersection of two triangular schemas—one locating the geometral subject of representation and the other constituting the subject as picture—thereby grounding the scopic drive within the broader logic of the central lack of desire.

    as = (-φ)

85. #85

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

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

    This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking.

86. #86

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

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

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

    the supposed anal object, namely, the faeces, in relation to the phallus in its negative effect

87. #87

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

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

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

    give the faeces in place of the phallus

88. #88

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

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of the female homosexual's deceptive dream to distinguish the Freudian subject of certainty from the search for truth, and announces that repetition—as repetition of deception—is the mechanism by which Freud coordinates experience with the Real, which is constitutively missed by the subject.

    showing the father how one is, oneself, an abstract, heroic, unique phallus, devoted to the service of a lady.

89. #89

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan situates his early teaching as a corrective struggle against practitioners' méconnaissance of speech as the analytic instrument, framing his appeal to language philosophy as merely propaedeutic, and announces a pivot toward confronting the "refusal of the concept" in psychoanalysis.

    the various forms of the objet a and the central symbolic function of the minus-phi [(—

90. #90

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

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

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the phallic/anamorphic register of vision to the gaze as such — not as a symbol of castration but as a pulsatile, elusive function that any picture traps yet simultaneously causes to disappear at every point of inquiry, establishing the picture as fundamentally a 'trap for the gaze'.

    not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such

91. #91

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS

    Theoretical move: The passage locates the digression on the scopic function within the theory of repetition, situating the gaze (as objet a) as the pivot through which consciousness can be positioned from the perspective of the unconscious — with Merleau-Ponty's work on the visible and the invisible named as the external prompt for this development.

    The phallus in the picture

92. #92

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.91

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

    Theoretical move: Through the Zhuangzi butterfly dream, Lacan argues that the gaze is the site where the subject apprehends a root of its identity — not as unified consciousness but as a captured, desiring being — and that the objet petit a of the gaze is what causes the subject's fall in the scopic field, linking the primal marking of desire to the structure of scopic satisfaction.

    the butterfly who paints himself with his own colours

93. #93

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.117

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: By analogy with the phallus as the organ marked by lack in the castration complex, Lacan argues that the eye is similarly structured by a non-coincidence between eye and gaze, revealing the gaze as a lure rather than a transparent instrument of vision — thereby grounding the scopic drive in the logic of the unconscious relation to the organ.

    It is a question rather of the relation to the phallus, in as much as it is lacking in the real that might be attained in the sexual goal.

94. #94

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

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

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

    What the voyeur is looking for is not, as one says, the phallus—but precisely its absence

95. #95

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.103

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: Through the analysis of Holbein's anamorphic skull in *The Ambassadors*, Lacan argues that the geometral dimension of the gaze is not vision as such but a partial field that renders visible the subject's annihilation and the phallic function of lack—the gaze thus operates as the site where the subject is undone rather than constituted.

    something symbolic of the function of the lack, of the appearance of the phallic ghost

96. #96

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know (who knows signification as such), and that the transference effect—love—is simultaneously its enabling condition and its resistance: love as narcissistic deception closes the subject off from the analytic interpretation it also makes possible, manifesting the alienation effect in the subject-Other relation.

    the negative effect in which the phallus object enters into it.

97. #97

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the gaze as a mortifying, anti-life force (the fascinum/evil eye) whose encounter arrests movement and suspends the subject; the moment of seeing functions as a suture between the imaginary and symbolic, while the scopic field is distinguished from the invocatory field precisely because the subject is determined—not indeterminate—through the separating cut of objet a.

    forms in which a counter-eye emerges—this is homeopathic... the turpicula res, described by Varro, I think, which is quite simply a phallus

98. #98

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    WHAT IS A PICTURE?

    Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the gaze as the specific form taken by objet petit a in the scopic field, establishing it as the object that symbolizes the central lack of desire, and introduces the two-triangle schema to show how the geometral subject is turned into a picture—subordinating geometral representation to the scopic drive.

    as = (-φ)

99. #99

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan situates his early teaching as a corrective struggle against the méconnaissance of speech as the instrument of psychoanalysis, distinguishing a merely propaedeutic use of Heidegger/philosophy of language from his own project, and pivots toward introducing the concept of repetition by diagnosing a broader "refusal of the concept" in analytic practice.

    a correspondence between the various forms of the objet a and the central symbolic function of the minus-phi [(—

100. #100

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

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the Freudian "subject of certainty" from the "search for truth," and pivots to announce repetition as the key concept through which Freud coordinates deceiving experience with a Real that the subject is structurally condemned to miss.

     the function she had, that of showing the father how one is, oneself, an abstract, heroic, unique phallus, devoted to the service of a lady.

101. #101

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS

     Theoretical move: The passage positions the gaze as objet a within the scopic field, framing the digression on the scopic function as arising from the explication of Freudian repetition and as opening onto the question of how consciousness can be situated within the perspective of the unconscious.

     The phallus in the picture

102. #102

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Through a reading of Holbein's anamorphic skull in *The Ambassadors*, Lacan argues that the geometral dimension of the gaze—irreducible to vision—functions as a symbolic appearance of the phallic ghost and the lack, and that anamorphosis makes visible the subject's own annihilation, the death drive inscribed at the heart of the scopic field.

     something symbolic of the function of the lack, of the appearance of the phallic ghost?

103. #103

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the phallic/anamorphic reading of vision toward a more fundamental function: the gaze as such, distinct from the eye and irreducible to phallic symbolism, with the picture theorised as a 'trap for the gaze' that causes the gaze to vanish at every point one tries to locate it.

     not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such

104. #104

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the optical structure of the eye (fovea/peripheral retina chiasma, the Arago phenomenon) as an analogy to argue that the relation between organism and organ is never one of adequacy or instinctual harmony, but is structurally organized by lack—as in the castration complex and the phallus—thereby establishing that the eye/gaze dialectic is constitutively one of non-coincidence and lure, not identity.

     It is a question rather of the relation to the phallus, in as much as it is lacking in the real that might be attained in the sexual goal.

105. #105

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

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

     This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking.

106. #106

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

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

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

     give the faeces in place of the phallus

107. #107

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the evil eye (fascinum) as the point at which the gaze exercises its anti-life, mortifying power, distinguishing the scopic register—where the subject is determined by the separation introduced by the gaze (objet a)—from the invocatory field, and locating the moment of seeing as a suture between the imaginary and the symbolic.

     the turpicula res, described by Varro, I think, which is quite simply a phallus

108. #108

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

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

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

     the supposed anal object, namely, the faeces, in relation to the phallus in its negative effect

109. #109

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

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

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

     What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain... What one looks for is not, as one says, the phallus—but precisely its absence.

110. #110

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know—the analysand's attribution of knowledge about signification to the analyst—and that the transference effect manifests as love, which simultaneously enables and resists interpretation by closing the subject off through an alienation effect.

     the negative effect in which the phallus object enters into it.

111. #111

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the clinical structures of neurosis (hysteria and obsession) through the differential relation each takes to the demand of the Other, showing how the o-object (objet petit a) anchors subjective positions differently in each structure, and concludes that the end of analysis is the signifier of the barred Other — the Other's acknowledgment that it is nothing.

     he experiences himself as a safeguarded phallus... to protect his penis

112. #112

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysteric's desire-to-desire) as demanding a tripartite structural framework—privation, frustration, castration—in which the status of the subject (oscillating between zero and one) must be posited prior to any account of demand, transference, or castration, thereby exposing the conceptual limitations of post-Freudian analytic practice.

     someone like Jones gave to the function of privation - when it was a question for him precisely of questioning the enigma of the relationship of the feminine function to the phallus, that is, to the function of privation

113. #113

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

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

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

     with one or other more or less incarnated shape of the o-object, the function of the phallus being here altogether present.

114. #114

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.321

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through a psychoanalytic reading of Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein*, the seminar argues that the subject is constituted in a "perpetual division" between the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the Gaze), and that the subject can only be grasped "at the zero point of her desire" through the discourse of the other's desire — that is, Lol's subjectivity is structured entirely around a fundamental lack that is both sustained and circulated by the o-object as Gaze.

     the rarity of phallic signifiers, it seems that Lol's sexuality is situated well on this hither side of an oedipal structure

115. #115

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical dispute within Lacan's seminar over the structural role of the incest barrier, the Name-of-the-Father, and castration in grounding desire, with Safouan arguing that psychoanalysis leads not toward transgression but toward recognition of the limit as such, while Leclaire contests the appeal to Lacanian orthodoxy as a guarantor of correct interpretation.

     the recognition by the one of the fact that he can only make use of his phallus when he submits it to a precise jurisdiction even when it is not written down

116. #116

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how the fundamental fantasy is anchored in a small set of phonemes (pe, je, li) that simultaneously encode the subject's proper name, the phallus/penis opposition, bisexuality, and the death drive — showing that the subject's singularity and phallic identity are constituted at the intersection of letter, desire, castration, and the irreducible rock of the death drive.

     the opposition of penisphallus, and of the throat as the representative of the two poles of bi-sexuality

117. #117

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the phonematic gestalt "Poord'jeli" is not a fantasy but rather a pre-subjective phonological structure marking the emergence of the speaking subject, located at the articulation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, while Leclaire's response opens the question of whether fantasy must be organized around the scopic drive or whether it may equally be constituted by the voice as objet petit a.

     What seems to be in question here is the problematic of the phallus in the analytic relationship; the path which leads towards the unity of the subject signified by the name of the father... phenomenologically is the appearance of the phallus in the progress of making meaning.

118. #118

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the analysis of Philip's proper name and fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) to articulate the interweaving of transference, the unconscious, drive, repetition, and the incestuous encounter as the conditions under which a desiring subject emerges from the analytic situation—turning the phonematic transcription of the fantasy into a site where metaphor, metonymy, castration, and the analyst's desire converge.

     constituting himself as the phallus of the analyst and seeking his complicity in masking his lack of subject, according to the formula of Leclaire, 'of the stag, I am the horn'

119. #119

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

     Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's emergence as representation in the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing—a circular temporal structure in which the subject is simultaneously the origin of the signifier and excluded by it—and uses this logic to critique Aulagnier's notion of 'insertion' as neglecting the dimension of aphanisis, while grounding desire's pseudo-infinity and alienation in the metonymic function of the objet petit a.

     the o-object and it is well said in this article, that it has as a turning point of its constitution the phallus

120. #120

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     **PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**

     Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a general structural category—not reducible to the analyst's clinical non-suturing practice—by arguing that a sutured discourse is constituted by an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain whose occultation is the condition of discourse, while the signifier is identical to itself precisely insofar as it is constituted at its root by the non-identical to itself (the barred subject/lack).

     it is never anything but the representative of the barred phallus as such, the representative of the barred subject.

121. #121

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     From the place of the Other, through all the calculated risks that he runs, he experiences himself as a safeguarded phallus.

122. #122

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a clinical-theoretical dispute about the relationship between the incest barrier, the Name of the Father, castration, and desire: Safouan argues against conflating the conscious/unconscious barrier with the incest barrier, insisting that the Name of the Father (not transgression) is what orients the subject toward the unconscious and grounds desire through castration, while Leclaire counters that orthodoxy itself is the danger in such argumentation.

     the recognition by the one of the fact that he can only make use of his phallus when he submits it to a precise jurisdiction even when it is not written down

123. #123

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.

     constituting himself as the phallus of the analyst and seeking his complicity in masking his lack of subject, according to the formula of Leclaire, 'of the stag, I am the horn.'

124. #124

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

     Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's insertion into the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing — a circular, non-linear temporal logic — and that alienation is properly grounded in the division of the subject (not in consciousness), while the o-object, functioning as metonymy and as the logic of number (zero/one), structures the pseudo-infinity of desire.

     it has as a turning point of its constitution the phallus... this relationship to this - (minus phi) essentially correlative to the S

125. #125

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how the fundamental fantasy is encoded in phonemic material — three phonemes (pe, je, li) — that simultaneously condenses the subject's proper name, bisexuality, the death drive, castration, and phallic identity; the analyst's interpretive work moves from the wound/lack at the foot (castration) toward a phallic identification, tracing the irreducible singularity of the desiring subject in its phonemic substrate.

     the je of George Philip will tighten around the proud symbol to constitute his phallic identity, joli porc

126. #126

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the "phonematic gestalt" (Poord'jeli) is not a fantasy but rather the pre-symbolic point of emergence of the speaking subject — the locus from which fantasy and its privileged image arise — while Leclaire's response pivots on distinguishing fantasy-forms by the nature of the Lacanian object (scopic vs. vocal) implied within them.

     What seems to be in question here is the problematic of the phallus in the analytic relationship; the path which leads towards the unity of the subject signified by the name of the father

127. #127

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.321

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The seminar presentation reads Marguerite Duras's novel *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* as a clinical-literary staging of the subject's constitution through the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the gaze), arguing that the subject (Lol) can only be grasped at the zero-point of desire in the discourse of the other, where she is structured by a perpetual division between the desire of the Other and the o-object that drives the fantasy.

     it seems that Lol's sexuality is situated well on this hither side of an oedipal structure, in this relationship to the void... One is struck in this novel by the absence of reference points, the rarity of phallic signifiers

128. #128

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysterical desire-to-desire) as a scaffold to argue that analytic experience cannot be exhausted by demand and transference alone, and that a tripartite structure of privation, frustration, and castration—grounded in a radical materialism of the body as libido—is required to make castration thinkable and to properly situate the subject in relation to the Other.

     when it was a question for him precisely of questioning the enigma of the relationship of the feminine function to the phallus, that is, to the function of privation

129. #129

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

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

     why not say it? - in the disguised, entstellt, displaced form of the phallus, this is something which ought to attract our attention

130. #130

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.239

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's Las Meninas as a structural demonstration of the Gaze and the Objet petit a: the Infanta figures the central 'slit' (phallus-as-object) around which the picture's whole economy of vision is organised, and the Cross-cap topology is invoked to show how the fall of the object (the painter's look) simultaneously produces the barred subject and installs the empty Other as the support of truth.

     the girl = phallus, which is what, moreover, I earlier designated for you as the slit.

131. #131

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.

     For the phallus, with the woman and with what effectively introduces it in an extraordinary relief as regards the determination, the function, even the sense of female homosexuality

132. #132

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

     Mademoiselle Grazien

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

     it is very properly speaking, the function that the phallus comes to occupy at the same place which, precisely, has absolutely not the same character... The phallus enters, as such, in a certain function that it is now a matter of defining and which, properly speaking, can only be defined with reference to the signifier.

133. #133

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs, arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between Subject and Other (via the Mirror Stage) and between Subject and Ego Ideal (via Schema R), while the Symbolic field alone provides the third term—the Name of the Father—that structures the whole process, inaccessible by any direct route.

     he is the substitute for the penis of which the mother is deprived and only accedes to his status of subject by taking his place there where he is lacking to the mother on whom he depends.

134. #134

     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.

     this object which is the penis, but that we are forced to raise to this function of being pin-pointed as phallus... it is necessary for the man to perceive that masturbatory jouissance is not everything

135. #135

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory and its reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's proper position is to demand nothing, and that what the analyst gives is the objet petit a — specifically, through the anal object as the paradigm of demand, castration, and the gift, Lacan exposes the scatological underside of the phallic dialectic in obsessional neurosis and the concept of oblativity.

     everything that has been said about this phallic dialectic, especially in the obsessional, and about the touching and the not touching

136. #136

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be grasped topologically—not as a mere metaphorical "hole in the real" but as constituted through the cut on a surface, whereby the fall of the objet petit a is structurally inseparable from the division of the subject; two-dimensional topology (rather than three-dimensional intuition) is proposed as the privileged formal apparatus for capturing the impossible structure of the subject.

     It is the phallus. The phallus, at a certain level of experience, which is properly speaking the one analysed in the case of Little Hans, the phallus is the attribute of what Freud calls living beings.

137. #137

     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'.

     this object which is the penis, but that we are forced to raise to this function of being pin-pointed as phallus

138. #138

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

     A - The problem of the suture

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

     the cutting up of the signified in this metonymical series of different partial objects is represented by the phallus precisely in so far as it has appeared in the form of (-phi) in its different partial objects

139. #139

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Augustinian formula *inter urinas et faeces nascimur* to pivot from the subject's corporeal origin to its structural constitution via the o-object, arguing that the subject is not born as a living body but as a subject in relation to the anal and phallic objects—and, crucially, to two further objects that remain undertheorised even in Freud: the gaze and the voice. He then frames the upcoming seminar on the gaze by recommending Foucault's *Les mots et les choses* (the *Las Meninas* chapter) as preparation.

     the second, namely the penis, having been found to occupy in this determining of the subject, an altogether fundamental place

140. #140

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     D - The (o) as fetish

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theorisation is distinguished from post-Freudian authors by its privileging of a negative/reflexive approach to the object: rather than marking the positive qualities of the object (e.g. the phallus as terrifying instrument), Lacan follows Freud's logic of the Medusa to argue that the fetish object functions as a veil over castration — a witness to the lack in the field of the Other.

     Before the image of the phallic mother the post-Freudian authors will say that she is terrifying because she is phallic. Because the phallus can be a maleficent instrument, a destructive weapon, etc...

141. #141

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     there are normal perverts,

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

     the (-phi), namely, the phallus qua the object at stake in the relationship to jouissance, in so far as it requires the union of the other in the sexual relation

142. #142

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan's case presentation of an obsessional's 'duplication of the feminine object' is used to argue that the split between a narcissistic/desired beloved and an anaclitic/demanding 'perverse' partner is structurally grounded in the imaginary phallus (-phi): the beloved is not identified to the phallus but to minus-phi, the guarantee of the Other's castration, while the subject himself is subtilised into (-phi), such that symbolic castration (as the regularisation of the phallic position) must be distinguished from imaginary castration via yet-unformulated distinctions around negation.

     the content of the jewel-case is found to be sometimes, proves to be sometimes shit, and sometimes the phallus. This phallus finds itself identified to the beloved object

143. #143

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect, like the representative of the drive, must be re-categorised as a form of signifier — demonstrated by Freud's progressive specification of Verleugnung alongside Verdrängung — and that this re-categorisation reveals a reduplicated non-identity (Entzweiung) at the heart of the signifier itself, which the Lacanian formula of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier must be extended to accommodate.

     the narcissistic dialectic whose limit is the phallus which operates there under the form of a lack

144. #144

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     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.

     One only begins to pose questions that concern sexuality, masculine as well as feminine, starting from the moment where there comes into play the phallic organ and function.

145. #145

     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.

     it is from stressing the function of what is at stake, namely, a certain object, and this object as lost, that the choice is going to be made, whether this object is going to become an object that is claimed... claiming to have the phallus like them, or that in the case of homosexual love, it is qua not having it that she loves

146. #146

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.168

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar uses Jones's 1927 article on female sexuality as a platform to reconceptualise 'aphanisis' as the disappearance of desire, and to reframe the 'unseen man' in female homosexuality as a structural-symbolic operation involving identification and the phallic gaze, distinguishing Jones's proto-structural insights from his failure to organise them rigorously.

     This man who is invisible to her... the eye, a symbol already evoked by Jones in his theory of symbolism and specified by him there as phallic, is the true object

147. #147

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     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.

     One only begins to pose questions that concern sexuality, masculine as well as feminine, starting from the moment where there comes into play the phallic organ and function.

148. #148

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a functions as the cause of desire precisely through its status as objective lack: it operates in a double register — revealing the lack of the Other and the loss internal to signification — and its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to misidentify with knowledge in order to cover over the irreducible remainder left by castration.

     The (-phi) which is introduced here in the shape of what does not appear - it is the Nothing which cannot be pictured

149. #149

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     there are normal perverts,

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

     the (-phi), namely, the phallus qua the object at stake in the relationship to jouissance, in so far as it requires the union of the other in the sexual relation

150. #150

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Augustine's 'inter urinas et faeces nascimur' as a statement about the subject's birth rather than the living body, using it to introduce the o-object (objet petit a) — specifically the anal and phallic objects alongside the look and the voice — as constitutive of subjectivity, while situating this against the Cartesian 'I think' and recommending Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas as preparation for the next session on the Gaze.

     At least one of them, and even two, the second, namely the penis, having being found to occupy in this determining of the subject, an altogether fundamental place

151. #151

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that topology—specifically two-dimensional surface theory—provides the structural model for the subject's constitution through the fall of the objet petit a, where the cut on a surface (not a metaphorical void in the real) is what determines the division of the subject; Bejahung/Verneinung, the phallus as attribute, and Stoic *ptosis* are marshalled to show that the subject is the effect of a structural cut, not merely a hole in the real.

     The phallus, at a certain level of experience, which is properly speaking the one analysed in the case of Little Hans, the phallus is the attribute of what Freud calls living beings.

152. #152

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs—from the Mirror Stage to the L Schema and Schema R—arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between the subject and the Other, and between the subject and the ego ideal, while the symbolic field alone provides the third term (Name of the Father) that structures the whole process.

     he is the substitute for the penis of which the mother is deprived and only accedes to his status of subject by taking his place there where he is lacking to the mother on whom he depends.

153. #153

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     D - The (o) as fetish

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theoretical distinctiveness lies in his privileging of a negative or reflective approach to the object, exemplified by his reading of fetishism: the fetish is not defined by the positive qualities of the object but as the veil/witness of the lack (castration) in the field of the Other.

     Before the image of the phallic mother the post-Freudian authors will say that she is terrifying because she is phallic. Because the phallus can be a maleficent instrument, a destructive weapon, etc.

154. #154

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's position is precisely to demand nothing, and that the privileged o-object in the field of the Other's demand is anal—linking oblativity, the phallic fantasy in obsessional neurosis, and the anal phase's logic of the bar (gift/retention) to show that 'giving what one has' is always giving shit, whereas genuine love is to give what one does not have.

     this phallic dialectic, especially in the obsessional, and about the touching and the not touching, and of the precautions and of the approaches, all of that smells of shit

155. #155

     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).

     this object which is the penis, but that we are forced to raise to this function of being pin-pointed as phallus... it is necessary that in the man-woman relationship, the contingent object, the decrepit (caduc) object of mammal jouissance should be capable of being negatived

156. #156

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

     For the phallus, with the woman and with what effectively introduces it in an extraordinary relief as regards the determination, the function, even the sense of female homosexuality

157. #157

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.239

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* to demonstrate how the Objet petit a (the Infanta as the 'girl = phallus', the slit, the hidden central object) structures the field of vision, showing that the subject is constituted by the cut of the object on the cross-cap, while the function of the Other as 'blind vision' (an empty, void Other) supports the truth of representation without itself seeing — with direct consequences for the end of analysis as the subject's encounter with the o-object.

     This central object, the split, the little girl, the girl = phallus

158. #158

     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 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.

159. #159

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     Mademoiselle Grazien

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

     the function that the phallus comes to occupy at the same place which, precisely, has absolutely not the same character... it does not enter as organ... the phallus enters, as such, in a certain function that it is now a matter of defining and which, properly speaking, can only be defined with reference to the signifier

160. #160

     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 that in the man-woman relationship, the contingent object, the decrepit (caduc) object of mammal jouissance should be capable of being negatived

161. #161

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: By tracing Jones's concept of aphanisis and the structural logic of the "unseen man" in female homosexuality, Lacan argues that Jones — despite himself — arrives at structural (symbolic/metaphorical) references that he cannot properly organise, and that what Jones calls aphanisis corresponds clinically to the disappearance of desire, while the "unseen man" scenario turns on a symbolic operation in which the Gaze (the phallic eye of the father) is the true object of the ritual.

     the eye, a symbol already evoked by Jones in his theory of symbolism and specified by him there as phallic, is the true object, for its presence is necessary, indeed indispensable, for the accomplishment of the ritual

162. #162

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect must be granted the status of a signifier — on a par with the drive-representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) — by tracing Freud's progressive distinction between Verleugnung (denial, bearing on perception) and Verdrängung (repression, bearing on affect), and then proposes that the signifier itself be redefined to include both registers, thereby grounding a reduplicated Entzweiung (splitting) at the heart of the subject.

     the narcissistic dialectic whose limit is the phallus which operates there under the form of a lack

163. #163

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

     A - The problem of the suture

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

     In any case the penis plays here the role of mediator of the cut and of the suture... the cutting up of the signified in this metonymical series of different partial objects is represented by the phallus precisely in so far as it has appeared in the form of (-phi)

164. #164

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     Monsieur Safouan

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

     the content of the jewel-case is found to be sometimes shit, and sometimes the phallus. This phallus finds itself identified to the beloved object

165. #165

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.92

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the barred Other — S(Ø) — must be understood not as the simple non-existence of the Other but as the Other being *marked* (by castration), and that this marking is the logically prior condition for the subject's alienation, the constitution of desire via the objet petit a, and the very possibility of a logic of the phantasy; it further insists that the scopic drive's proper object (the gaze) is to be sought in what the voyeur wants to see, not in the look of an arriving Other, correcting a philosophical deviation that would locate hell in the Other rather than in the subject.

     around the sign of castration, namely, - at the start - around the phallus, in so far as it represents the possibility of a lack of object.

166. #166

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the sexual act through the harmonic "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio logic), mapping the relation between the subject (small o), the mother as unifying One (capital O), and castration (minus phi) as the fundamental lack structurally inscribed in any subjective realization of the sexual act — thereby grounding sublimation and acting-out as proportional variants within the same signifying quadrangle organized by repetition.

     the phallus as signifier gives the ratio of desire (in the sense that the term – I mean: 'ratio' – is used as the 'mean and extreme' ratio of harmonic division).

167. #167

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     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.

     not the penis, but what ensures, since the woman becomes the metaphor of jouissance, that one can in its place take a new metaphor, namely, this negatived part of the body that we call the phallus, in order to distinguish it from the penis.

168. #168

     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.

     feminine desire, which we explain is, like masculine desire, in a certain relation to a lack, a symbolised lack which is the phallic lack

169. #169

     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.

     the gift of feminine love, in so far as it creates this vanishing object - and what is more, in so far as she lacks it - which is the all powerful phallus.

170. #170

     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.

     it is in so far as the phallus designates - from something raised to a value, by this less which the castration complex constitutes- this something which constitutes precisely the distance between the small o and the unit of sex.

171. #171

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.209

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism, neurotic rejection, and the sexual act cannot be understood through moralistic or pleasure-based frameworks but require a rigorous logical articulation of the subject's structural position; the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the Other, the phallus, the mother) that prevents any simple dyadic union, and feminine jouissance remains irreducible to what psychoanalytic theory has so far been able to articulate.

     the phallus in so far as it must be lacking to the one who has it - namely, to the man … if he does not have it, in the register and in so far as the sexual act can exist, this is not to say, for all that, that he loses it either!

172. #172

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of the subject's division by mapping the Id (as grammatical/thinking structure) against the Unconscious (as non-existence, the 'I am not'), showing how these two fields do not overlap but rather eclipse each other—and that their intersection is mediated by the objet petit a, which emerges as the operator of alienation, while castration is recast as the failure of any Bedeutung to cover sexual difference.

     sexual difference is only supported by the Bedeutung of something lacking under the aspect of the phallus

173. #173

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     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.

     there is no phallic object!… It is not castration, it is the phallic object which is the effect of the dream, around which the sexual act fails!

174. #174

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ, "small o") and the mathematics of the mean and extreme ratio to theorise the sexual relation: the subject enters genital union as a "product" (objet petit a), and the irreducible remainder generated by the division of the subject by the Other (the small o that cannot be eliminated) both limits jouissance and founds the "phantom of the gift" that constitutes feminine love.

     in the erotic mirage she can be the phallus - to be it and at the same time not be it

175. #175

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

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

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

     by taking it as a phallic complement … what is involved in this object, the phallic object, of which I said that it would be necessary, in order finally to articulate it, for me to carefully examine it first.

176. #176

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · 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 a biological or imaginary fact but the logical result of language's constitutive inadequation to sexual reality: at the level of Bedeutung, language reduces sex to the binary of having/not-having the phallus, and it is precisely this structural lack that grounds the o-object (objet petit a) and distinguishes the alienating operation of logical subjectivity from the alienating operation of unconscious sexual meaning.

     language reduces sexual polarity to what we designate as we can, by this something to which language reduces sexual polarity, namely: *having* or *not having* the phallic connotation.

177. #177

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.137

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio) as the mathematical model for the structure of the sexual relation, arguing that subjective satisfaction in the sexual act cannot be grounded in homeostatic/pleasure-principle models nor in complementarity (key-and-lock), but requires a third term (phallus/castration, child-phallus equivalence) whose structural logic is captured by this uniquely determined, incommensurable proportion—linking repetition, the division of the Other, and the problem of the object.

     everything indicates to us - and it seems that I only have to make something of the fundamental function of this third element which turns around the phallus and castration

178. #178

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.210

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act constitutes the founding impossibility (the "holed One") from which all truth, symptom, and signification emerge, while identifying the big Other not with spirit but with the body as the primary site of inscription — thereby grounding the Symbolic in a Real that cannot be formally proved.

     that the *to ti*, the *quiddity* of sex is perhaps lacking, that there is perhaps only the phallus

179. #179

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (mean and extreme ratio) as a matheme to distinguish the sexual act—where lack is structurally elided—from sublimation, which starts from lack, reproduces it iteratively, and arrives at a final cut strictly equal to the initiating lack; Fantasy ($ ◇ a) is then re-situated as the relation between objet a and the barred subject in the field of sexual satisfaction.

     why does the penis find itself symbolising it? Precisely because of being that which, in the form of detumescence, materialises this flaw, this lack in jouissance

180. #180

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

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

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

     the facts furnished by these objects … namely, the phallus, the different partial objects

181. #181

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

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

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

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

182. #182

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.234

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the subject's constitution through the signifier effects an alienation that structurally separates body from jouissance — making castration the condition of possibility for any genuine sexual act, while systematically dismantling the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as a sufficient account of jouissance's distribution.

     It is enough for the woman to enter into the game of being this object that the biblical myth designates so well for us, of being this phallic object, for the man to be fulfilled. Which means, exactly, to be completely swindled.

183. #183

     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.

     It is we who discover that it is the woman who represents this phallic value! If jouissance - I mean penile jouissance - carries the mark described as that of castration, it seems that it is in order that… the woman should become what one enjoys.

184. #184

     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.

     feminine desire, which we explain is, like masculine desire, in a certain relation to a lack, a symbolised lack which is the phallic lack.

185. #185

     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 I entitled … this lecture that I gave on the meaning of the phallus … language reduces sexual polarity to … having or not having the phallic connotation.

186. #186

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.225

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

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

     the castrated man can be conceived of as never having to embrace anything but this complement, with which he can deceive himself ... by taking it as a phallic complement.

187. #187

     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.

     I will leave in suspense the question of what is involved in the phallic object. Because it is necessary … for me to carefully examine the way in which it is supported as object. All of this, precisely, in order for me to perceive that it is not supported itself. This is what the castration complex means: there is no phallic object!

188. #188

     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.

     no one should have imagined inscribing the elementary structures of kinship in this circulation of the all-powerful phallus! It is a curious thing. It is we who discover that it is the woman who represents this phallic value!

189. #189

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.137

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act cannot be modeled on organic satisfaction or simple complementarity (key/lock), but requires a structural, mathematical account of the "measure and proportion" implicit in repetition — introducing the Golden Ratio (mean and extreme ratio) as the formal analogue for the third element (phallus/castration) that structures the sexual relation, linking this to the incommensurable and to objet petit a.

     this requirement of the phallus, which appears so internal, in our experience, to the sexual relation as it is subjectively lived. Is not the child-phallus equivalence something from which we can, perhaps, attempt to designate the relevance

190. #190

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     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.

     It is because she does not have the phallus that the woman's gift takes on a privileged value as regards the individual (l'être) and is called love, which is – as I have defined it – the gift of what one does not have

191. #191

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     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.

     not the penis, but what ensures, since the woman becomes the metaphor of jouissance, that one can in its place take a new metaphor, namely, this negatived part of the body that we call the phallus, in order to distinguish it from the penis.

192. #192

     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.

     what is more, in so far as she lacks it - which is the all powerful phallus... it is in so far as it is its lack with respect to jouissance that constitutes the definition of the subjective satisfaction

193. #193

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.209

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "masochism" as a clinical label obscures the logical structure of neurotic desire (specifically the "wish to be refused"), and that grasping the full range of satisfactions implied by the sexual act requires logical articulation—not moralistic or adaptive frameworks—culminating in the claim that the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the prohibited mother, the phallus) and that feminine jouissance remains fundamentally unarticulated by sixty-seven years of psychoanalytic practice.

     the phallus in so far as it must be lacking to the one who has it - namely, to the man … this phallus, on the other hand, becomes the being of the partner who does not have it.

194. #194

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · 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 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.

     it is in so far as the phallus designates - from something raised to a value, by this less which the castration complex constitutes- this something which constitutes precisely the distance between the small o and the unit of sex.

195. #195

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural relationship between the Id (Es) and the unconscious as two non-overlapping fields defined by complementary negations ("I am not thinking" and "I am not"), arguing that their mutual eclipsing produces, on one side, the o-object as the truth of alienation's structure, and on the other, castration as the incapacity of any Bedeutung to cover sexual difference—with the drive's grammatical montage (as read through "A Child is Being Beaten") serving as the hinge for this demonstration.

     sexual difference is only supported by the Bedeutung of something lacking under the aspect of the phallus.

196. #196

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

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

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

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

197. #197

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.234

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle that "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the introduction of the subject as an effect of signification necessarily alienates the subject from jouissance — separating body from jouissance — with castration named as the structural mechanism by which jouissance is cancelled in the sexual relation, making any genuine sexual act contingent on this loss.

     It is enough for the woman to enter into the game of being this object that the biblical myth designates so well for us, of being this phallic object, for the man to be fulfilled. Which means, exactly, to be completely swindled.

198. #198

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

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

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

     namely, the phallus, the different partial objects? We will return to what results from their inmixing into our thinking

199. #199

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (mean and extreme ratio) as a structural matheme to differentiate the sexual act from sublimation: whereas in the sexual act the lack is obscured (the remainder o² is not noticed), sublimation begins from lack and iteratively reproduces it, with the repetitive reduction of successive powers of o converging on the original lack—thereby grounding sublimation's structure in repetition and linking objet petit a to fantasy as the subject's relation to sexual satisfaction.

     why does the penis find itself symbolising it? Precisely because of being that which, in the form of detumescence, materialises this flaw, this lack in jouissance

200. #200

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.210

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act is constitutively impossible (there is no sexual act), yet it remains the sole ground of truth; the symptom is the knot at the hole of the 'One', the Other is identified with the body as the primordial locus of inscription, and all truth—including ideology and perception—is structured by this foundational gap.

     the *to ti*, the *quiddity* of sex is perhaps lacking, that there is perhaps only the phallus.

201. #201

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.92

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the logic of the phantasy by linking alienation (the forced choice between "I do not think" and "I am not") to castration as the primordial marking of the Other: the barred Other (S(Ⓞ)) does not mean the Other is absent but that it is marked—by lack, by castration—which grounds desire through the objet petit a as cause, and against which all sexuality and philosophy defensively operate.

     around the sign of castration, namely, - at the start - around the phallus, in so far as it represents the possibility of a lack of object.

202. #202

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the harmonic (mean and extreme) ratio — anchored in the Phallus as signifier — to formalise the sexual act's relation to repetition, castration, and subjective lack, then uses this quadrangular proportion to position passage à l'acte, acting-out, sublimation, and repetition in structural relation to one another and to the analytic act.

     the phallus as signifier gives the ratio of desire (in the sense that the term – I mean: 'ratio' – is used as the 'mean and extreme' ratio of harmonic division).

203. #203

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

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

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

     a very direct extract… from what I wrote precisely about this direction of the treatment, as regards what is at stake in the phallic function.

204. #204

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.

     this lack has made progress in the articulation of its function as *organum,* an essentially logical progress in this realisation as such of the phallic lack

205. #205

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

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

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

     a very direct extract... from what I wrote precisely about this direction of the treatment, as regards what is at stake in the phallic function.

206. #206

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of the statement "I am not" to anchor the split subject of the unconscious, then extends this logical paradox to the claim that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" — not as naturalist provocation but as a structural consequence of desire being constructed through the unconscious, with the psychoanalytic act defined as the analyst being rejected like the objet petit a at the end of analysis.

     it is never 'who has tenus femina', I am saying 'femina' not even 'mulier' in so far as the 'woman' is desired.

207. #207

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.327

     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.

     these remarks have no other interest than to allow us to specify the sense of the phallus as missing signifier. It is the signifier outside the system, and in a word the conventional one to designate what is involved in sexual enjoyment as radically foreclosed.

208. #208

     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 lack or the non-lack of an organon, of an instrument, in other words the phallus

209. #209

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.339

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally excluded from the symbolic system of knowledge, yet is thereby realised as the Real; this exclusion—figured through the phallic signifier—organises all clinical structures (neurosis/psychosis), and the triad of enjoyment, the Other as locus of knowledge, and the objet petit a provides the proper framework for understanding both infantile biography and the analytic encounter.

     It is around this signifier of enjoyment, this signifier excluded in so far as it is the one that we promote under the term of phallic signifier

210. #210

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

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

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

     the object of desire of the voyeur in the slender body, the profile of a little girl, is very precisely what can be seen there only by the fact that it supports the ungraspable itself a line where it is lacking, namely, the phallus.

211. #211

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.380

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

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

     It is to know why the 1 by which the woman subject is supported is so ordinarily the Phallus with a capital P.

212. #212

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.222

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

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

     it is only from this angle that, in Freudian logic, the woman appears: an inadequate representative, alongside the phallus and then the negation that she has it

213. #213

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

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

     providing something that completes, that replaces the phallic lack, in providing this Other, in so far as he is asexual

214. #214

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.325

     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.

     the function described as the phallus, in so far as it is what is effectively found to intervene, and in a way which it is of course never in any case anything but a third function.

215. #215

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     *[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.

     there is no happiness except from the phallus (il n'y a de bonheur que du phallus).

216. #216

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian schema of "murder of the father – enjoyment of the mother" is insufficient because it elides the tragic dimension of the Oedipus myth; beyond the axes of desire and jouissance, truth must be introduced as a third, irreducible dimension. He reinforces this by contrasting the paternal metaphor (his own formalization) with Freud's literal-historical reading in Totem and Taboo, and by reading Hosea as evidence that the prophetic tradition concerns a relation to Truth rather than to enjoyment.

     There is a cylinder (rouleau), a stone one of course, which is there, potentially, at the level of her trap, and it acts as a restraint, a wedge. It is what is called the Phallus.

217. #217

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to demonstrate the structural logic of the Discourse of the Hysteric: the hysteric maintains an alienated relation to the master-signifier (the idealised father) precisely by refusing to surrender knowledge and by orienting desire around the Other's enjoyment rather than her own, thereby unmasking the master's function while remaining in solidarity with it.

     What suits Dora is the idea that he has the male organ... it is the organ that makes the third man, Herr K, worthwhile, but not so that Dora can find her happiness in it, as I might say, but so that someone else may deprive her of it

218. #218

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the Real Father as a structural-logical operator defined by impossibility: as the agent (not the performer) of castration, the Real Father is constitutively an effect of language, not a psychological or empirical figure, and the impossibility he embodies is precisely what generates the master signifier through the repetitive failure of demand, producing surplus-jouissance as loss.

     It is from the riddle that the phallus proposes to us qua manifestly imaginary that we must make the object of the first of these operations, castration.

219. #219

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure is the effect of language already operative in reality—not a representational function of any subject—and uses this to demarcate psychoanalysis from linguistics and ethnology: neither can master the unconscious because psychoanalysis operates within a particular tongue where there is no metalanguage, the signifier represents a subject (not another signifier), and sexual non-relation is the irreducible structural remainder that myth and linguistics cannot formulate.

     It is in the phallus that there is summarised the mythical point by which the sexual is implicated in the passion of the signifier.

220. #220

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.172

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan drives a wedge between the Oedipus myth (dictated by the hysteric's dissatisfaction, privileging law over enjoyment) and *Totem and Taboo* (an obsessional-neurotic construction that places enjoyment at the origin, then law), arguing that the psychoanalytic discourse must move beyond mythic interpretation toward a more rigorous combinatorial of desire's causation.

     it is simple to recognise here the phallus, the totality of what 'femininely' can be subject to enjoyment... Oedipus did not have to function as the phallus, the phallus of his people, and not of his mother.

221. #221

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Writing is theorized as the necessary condition for logic and for questioning the symbolic order, while the Phallus is recast not as a missing signifier but as an obstacle to the sexual relationship—what establishes jouissance as the condition of truth in analytic discourse.

     It is not the lack of signifier that is at stake, but the obstacle raised to a relationship. The phallus, by emphasising an organ, does not designate...the organ described as the penis...It aims in the least ambiguous way...at its relationship to enjoyment.

222. #222

     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.

     there is only one Bedeutung, die Bedeutung des Phallus. It is there alone what is involved in language, denoted, of course, but without ever anything corresponding to it.

223. #223

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     **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.

     No one challenged me about what language knows, namely die Bedeutung des Phallus

224. #224

     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 sexual enjoyment is only formulated, is only articulated from the phallus in so far as the phallus is its signifier.

225. #225

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.68

     **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.

     the phallus is the organ in so far as it is, it is being that is at stake, in so far as it is . . . feminine enjoyment. This is where and in what there resides the incompatibility of being and having.

226. #226

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

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

     through the phantasy, there are people who lucubrate about certain ways in which if not the truth itself, at least the phallus could be tamed

227. #227

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews his early work on "The Purloined Letter" as a foundational articulation of the phallus within discourse, arguing that it already contained the key signifier-based articulations he continues to develop — including the impossibility of the sexual relation — while pivoting toward the function of writing (the Letter) and its relationship to logical/mathematical reasoning as distinct from spatial intuition.

     In these pages, I am very precisely only speaking about the function of the phallus in so far as it is articulated, as it is articulated in a certain discourse.

228. #228

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     **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.

     This semblance exposed by pure truth is, we have to recognise, rather phallic (assez phalle)... sufficiently involved then to merit this ancient name of phallus.

229. #229

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.181

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every discourse is structured as a semblance, and that the four discourses—particularly analytic discourse—circle around the fundamental impossibility of the sexual relationship, a void that is managed (but never resolved) through the composition of jouissance and castration; surplus-jouissance, as the Freudian analogue of Marxian surplus value, names the point where the semblance of discourse is anchored to this constitutive gap.

     it is the phallus, and that the phallus, in so far as it is to this third that there is ordered everything which, in short, creates an impasse in enjoyment

230. #230

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     *Lacan writes on the board: "L 'achose"*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the lapsus is always fundamentally a written phenomenon (lapsus calami even when linguae), and uses this to establish that there is no metalanguage because one only ever speaks *about* language by starting from writing—culminating in the claim that his seminar on the Purloined Letter is ultimately an extended discourse on the phallus.

     from this page to this page, what I am talking about, I am the one who wrote it, did I know what I was doing?... What I am talking about, is the phallus.

231. #231

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     *Lacan writes on the board: "L 'achose"*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that writing is not the representation of speech but rather the material support that makes scientific and psychoanalytic formalization possible, and uses this to sharpen the claim that the sexual relationship cannot be written except through the phallus — while insisting that the unconscious is structured like a language *within which* its writing appears, distinguishing the Letter from the Signifier.

     the fact is that this cannot be written without bringing into play something a little funny - because precisely, one knows nothing about its sex - which is called the phallus.

232. #232

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **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.

     it is necessary that he should be simply what answers in the place of the phallus... it is clear that in the hysterical perspective it is the phallus that fecundates, and that what it engenders, is itself

233. #233

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     **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 come, and this through analytic experience, to the foundation of the fact that this relationship cannot work without a third term, which is properly speaking the phallus.

234. #234

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's *Foundations of Arithmetic* as a logical foundation for his own work on denotation and the phallus, while pivoting to a grammatical distinction between objective and subjective genitives to clarify the ambiguity in the phrase "the meaning of the phallus" — a distinction that determines whether the phallus is what is desired or what desires.

     What is meant by The meaning of the phallus! It deserves to be dwelt on, because after all, in such a determinative liaison, you must always ask yourself if it is a genitive that is described as objective or subjective

235. #235

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972 > *the law of retaliation.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's derivation of number from the concept of inexistence to ground the signifier "1" as essentially the signifier of inexistence, and links this logical-arithmetic operation to the foundations of repetition and to his own formulas of sexuation (all/not-all), arguing that logical necessity—not empirical counting—is what underpins both number and the meaning of the phallus.

     the meaning of the phallus is something very clever in that what the phallus denotes is the power of meaning.

236. #236

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two modes of the One — the One of attribute (defining a class) and the One of pure difference (defining a set element) — and uses this distinction to ground the sexuation formula: the existence of an exception (∃x.Φ̄x) is what counts the One "in addition," grounding the masculine "all" (tout homme), while the question of what constitutes an "all" is deferred to the logic of the y'a d'lun.

     this φ of x is not the truth, ∃x.φ̄ that it is from there that the One arises which means that this ∃x ought to be put on the side of what grounds man as such

237. #237

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.82

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment is always "from the Other" but never sexual (there is no sexual relation), and that the Other must be barred — emptied out — to become the locus where the sexuation formulae and knowledge are inscribed; this move connects the barred Other S(Ø) to lalangue, fantasy, repetition (Nachträglichkeit), and the necessity of writing for psychoanalysis to be possible at all.

     the train, precisely, of this queue of thoughts, of this something real which gives this impression of a comet that I called the queue of thoughts and which may well be the phallus.

238. #238

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     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.

     the signifier is enjoyment, and that the phallus is only its signified. The transsexual no longer wants to be signified as phallus by sexual discourse

239. #239

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     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.

     Die Bedeutung des Phallus... It seemed opportune to me to introduce under the term of Bedeutung what in French... I could only decently translate by signification.

240. #240

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     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.

     one cannot write that what creates an obstacle to the phallic function is not true. So then what is meant by ∃ dfx? Namely, that there exists an x such that it could be inscribed in this negation of the truth of the phallic function?

241. #241

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     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.

     Because the phallus, and I underline that I have not yet said what it is, well then they do not have it.

242. #242

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.87

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the Other (as heteros) from the sexual relationship is not gendered but structural, grounded in the logic of Zero and One; the sexuation formulas are then developed through a critique of Aristotelian universals and quantification, establishing that the Universal (phallic function) requires the exception ('at-least-one') as its foundation, and that Eros as fusion toward the One is a dangerous mythological delusion with no analytic warrant.

     in order to exist as a man at a level that escapes the phallic function, there was no other woman than her who for him ought precisely not to have existed.

243. #243

     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.

     the phallus is meaning. It is that through which language signifies, there is only a single Bedeutung: the phallus.

244. #244

     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.

     everything that is built up from the term phallus and which indeed here is something that designates a certain signified, a signified of a certain perfectly vanishing signifier.

245. #245

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     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.

     the phallic function - that is why I write it as $ of x - there exists an x which determines the fact that he has said no to the function.

246. #246

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     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.

     it is very precisely inasmuch that it is a matter of the phallic function, from whatever side we look at it, I mean from one side or from the other, that something solicits us to ask then how the two partners are different.

247. #247

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.94

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine universality (the "not-all") is structured by the *absence* of exception rather than by a grounding exception, and that this absence of exception does not consolidate but rather further undermines any universal — making the feminine position irreducibly non-universal and essentially dual, in contrast to the masculine universal which rests on a (gratuitous) founding exception.

     what I recalled earlier about the behaviour of the woman sufficiently shows that her relation to the phallic function is quite active.

248. #248

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

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

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

     It isn't the penis, but the phallus, that is to say something whose symbolic usage is possible because it can be seen, because it is erected.

249. #249

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.103

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that truth can only be "half-told" (mi-dire) because jouissance constitutes a structural limit on avowal, and that the phallic function is not necessary but merely contingent—it has "stopped not being written" through analytic experience without entering the register of the necessary or the impossible—thereby re-situating knowledge, truth, and the real within the schema of analytic discourse and the three registers.

     The phallus - as analysis takes it up as the pivotal or extreme point of what is enunciated as the cause of desire - analytic experience stops not writing it. It is in this 'stops not being written' that resides the apex of what I have called contingency.

250. #250

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is characterized by contingency rather than eternity, and that this contingency (figured through creationism, the *ex nihilo*, and the Copernican/Newtonian revolution) grounds his central claim that love compensates for the absence of the sexual relationship — a relation only accessible through the function of the phallus as that which is articulated on the basis of absence. The "revolution" Lacan values is not a change of center but the shift from "it turns" to "it falls," marking the real subversion of the signified's routine.

     a jouissance, that analytic discourse has precipitated out as the function of the phallus, whose enigma remains utter and complete, since that function is articulated therein only on the basis of facts of absence.

251. #251

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.38

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the written (l'écrit) is not of the same register as the signifier, and uses this distinction to ground the specific function of analytic discourse: letters (a, A, $) name loci and functions rather than merely signify, while the unconscious is what is *read* beyond speech — a move that simultaneously critiques ontology (the master's discourse) for its illegitimate hypostatization of the copula "to be."

     I used the letter $, to be distinguished from the merely signifying function that had been promoted in analytic theory up until then with the term 'phallus.'

252. #252

     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.

     analytic discourse demonstrates - allow me to put it this way - that the phallus is the conscientious objection made by one of the two sexed beings to the service to be rendered to the other.

253. #253

     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.

     she has different ways of approaching that phallus and of keeping it for herself. It's not because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there at all.

254. #254

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.81

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

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

     the phallic function that helps them situate themselves as men and approach woman... there is no chance for a man to have jouissance of a woman's body... without something that says no to the phallic function.

255. #255

     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

256. #256

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the true from the real by arguing that truth can only be "half-said" (because jouissance constitutes its limit), while the real is accessible only through the impasse of formalisation; the mathemes (objet a, S(Ø), $) are introduced as written supports that, unlike speech, can designate the limits where the symbolic encounters the real—culminating in the claim that the phallic function is a contingency (ceases not to be written) rather than a necessity or impossibility.

     the phallus, as tackled in analytic experience as the key point, the extreme point of what is stated as cause of desire, one could say that analytic experience does not cease writing it.

257. #257

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.95

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "Copernican revolution" as a foil to argue that genuine subversion lies not in changing a centre but in substituting a new formal principle ('things fall', expressed as Newton's law of gravity written down) — an argument that privileges the function of the written over imaginary, sphere-centred thinking, while reframing the phallus, the Other, love, and the sign as the year's key compass-points.

     an enjoyment that analytic discourse has precipitated from this function of the phallus whose riddle remains complete, since it is only articulated in it from effects of absence

258. #258

     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.

     she can have this relationship with this capital Φ that in analytic theory we designate by this phallus that I specify as being the signifier. The signifier which does not have a signified.

259. #259

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.204

     **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.

     In the father function, the function, in the measure that it is on it that negation is brought to bear, is emptied out by no longer being able to be indexed by any logical truth.

260. #260

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan links the objet petit a as a semblance of being to a primordial scene of jealous enjoyment (jalouissance) drawn from Augustine, positioning it as the first substitutive enjoyment that founds desire through metonymy and demand addressed to the Other, and closes on the question of whether having the object a is the same as being it — a question he refers to "The Meaning of the Phallus."

     what I wrote about die Bedeutung des phallus, on the meaning of the phallus

261. #261

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that writing (the letter) belongs to a fundamentally different register than the signifier, and uses this distinction to theorize the specific function of writing within analytic discourse—particularly how mathemes (S(O), objet a, Φ) operate as letters that mark lack and loss within the locus of the Other, rather than as signifiers in the linguistic sense.

     I put forward this capital Φ as constituting something original, something that I am specifying here today as being made precise in its relief by the writing itself.

262. #262

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.145

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

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

     the phallic function does not prevent men from being homosexuals. But that it is also, indeed, what allows them to situate themselves as man and to approach the woman.

263. #263

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.152

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that feminine (Other) jouissance is an enjoyment that is experienced but known nothing about, linking mystical experience to the structural position of the not-all and to the impossibility of the sexual relationship; he then introduces the sexuation formulas and explains how the barred subject's only access to the Other is via the fantasy ($ ◇ a), which also constitutes the reality principle.

     they glimpse, let us say, despite – I did not say despite their phallus – despite what encumbers them under that heading, they experience the idea that somewhere, there might be an enjoyment which is beyond.

264. #264

     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.

     analytic discourse demonstrates — allow me to put it this way — is that the phallus is the conscientious objection made by one of the two sexed beings to the service to be rendered to the other.

265. #265

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **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.

     an ideal point that one calls as one can, the phallus… the phallus is what gives body to the Imaginary… The phallus then is the Real.

266. #266

     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.

     anxiety, source of the phobia, and it is in this sense that in giving him what one might call this pure anxiety, they manage to get him to accommodate himself to this phallus

267. #267

     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.

     really *aphligé* by a phallus which is what prohibits for him the enjoyment of the body of the other

268. #268

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.114

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the Real is defined by its ek-sistence *outside* meaning—as the impossible, the expelled, the anti-meaning—and that the Borromean knot of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary is the structural form of the Name-of-the-Father, with feminine ek-sistence (as symptom) arising where the Symbolic circles an inviolable hole and the not-all resists phallic universality.

     There is nothing more phallogocentric than a woman, except for the fact none ne-toute wants the aforesaid phallus. Each of them of course want it, except for the fact that this does not weigh too heavily on them.

269. #269

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     **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.

     the consistency of the Real, namely, what Freud put the accent on, renewed the accent, no doubt using an ancient term, the phallus

270. #270

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* and the sinthome to distinguish the unanalysable from what analysis can address, then pivots to the Phallus as a "phunction of phonation" substitutive for man, contrasting it with S(Ⓞ) — the signifier of the non-existence of the Other of the Other — which Lacan identifies with "The woman" as the only candidate for an Other of the Other, thereby articulating the impossibility of the sexual relation through the bar that no Other can cross.

     This letter situates the relationships of what I will call a phunction of phonation. This is the essence of the Φ contrary to what is believed.

271. #271

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar XXIII by introducing the *sinthome* as a new spelling/concept that bridges symptom, sin, and the Joycean art of lalangue-injection, arguing that Joyce's literary practice offers a privileged case for understanding how the sinthome functions as a logical-phallic supplement that can reach the Real — and that this case illuminates the structural necessity of castration, the not-all, and the inexistence of the Woman.

     The phallus is the conjunction of what I called this parasite, which is the little piece of prick in question, it is the conjunction of this with the function of the word.

272. #272

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > QUESTIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the sinthome from psychoanalysis proper, arguing that it is the *psychoanalyst* (not psychoanalysis) who functions as a sinthome — a "help against" in the biblical sense — and that the Real, as lawless and devoid of meaning, may itself be illuminated as sinthome; simultaneously, the Borromean knot is defended as a topology that can hold Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real together as separable rings without a common point.

     I absolutely do not think in effect that, that the phallus can be a sufficient support for what Freud conceived of in terms of energetics.

273. #273

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.109

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

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

     the phallus, is transmitted from father to son. And that even this involves something which cancels out the phallus of the father before the son has the right to bear it.

274. #274

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot's essential property is the "false hole" produced when two circles conjoin, and that it is the Phallus—as the verifier of this false hole—that constitutes the Real; he then extends this topological claim to the sinthome (specifically Joyce's), lalangue, and the relation between the sexes, positioning the phallus as the sole signifier that creates every signified and thereby verifies the Real.

     The only Real which verifies anything whatsoever is the phallus, in so far as I said earlier what the phallus is the support of; namely, of what I underlined in this article, that is to say the function of the signifier in so far as it creates every signified.

275. #275

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dissymmetry of the Oedipus complex between the sexes is not anatomical but fundamentally symbolic: the absence of a signifier for the female sex forces the girl to take a detour through identification with the male (phallic) image, making the phallus as signifier — not as organ — the pivot of sexuation for both sexes; this symbolic lack is what structures neurosis and, specifically, the hysteric's question "What is a woman?"

     It's the prevalence of the phallic Gestalt that in bringing about the oedipal complex forces the woman to take a detour via identification with the father... the phallus is a symbol to which there is no correspondent, no equivalent. It's a matter of a dissymmetry in the signifier.

276. #276

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     **XXV** > **INDE X**

     Theoretical move: This is the index section of Seminar III, a non-substantive reference apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references for the seminar's theoretical content on psychosis, language, and related Lacanian concepts.

     phallus father and, 319-20 imaginary, 319 and Oedipus complex, 176, 319-20

277. #277

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.331

     **XXV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is irreducibly symbolic—not imaginary—because the phallus operates as a signifier rather than an imaginary element; and that the signifier as such (illustrated through the example of naming/the rainbow) introduces an ordering structure that cannot be derived from imaginary or naturalistic dynamics, with this distinction being decisive for differentiating neurosis from psychosis.

     The phallus is, as it were, a wanderer. It is elsewhere. Everyone knows where analytic theory places it - it's the father who is supposed to be its vehicle.

278. #278

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.345

     **XXV** > **INDE X**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index for Seminar III (The Psychoses), listing key terms, proper names, and their page references across the seminar volume.

     and phallus, 319-20 ... imaginary phallus, 319

279. #279

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.325

     **XXV** > **1**

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

     the phallic object occupies the central place in libidinal economy, in both man and woman

280. #280

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.418

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the scholarly correction of Freud's mistranslation (kite vs. vulture) in the Leonardo essay not to discredit Freud but to isolate what is genuinely original in that text: the introduction of the phallic mother as the child's imaginary relation to the phallus-as-lack, which also marks the inaugural structuring of the imaginary register and the first appearance of narcissism in Freud's work.

     the importance of the function of the phallic mother, the phallic woman. She is phallic not for the subject herself, but for the child who is dependent upon this subject.

281. #281

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.393

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: The phobic object (the horse in little Hans's case) functions as a metaphorical substitute signifier for the missing paternal function, transforming free-floating anxiety into a localized, manageable fear that anchors the subject's symbolic order; Lacan traces the dialectical transformation of the phobia through a series of algebraic formulas, showing how the analysis works by allowing the signifier to evolve through its own structural laws rather than by direct suasive intervention.

     it allows all the necessary transfers to occur on the level of everything that is complicated and problematic on the lower line, namely the mother, M, her phallic function, φ, and the other child, α.

282. #282

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: The father's symbolic function intervenes to maintain a triadic distance between mother, child, and phallus, preventing the child from having to identify herself as the imaginary phallus—a failure of this distance opens the path toward fetishistic object-formation in pre-Oedipal relations.

     She is to become the girl-phallus which is spoken about so often. It will be a matter of finding out to what extent thereafter she might not be implicated in this imaginary function.

283. #283

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two ways the penis enters the imaginary economy — as compensatory oral object and as the phallus marking the mother's lack — and argues that access to the missing phallus as substitutable object requires passing through two successive phases: symbolic primal identification (superego formation) and narcissistic specular identification (mirror stage), the latter being the precondition for the subject's discovery of lack and its offer to substitute itself for the missing phallus.

     The other one is the phallus inasmuch as the mother lacks it and it lies beyond her and her power of love.

284. #284

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.377

     XVIII CIRCUITS > P(M) (M')

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his analysis of Little Hans by arguing that Hans's resolution of the phobia follows an atypical Oedipal path—owing to the father's shortcoming—that installs an imaginary paternity and a narcissistically structured object relation, formalised topologically as p(M)(M')~(α/φ)Π, and closing with a parallel to Freud's Leonardo study to underscore the structural necessity of a fourth (animal/residual) term beyond the trinity.

     the phallus that is both unreturned and eternally imagined by the mother. We see it reproduced at the end in the shape of little Lodi.

285. #285

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

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

     the transvestite identifies with the phallic mother insomuch as, further to this, she veils over the lack of phallus.

286. #286

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

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

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

     the key to this idea that a phallic mother is involved is given to us by the author when she wonders about the overall handling of the treatment... she was far more prohibitive than his mother had ever been

287. #287

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Witz (naivety, the third-person ternarity, and the combinatorial logic of signifiers) to argue that Little Hans's symptom is best understood as a mythical-signifying system whose diachronic development is circular: the impasse at the origin is found again—inverted but structurally identical—at the point of arrival, and this movement is governed by the symbolic register, not by instinctual meaning.

     It is also the screen onto which is projected the major object of his preoedipal questioning, namely the missing phallus.

288. #288

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

     Theoretical move: By reading Little Hans's case through Lévi-Strauss's structural method for myth analysis, Lacan argues that the signifying elements of Hans's fantasies cannot be fixed to univocal meanings but function as transforming bundles whose traversal moves from the eruption of the real penis to its symbolic accommodation, with the imaginary father (occupied by Freud himself) remaining distinct from both the real and symbolic father—and this structural incompleteness explains both the cure and its limits.

     What does it mean that it should be an imaginary father who definitively sets the order of the world, namely that not everyone has a phallus?

289. #289

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

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

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

     this is why the shoe can, at least in certain particular but exemplary cases, assume its function as a substitute for what has not been seen but which is articulated and formulated as being, here for this subject, what the mother possesses, namely the phallus.

290. #290

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.141

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

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

     She knows full well where the symbolic penis is to be found. It is with her father who, for his part, is not impotent.

291. #291

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a tripartite schema (castration/frustration/privation) to critique the "harmonic" object-relations conception of frustration dominant in post-Freudian analysis, arguing that frustration must be understood through the asymmetric interplay of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers rather than as a quantitative deficit in a natural complementarity between infant and mother.

     What is the object that is at issue... in the symbolic indebtedness established by castration? As I indicated last time, it is an imaginary object, the phallus as such.

292. #292

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.388

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

     First there is the phallus, ϕ. I told you that this was certainly the critical gap-element in any relation between the two

293. #293

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Jones's concept of aphanisis as an inadequate psychologisation of the castration complex, and reconstructs castration by strictly differentiating privation (a real hole covered by symbolic notation), frustration, and castration (an operation on an imaginary object), grounding each in its proper register (real/symbolic/imaginary) and locating the necessity of castration in the subject's inscription into the symbolic chain.

     the object at issue in this instance is the penis. It's an object that is given to us in a symbolic state on the tier at which we have been speaking about privation.

294. #294

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.342

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > ^I (o P°)

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the phobic signifier (the horse) operates as a transformation mechanism: the father's symbolic intervention partially unloads anxiety by introducing a castration-threat function the real father cannot sustain, forcing Hans to convert anxiety about real movement into a symbolic schema of substitution (detachable elements), a process crystallized around the veil/drawers episode which rules out fetishism and inaugurates the plane of instrumental signification.

     If, on the contrary, he had recognised these drawers as his object, namely as the mysterious phallus that no one could ever see, he would have been satisfied and would have become a fetishist.

295. #295

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.301

     XVIII CIRCUITS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the horse in little Hans's phobia functions primarily as a "polarising" signifier — not because of its symbolic content but because of its formal structural role: introduced at a critical moment, it reorganises the field of the signified, constitutes limits and transgressions simultaneously, and operates as a signal that restructures Hans's world. The analysis pivots on the priority of the signifier over the signified, against any object-relations or content-based reading.

     Hans is no longer in a position to respond in full. I mean when he is no longer able to show, actually and in its most glorious state, his little penis. Right there and then, he is rebuffed.

296. #296

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.351

     XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the case of Little Hans to show that the phobia's double signifiers (bite/fall) are not expressions of instinct or ambivalence in the classical sense, but purely signifying elements whose combinatory logic drives the mythical evolution through which Hans negotiates the father's shortcoming and the mother's desire for the phallus, culminating in a re-articulation of the structural roles in the Oedipus complex.

     It is not the child himself, but the z, the imaginary element, that is to say, the mother's desire for the phallus.

297. #297

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.362

     XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

     Theoretical move: In the Little Hans case, Lacan argues that the phobia's resolution proceeds through stages of "imaginification" — converting an inassimilable real element (Hanna) first into a Platonic reminiscence (always-already-there object) and then into an Ideal/Image — thereby distinguishing this fantasmatic operation from repetition and the re-found object, and showing how the little other (Hanna-as-image) functions as a superior ego enabling Hans's mastery of the castration situation.

     it doesn't bear on the penis but on something else, something that in the final fantasy culminates in a change

298. #298

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Little Hans case as structured around the imaginary phallus of the mother, arguing that the horse phobia functions as a crystallising signifier that organises Hans's libidinal development, while the successive fantasies punctuate transformations in the signifying configuration—and that Hans's ultimate heterosexuality is won at the cost of a narcissistic, fetishistic relation to women as imaginary objects.

     it's another phallus, the imaginary phallus of the mother. It is by way of the mother's imaginary phallus that the intolerable phobia opens up.

299. #299

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved on the imaginary plane alone (where it produces only anxiety and symptom), but requires the introduction of a real element into the symbolic order — the paternal figure who "truly has" the phallus — such that castration becomes the necessary condition for the male subject's accession to the virile position and the inscription of the Law; yet the symbolic father as such can never be fully incarnated by any real individual.

     the child can conceive that this same symbolic object will be given to him one day by the one who has it, who knows that he has it in every instance.

300. #300

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: The symbolic father is constitutively unthinkable and absent—only ever retroactively posited through myth (Totem and Taboo) as the dead father—while it is the real father who momentarily embodies the paternal function; the Oedipus complex concludes by instituting the Law as repressed in the unconscious, crystallising as the superego, and this structure ensures that love is always marked by castration and a fundamental duplicity rather than any harmonious object-relation.

     it is either him or her. It is one or the other, without ever knowing which, he the phallophore or she the phallophore, the little giraffe or the big giraffe.

301. #301

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.406

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that little Hans's case resolves not through a properly symbolised castration complex and superego formation, but through identification with the maternal phallus as Ego Ideal — a structurally atypical Oedipal outcome that positions Hans as a fetish-like object, leaving him on the margins of full phallic symbolisation and masculinity.

     he blends in with a type… he will have children structured on the model of the maternal phallus, which ultimately he will turn into the object of his own desire.

302. #302

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the castration complex emerges as the necessary structural resolution to an impasse created when the child's real drive (the stirring of the real penis) disrupts the imaginary phallic luring game with the mother; the symbolic father's intervention re-orders what was an unresolvable imaginary deadlock, while the phobia (Little Hans) functions as a substitute signifier for the absent paternal term.

     the child presents himself to the mother as being the very thing that offers her, in himself, the phallus.

303. #303

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a tripartite typology of the lack of object — frustration (imaginary detriment, real object), privation (real hole, symbolic object), and castration (symbolic indebtedness, imaginary object) — arguing that each form must be distinguished by its modal register rather than collapsed into a single principle, and that this matrix is essential to understanding the different developments of sexuality in men and women.

     the object of castration is an imaginary object, and this is what ought to make us ask what is meant by this phallus that it took so long to identify as such.

304. #304

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

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

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

     what arises in the real as a surplus that cannot be symbolically assimilated tends to precipitate what lies at the bottom of the symbolic relationship, namely the equivalence between phallus and child.

305. #305

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     XVIII CIRCUITS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the phobia's meaning cannot be grasped by symbolic analogies or biographical extrapolation but only by tracing the autonomous operation of signifying laws—the "circuit system" of the horse and the railway network—as a structural (symbolic, not real) topology that maps Hans's impossible position between mother and father.

     Hans has accurately assessed the reduced, minuscule and ridiculously insufficient character of the organ in question. It is this real element that comes to be added to the rebuff, lending it a weight that shakes the edifice of the relationships with his mother right down to its foundations.

306. #306

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.453

     FAREWELL > AUSTRIA-HUNGARY > XXIII 'Me donnera sans femme une progéniture9 > XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar IV, listing names, concepts, and bibliographic references with page numbers; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     with imaginary phallus 152, 153, 407 with phallus 217

307. #307

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's phobia is not triggered by the discovery of anatomical difference (aphallicism) but by the moment the mother appears as lacking the phallus—that is, as a desiring, castrated subject—thereby demonstrating that what structures the child's entry into the symbolic is the mother's own relation to lack, not the child's imaginary all-powerfulness or ego-reality adjustments.

     Freud tells us that in the world of objects there is one that has an utterly and paradoxically decisive function, namely the phallus. This object is defined as imaginary. In no case whatsoever is it possible to conflate it with the penis in its reality.

308. #308

     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.

     it is in the relationship with the mother that the child experiences the phallus as the central focus of the mother's desire. And he places himself there in different positions, through which he is led to maintain, but more exactly to lure, the mother's desire.

309. #309

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

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

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

     The ambiguous feminine creature represents the subject himself, embodying in some way, beyond the mother, the phallus that she lacks, and doing so all the better in that he doesn't possess it himself.

310. #310

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.423

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Leonardo essay to develop a structural account of sublimation as the displacement of the radical alterity of the absolute Other into an imaginary relation—a "relation of mirage"—distinguishing this from the ego-psychological account of de-instinctualisation, and situating it through Leonardo's peculiar relationship to Nature as a non-subjective other accessible via imaginary identification.

     this finger, which is to be found right across Leonardo's output, is the index to want-of-being... a very fine image of the ambiguity between the real mother and the imaginary mother, between the real child and the hidden phallus.

311. #311

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

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

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

     he recognises… not only that he is not his mother's sole object, but also that his mother's point of interest is the phallus, in a way that has greater or lesser accentuation depending on the case

312. #312

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

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

     In this text Freud posits as a principle the Primat des Phallus, the primacy of the assumption of the phallus.

313. #313

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Freudian equation Penis=Child as the pivot for a structural account of how the phallus slides from the imaginary to the real differently for boys and girls, arguing that the girl's entry into the Oedipus complex is paradoxically simpler because her path via lack leads directly to the father as real bearer of the phallus/child, while the boy faces the deeper difficulty of acceding to the symbolic father function.

     the child has to take the phallus on board as a signifier, and in a way that turns it into the instrument of the symbolic order of exchange that presides over the constitution of lineages.

314. #314

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object relation cannot be theorized without the phallus as a third-party element disrupting any dual (imaginary) subject-object relation, and that the dominant object-relations practice errs by reducing the analytic situation to an imaginary dyad (identification with the analyst's ego), as exemplified by its mishandling of obsessional neurosis.

     The notion of object relations cannot be dealt with, cannot be understood, cannot even be put into practice, if one doesn't include the phallus as a third-party element.

315. #315

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.125

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

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

     She is homosexual, and Freud tells us that she loves as does a man... She is in a virile position... at the level of the Other there is the symbolic penis.

316. #316

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

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

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

     the phallus that she has and which she does not have, has to be seen qua presence-absence, qua absence-presence. The historical reminiscence is halted and suspended at the moment just before.

317. #317

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

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

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

     The child knows full well that she doesn't have the phallus. The psychotherapist lets her know that this is the rule, thereby making it pass over to the symbolic plane of Law.

318. #318

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.79

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

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

     the child receives, symbolically, the phallus he is in need of. But for him to be in need of it, it was necessary for him first to be threatened by the castrating agency, which is originatively and essentially the paternal agency.

319. #319

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.260

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Hans's progressive symbolisation of the phallus—through metonymy, the imaginary-to-symbolic passage, and the introduction of the "screw thread" as a mythical logical instrument—arguing that the resolution of the Oedipus complex requires the child to construct a myth that integrates the phallus into symbolic circulation as a detachable, mediating element.

     In this series of elements or instruments that are called mother, child and phallus, the phallus is the new element that is no longer merely something that is played with, because it has become unruly.

320. #320

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.326

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hans's series of fantasies as a structured permutation of signifying elements—hole, bathtub, behind, pincers—demonstrating that the signifier does not represent signification but rather fills the gap left by lost signification, while the castration complex is recast as a symbolic operation (removal and impossible return of the penis) whose incomplete execution in Hans's case may nonetheless suffice as a rite of passage.

     This widdler is the insufficient reality that has not succeeded in seducing the mother.

321. #321

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object must be theorised across three distinct registers—Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary—and that the psychoanalytic tendency to reduce reality to organic/material substrate misrecognises symbolic Wirklichkeit; Winnicott's transitional object is reinterpreted as belonging to the imaginary register, setting up the distinction between the imaginary object and the fetish that the subsequent elaboration of the three forms of lack of object will require.

     phallus and penis are not to be conflated. When in the 1920s and 1930s the notion of phallicism and of the phallic period fell into place… what was at stake was to draw a distinction between the penis as a real organ… and the phallus in its imaginary function.

322. #322

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

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

     The signifying role of the imaginary phallus

323. #323

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

     Theoretical move: Through the case of Little Hans, Lacan demonstrates that therapeutic interventions aimed at directly addressing guilt or abolishing prohibition inevitably backfire, transforming the forbidden into the compulsory, and that the child's symptomatic productions are better understood as permutative signifier-operations that progressively integrate a disturbing new real element (the real penis) into the subject's mythic system—making progress in analysis a function of the signifier's displacement across personages, not of regression or direct authoritarian clarification.

     Since Hans's satisfaction is clearly derived from hunting out … the hidden object that is the penis or the phallus of the mother, this desire is to be taken away from him by taking away the object of his satisfaction. You are to tell him that this desired phallus does not exist.

324. #324

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is seized by the autonomous play of the signifier — not by drives or affects — and uses the case of Little Hans to show that phobia/myth functions as a structural solution to an impossible symbolic impasse; he then anchors this in Freud's Witz to demonstrate that condensation at the level of the signifier is the constitutive mechanism of both wit and symptomatic production.

     Who out of the two of them has the phallus and who doesn't? What does mother desire when she desires something other than me, the child?

325. #325

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.138

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads the Dora case to argue that hysteria's structural ambiguity is resolved only by positing that the phallus must be raised to the level of the symbolic gift — what is loved and sought is precisely what the father lacks and cannot give — thereby grounding the female subject's entry into the symbolic order in the gift of the phallus rather than in real need.

     the female subject can enter the dialectic of the symbolic order only through the gift of the phallus. There is no other way.

326. #326

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: By aligning Lévi-Straussian structural mythology (mythemes, formal decomposition) with Little Hans's "playful mythical production," Lacan argues that the child's fantasy constructions are governed by the same structural necessity as collective myths, and that both are ultimately organised around the signifier's power—particularly as it bears on the castration complex and the Oedipus complex as the central "peg" through which that power operates.

     this indicates that for him his mother must have a phallus. This doesn't mean, however, that this phallus is something real for him.

327. #327

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.53

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that object relations must be structured around the lack of the object, articulated across three distinct registers — castration (symbolic), frustration (imaginary), and privation (real) — and that the re-found object is constitutively marked by a fundamental discordance introduced through diphasic development, against ego-psychological conceptions of the self-sufficient subject who generates his own world.

     I have set out for you the trio of mother, child and phallus.

328. #328

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.130

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

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

     the imaginary father, the lady, and the symbolic penis… the father qua he who can give the child is unconscious.

329. #329

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Little Hans case to argue that the Oedipus complex requires a tripling of the paternal function—real father, symbolic father (Freud as supra-father), and the Name-of-the-Father—wherein the child's phobia emerges from the mother's constitutive privation and is resolved through symbolic identification with the father, not mere genital maturation; simultaneously, Lacan critiques the psychoanalytic emphasis on 'frustration' as missing the deeper logic of the object as something that must be re-found through symbolic distancing.

     It has to do with what comes to be revealed to the child, from any angle, concerning the fundamental privation by which the image of the mother is marked... He gives her what she doesn't have.

330. #330

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.21

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

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

     castration anxiety in so far as it is linked to the perception of the absence of a phallic organ in the female subject, and to the negation of this absence.

331. #331

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the reorganisation of the real into a new symbolic configuration necessarily passes through an imaginary regression, using Little Hans's case to show that anxiety is not fear of an object but confrontation with the absence of an object, and that the Oedipus myth functions as an originary truth-creating myth rather than a direct therapeutic tool.

     the father is trying to make the phallus pass over entirely to the side of reality, telling little Hans that big animals have big widdlers and little animals have little widdlers

332. #332

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hans's phobia resolves not through a single myth but through a series of mythical structurations—using imaginary elements as logical instruments of symbolic exchange—such that the phobic threshold-element falls into disuse once the symbolic work of exhausting the castration problematic is complete.

     the issue of passing from a phallic apprehension of the relationship with his mother to a castrated apprehension of relations with the parental couple as a whole

333. #333

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symbolic order — demonstrated through the internal lawfulness of a combinatorial letter-sequence and the lion/counting anecdote — introduces an originary dimension into the Real that is irreducible to experience, and then deploys this argument to read the pre-phobic structure of little Hans's imaginary phallus as the condition of possibility for the eruption of castration anxiety.

     the child presents … a sort of problematic of the imaginary phallus, which is everywhere and nowhere.

334. #334

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.372

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the paternal metaphor through the Hugo poem on Boaz and Ruth, showing that the father's function is constitutively metaphorical (substitution + castration complex), and applies this formula to the case of Little Hans to explain how the horse-phobia acts as a substitute metaphorical mediator when the paternal metaphor is absent, while also distinguishing phobic and fetishistic objects as "milestones" of desire in the real that are nonetheless only accessible through signifying formalisation.

     This, which is to be read Mother plus phallus plus a for Hanna, designates the impasse that Hans has reached.

335. #335

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the lumf (excrement) functions not primarily as evidence of an "anal stage" but as a signifier homologous with the veil/garment (drawers), both being things that can "fall," and that the succession of Hans's fantasies must be read as a developing myth whose transformations resolve Hans's structural problem of situating himself in relation to the phallic mother — not through instinctual regression or frustration, but through a signifying process moving between symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

     It is precisely behind the theme of the veil, of the pair of drawers, of this garment, that the essential fantasy of the relationships between mother and child lies hidden. This is the fantasy of the phallic mother.

336. #336

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hans's phobia arises at the precise moment when the child is required to make the transition from treating the phallus as an imaginary element in the mother's desire to recognising its symbolic value within the signifying system — a passage that is structurally insurmountable without the paternal intervention that introduces a minimum ternary (or quaternary) organisation of the symbolic order.

     the child the mother presents with the requirement of what she lacks, of this phallus that she doesn't have. We have said that this phallus is imaginary.

337. #337

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.54

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's symbolic positioning as phallus for the mother is not directly accessible to the child but requires symbolisation; phobia is distinguished from perverse solutions (fetishism, identificatory fusion) as a specifically symbolic appeal—a 'call for rescue'—that introduces the paternal third term to manage the gap opened by the mother-child-phallus triad.

     The child is also the phallus. This is something that falls within the scope of experience, because certain elements can be extracted from experience which show us, for instance, that there needs already to be a period of symbolisation in order for the child to have access to this

338. #338

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.400

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: By tracing Little Hans's movement through signifying permutations toward an imaginary resolution, Lacan argues that Hans's phobia dissolves not through genuine traversal of the castration complex but through a narcissistic-imaginary fixation, leaving the subject alienated from himself—he has not "forgotten" but "forgotten himself."

     While it does resolve the question of the possession of the phallus, this image leaves the fundamental relation in an essentially narcissistic relation

339. #339

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     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.

     I have taken two examples which I said I would be focusing on — the phobia and the fetish.

340. #340

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.47

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is not a secondary overlay on natural processes but is primordially installed in the real (the Es), and that the condition of possibility for the signifier's existence is death (the Death Drive), which functions as the "Holy Spirit" intervening in nature—thus grounding the analytic experience in a constitutive, non-natural signifying articulation rather than any pre-set harmony.

     it is because this time, on the imaginary plane, there is a single primary representative of the genital state and stage, and this is the phallus as such. The phallus is neither wholly nor merely the full male genital apparatus.

341. #341

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

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

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

     the child is progressively led to realise that he must shift into a third-party position. He must slide in, squeeze himself in, somewhere between his mother's desire, which he learns to experience, and the imaginary object that is the phallus.

342. #342

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's position in relation to the mother is structurally determined by the mother's lack (the phallus), such that the child functions not as the metaphor of her love but as the metonymy of her desire—a distinction that explains the genesis of anxiety and its transformation into phobia in the case of Little Hans.

     It's a matter of finding out, in relation to the phallus that is the mother's object of desire, what the function of the child is for her.

343. #343

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

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

     the term of the phallus as an imaginary object of the mother's desire constitutes an absolutely crucial point in the mother-child relationship

344. #344

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.147

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

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

     on no account is this a real phallus, a phallus which, as real, would exist or not exist. It's a symbolic phallus, in so far as it's in its very nature to present in exchange as an absence, as an absence that functions as such.

345. #345

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.106

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's case of the young homosexual woman to argue that the structure of desire is organized around lack: what is loved in the beloved is precisely what she lacks (the phallus/child as imaginary substitute), and that Freud's countertransference error lay in making a mere desire real by premature interpretation, collapsing the symbolic plane onto the imaginary.

     What is desired, strictly speaking, in the beloved woman is precisely what she lacks. And what she lacks in this instance is the primordial object, the equivalent of which the subject would find in the child, the imaginary substitute.

346. #346

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.411

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the closing lessons on Little Hans and the opening of the Leonardo da Vinci case to articulate how the doubling of the maternal figure structures the subject's final equilibrium, pivoting from the fetish-resolution of Hans to Freud's analysis of Leonardo's childhood memory as the screen-memory of a fantasy of fellatio and maternal identification.

     I think that it's in the direction of the notion of the phallic woman that we need to look.

347. #347

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.119

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

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

     there remains this essentially imaginary and fantasmatic element which is the supervalence of the phallus, in view of which there are for the subject two types of being in the world those who have the phallus and those who have not

348. #348

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

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

     The imaginary phallus is the pivotal point in a whole series of facts that require it as a postulate. One has to study this labyrinth in which the subject generally loses his way, and in which he can even wind up being devoured.

349. #349

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.295

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phobia of little Hans arises not from any pre-established imaginary configuration but from the child's confrontation with the Real of turgescence/genital growth, which cannot be symbolised without the paternal function; the phobia's mythical proliferation reveals the fundamentally symbolic character of the passage through the Oedipus complex.

     little Hans was faced with something that until then had been the game of the phallus, which was already a sort of luring relationship that was sufficient to maintain a progressive movement between him and his mother

350. #350

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.464

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the resolution of obsessional and hysterical neurosis hinges on the subject's correct relationship to the phallus as a signifier—not identifying with it but assuming one's place relative to it—and that failures of analytic technique (reducing this to imaginary phallic identification) produce symptomatic persistence rather than cure, with the Freudian formula 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' pointing toward the properly symbolic realization of desire.

     What most particularly presents itself at the signifying level as having been undone is what marks the place of the Other's desire as such, namely the phallus.

351. #351

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.453

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis is a fully structured linguistic phenomenon—"speech pronounced by the barred subject"—and that the opacity of the unconscious derives specifically from the Other's desire, which sits between the Other as locus of speech and the Other as embodied being; regression is thereby recast not as a temporal return but as the reappearance in discourse of earlier signifying forms linked to demand.

     It isn't pointless that the phallic fantasy should present itself in the form of penis envy in the woman over the course of the analysis of an obsessional neurosis. This is not the work that will prove that I give an exaggerated importance to the phallus signifier.

352. #352

     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.

     it's necessary, effectively, that he be a being real enough in his physiological constitution for the phallus to pass to a stage of evolution that goes beyond the purely imaginary function, which it is capable of retaining for a long time, in *Penisneid.*

353. #353

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.276

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a privileged "crossroads-signifier" through which desire must pass to gain recognition, and uses this to pivot into a differentiated account of ego-ideal versus ideal ego, showing that the ego-ideal structures intrasubjectivity as an intersubjective (signifier-governed) relation — a framework then deployed to analyze the masculinity complex and female homosexuality via Horney and Deutsch.

     In some ways it's a crossroads-signifier. More or less whatever takes place over the course of the human subject's capture in the signifying system converges upon it inasmuch as one's desire has to pass through this system if it's to gain recognition

354. #354

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

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

     The phallus is absolutely inconceivable in Kleinian dynamics or mechanics. It is only conceivable if it is already implied that it is the signifier of lack, the signifier of the distance between the subject's demand and his desire.

355. #355

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.350

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: By working through the Dora case, Lacan demonstrates how hysteria is structurally defined by the subject's inability to advance beyond demand to desire: the hysteric's identification with the little other (Herr K.) functions as a substitute for the beyond-of-demand constituted by the paternal metaphor, and the collapse of this identification reveals the fundamental interchangeability—and fragility—of the two lines connecting desire and demand in the Graph of Desire.

     This is the capacity in which this chosen signifier, the phallus, is introduced and, naturally, it's situated at the same level as the law.

356. #356

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.437

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation must be grounded in a two-circuit schema (symbolic and imaginary) in which the subject's articulation of need passes through the Other, and that this structure requires a "Other of the Other" — a meta-symbolic function — to account for how the subject can symbolize the locus of speech itself; this reframes debates about castration, penis envy, and aggressiveness within a broader topology of desire.

     she has to be the phallus against the background of not being it, and that for the man, the castration complex can be formulated as this, that he has the phallus against the background of not having it

357. #357

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.388

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structured by dependence on the Other, and that fantasy must be redefined not as a blind imaginary image but as the imaginary captured in a particular use of signifiers—a scenario ($◇a) in which the subject is implicated—thereby distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire from the hysteric's identificatory structure.

     His relationship to life comes to be symbolized by the phallus signifier, this lure he extracts from forms of life... The phallus is its pinnacle, its point of equilibrium. It's the signifier par excellence of man's relationship to the signified

358. #358

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.494

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **EDITOR'S NOTE**

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive editorial note by Jacques-Alain Miller situating Seminar V's key schemas and lessons in relation to contemporaneous Écrits texts, and acknowledging manuscript sources and collaborators.

     'The Signification of the Phallus' (Bcrits, pp. 575-84).

359. #359

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan recasts male homosexuality not as an inverted Oedipus but as a triangulated identificatory solution: the child identifies with the mother's position (the one who holds the key to the law/phallus) precisely because the father's excessive love reveals his suspected castration, producing a structure in which the mother holds the fantasmatic paternal phallus—making the homosexual's structure triadic, not dual.

     the homosexual's requirement of encountering the penile organ in his partner corresponds precisely to this, which is that in the primitive position... what is called into question - not resolved but called into question - is whether, truly, the father has one or doesn't have one.

360. #360

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.431

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

     what we see appearing and substituting itself for him is, in a manner that converges with all our efforts to formulate the analytic experience, what we have been led to call the privileged, unique signifier, insofar as it designates the effect of the signifier, as such, upon the signified.

361. #361

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.320

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that demand, constituted through the symbolic parenthesis of presence, generates two distinct formations along separate signifying lines: the ego-ideal (produced via the transformation of rejected demand through the mask) and the superego (produced along the line of signifying prohibition from the Other); the mask itself is constructed through dissatisfaction, and a privileged signifier—the phallus—will be required to unify the subject across the plurality of masks.

     Next time we will see the essential condition that binds the subject to a prevailing, privileged signifier that we call - not by chance, but because concretely it is this signifier - the phallus.

362. #362

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.263

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the master signifier of desire for both sexes — not as a biological organ but as the structural marker of the gap between need and desire introduced by the signifying order — and that the Kleinian error lies in reducing the primordial dialectic to a specular, dyadic mother-child relation, thereby foreclosing the constitutive third term (the father) and the Other's desire.

     The constitutive function of the phallus in the dialectic of the subject's introduction to his pure and simple existence and to his sexual position is impossible to deduce if we don't make it the fundamental signifier by which the subject's desire has to be recognized as such, whether in the case of a man or a woman.

363. #363

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.377

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier that designates the overall effects of the signifier on the signified, and that desire—structured as the desire of the Other—is the key axis around which both hysterical and obsessional clinical structures are organized, with the Splitting of the Subject (Spaltung) as the structural condition making the unconscious possible.

     The phallus is this particular signifier which, in the body of signifiers, is specialized for designating the overall effects of the signifier, as such, on the signified.

364. #364

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.386

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan differentiates the hysteric's and obsessional's structural relations to desire: the hysteric locates desire in the Other's desire, while the obsessional's desire is constituted as an absolute condition that necessarily destroys the Other—making the obsessional's search for the object of desire self-defeating, since desire requires the Other's support as its very place.

     What takes its place and function in the obsessional is an object, one that is always - in a veiled form, no doubt, but recognizable - reducible to the phallus signifier.

365. #365

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

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

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

     the signified of the mother's comings and goings is the phallus... the father, as bearer of the phallus, has no difficulty in getting himself preferred over the mother.

366. #366

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

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

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

     It requires no great effort to identify the part object purely and simply with this phallus we are talking about... We know that it deserves this privilege as a signifier.

367. #367

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.521

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar V, listing concepts, proper names, and page references in alphabetical order (L–N). No original theoretical argument is advanced here.

     mother's desire ... phallus 159, 175, 177, 182-7, 192, 207, 209, 210, 223, 241, 255, 269, 308, 309

368. #368

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.416

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis requires interpretation at the level of castration-as-symbolic-law rather than suggestive identification with a part-object; mistaking the plane of demand for the plane of fantasy-identification constitutes a fundamental technical error whose visible symptom is the analyst's projecting passive homosexuality onto material (the bidet dream) that actually poses the question of the castration of the Other.

     It's here, therefore, that 0, the fantasmatic phallus, appears... the analyst becomes pressing and insistent through his interpretations, so that the subject agrees to enter into communion with, swallow and fantasmatically incorporate this part object into himself.

369. #369

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.369

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difficulty of accessing sexual desire is located in the gap between the Other's absolute subjectivity (as giver/withholder of love) and its necessary objectification as an object of desire; this gap produces dizziness/nausea, theorized via the Phallus as signifier rather than as image or fantasy, which Lacan proposes as the key rectification over existing (Ego Psychology) technique.

     it's insofar as the Other as object of desire is perceived as the phallus and insofar as, as such, he is perceived as a lack at the place of his own phallus, that the subject experiences something that resembles a very curious form of dizziness.

370. #370

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.196

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural failure of the Name-of-the-Father (foreclosure in psychosis, or its effective overruling by the mother in homosexuality) determines the subject's inability to complete the Oedipus complex's third moment; the key theoretical move is to show that homosexuality is not simply an "inverted Oedipus" but results from a precise structural inversion of authority within the parental couple, where the mother lays down the law to the father instead of the reverse.

     He intervenes at this level to give what is involved in phallic privation - a central term in the evolution of the Oedipus complex and its three moments.

371. #371

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

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

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

     On the imaginary plane, the question for the subject is one of being or not being the phallus.

372. #372

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

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

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

     This pole is an object. It's pivotal, central in the entire dialectic of perversions, neuroses and even, purely and simply, in subjective development. It has a name. It's called the phallus.

373. #373

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

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

     amongst the bad objects present in the mother's body... there is, quite precisely, the father represented in the form of his penis.

374. #374

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.482

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's demand for death must be understood as a signifier mediated by the Oedipal horizon rather than reducible to Penisneid or castration, and that the Christian commandment 'love your neighbour as yourself' discloses—when formulated from the locus of the Other—the unconscious circuit in which the subject is the one who hates (demands the death of) itself, converging with Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'.

     The phallus has to be situated here at the level of the signifier of the Other as barred, S(Ⱥ), as identical to the profoundest signification that the Other has attained for the subject.

375. #375

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.424

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of his schema—distinguishing the line of articulated demand from the upper horizon of the demand for love—to argue that desire is structurally located in the intermediary zone between need and that horizon, always structured by the Other; he then critiques a clinical case where reduction to a dyadic, two-person (homosexual transference) framework systematically misses the symbolic/phallic elements visible in the dream material.

     the properly phallic signification of what some analysts have called the hollowed out or cuplike penis, inasmuch as it's one of the forms in which the phallus signifier can be presented at the level of the adoption of the phallic image by the female subject

376. #376

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

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

     he shocks the ears of his listeners just a little - he suggests a phallus... Once the character... has been clothed in all the trappings of the Chief of Police, the prostitute makes the gesture of throwing in his face... that with which... he will never deflower anybody again.

377. #377

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.470

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar V by arguing that the phallus signifier is pluripresent across all neurotic structures, that obsessional neurosis is characterised by a 'demand for death' that structurally destroys the very possibility of demand, and that guilt in neurosis is independent of any reference to the law — reversing the Pauline formula so that 'if God is dead, nothing is permitted.'

     I will place you at the edge of the pluripresence, I would say, of the phallus signifier, always the same, the one that we have been occupied with for several sessions.

378. #378

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.151

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

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

     This third point - I will name it, finally ... is nothing other than the phallus. And this is why the phallus occupies such a central place as an object in the Freudian economy.

379. #379

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.429

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical practice that reduces the treatment of obsessional neurosis to a two-person relation and ratifies the subject's fantasmatic production at the level of demand rather than desire, showing through detailed case analysis that such indoctrination—centered on the imaginary other and phallic fantasy—produces regression, acting out, and artificial transference effects rather than genuine analytic cure.

     the desire to possess the analyst's phallus ... and the correlative desire to castrate him are brought to light

380. #380

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.469

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical case in which treatment ends not in genuine symbolic resolution but in the imaginary absorption of the phallus—a mechanism already operative in obsessional neurosis—arguing that a "more successful symptom" is not an adequate terminus for analysis, since the symbolic place of the phallus-as-mediator between man and woman has not been worked through.

     the phallus is altogether something other than an accessory of power, where it's truly this signifying mediation by which what takes place between man and woman is symbolized

381. #381

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten" through his own symbolic/imaginary framework to argue that the masochistic fantasy is fundamentally a signifier-event: the whip is not an instinctual object but a hieroglyphic signifier that marks (crosses out) the subject, and the Phallus is theorized as the signifier of signification itself—the pivot-signifier around which the entire dialectic of desire revolves. This reading connects the structure of fantasy to the Death Drive by showing that the pleasure principle's logic of return-to-zero is extended, not overturned, by what lies beyond it.

     the phallus enters into play in the signifying system when the subject has to symbolize, in contrast with the signifier, the signified as such - I mean signification. What matters to the subject… is literally carried out, ultimately, with the help of the phallus. The phallus is the signifier of the signified in general.

382. #382

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

     The phallus always finds itself covered by a bar placed over its accession to the domain of signifiers, that is, over its place in the Other. And this is how castration is introduced into development.

383. #383

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.505

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > Chapter X The Three Moments of the Oedipus Complex (I)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus (editorial footnotes and bibliographic references) for Seminar V, providing source citations, translations, and cross-references for chapters X–XVI. It is non-substantive theoretical content.

     Chapter XV The Girl and the Phallus

384. #384

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.407

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps Freud's three types of identification onto his schema of need/demand/desire, distinguishing the line of suggestion (identification with the Other's insignia along the demand axis) from the line of transference (a second, properly analytic articulation beyond demand), thereby reframing the transference/suggestion opposition as a topological split within the structure of demand itself.

     The distinction Freud introduces here between libidinal erotic attachment to the loved object and the identification with the same is no different from the one I alluded to... concerning the relation to the phallus, namely, the opposition between being and having.

385. #385

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.519

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

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

     phallus and 159,167, 168, 170, 189-90,209,214-15,369,429, 463,464

386. #386

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the original Freudian discovery of unconscious desire must be recovered against the distorting backdrop of contemporary psychoanalytic normativization: early Freudian interpretations derived their efficacy precisely from the absence of a pre-formed cultural framework, whereas today the analyst's intervention is weighted by an implicit normative horizon that obscures desire's essential link to its mask (symptom), making desire structurally unarticulable even when articulated.

     for woman in Penisneid, that is, in a particular fundamental relationship to the phallus.

387. #387

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

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

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

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

388. #388

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's dream of the butcher's wife, Lacan argues that hysterical identification enacts the structural split between demand and desire: the hysteric's unsatisfied desire is not a deficiency but a necessary condition for constituting a real Other, and it is only through the Other's barred desire that the subject can recognize and encounter its own barred, castrated desire.

     What's essential in what I gave you when describing the function of the phallus is that it's the signifier that is the mark of what the Other desires insofar as it itself, as a real, human Other, is, in its economy of being, marked by the signifier.

389. #389

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

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

     Comedy embraces, gathers and takes enjoyment from the relationship with an effect that has a fundamental relation to the signifying order, namely the appearance of this signified called the phallus.

390. #390

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

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

     I have suggested that this object is the phallus as the pivot of the entire subjective dialectic. It is the phallus insofar as it is desired by the mother.

391. #391

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the bar as the essential property of the signifier — its capacity to be cancelled/effaced — and uses this to ground the relationship between the signifying chain, the subject, desire, and the phallus; the Aufhebung of a non-signifying element (real or imaginary) is precisely what raises it to the dignity of a signifier, making the bar the hinge between signification, subjectivity, and the castration complex.

     It's a matter of seeing why it's there in a particular position that is so ambiguous... it's a question of the phallus inasmuch as it occupies a certain place in the economy of the subject's development and is the indispensable support of subjective construction as the pivot of the castration complex.

392. #392

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: The phallus as the third term in the mother-child relation constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the child's desire to be the exclusive object of the mother's desire; the resolution of this impasse requires a partial renunciation whereby desire becomes alienated desire — i.e., desire-as-demand, signified through the signifier.

     the phallus as object of the mother's desire is always there in a third place, and this raises an insurmountable obstacle to the satisfaction of the child's desire

393. #393

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.475

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates guilt as structurally located between desire and demand on the Graph of Desire, not merely as a response to prohibition: the prohibited demand kills desire, and this mechanism—visible only from outside the subject's lived position—defines neurotic (especially obsessional) guilt. The demand for death is shown to be an articulated symbolic demand whose reflexive structure makes it equivalent to the death of demand itself, while the polypresence of the phallus-as-signifier (rather than imaginary organ) explains the unity of obsessional phenomenology across sexes.

     the phallus is a privileged vital image raised to the signification of a signifier... the avatars of the phallus signifier are located... the polypresence of the phallus in various symptoms if not its function as a signifier.

394. #394

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.304

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

     Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized as the privileged signifier that introduces the relationship to the little other (a) into the big Other (A) as the locus of speech, thereby barring the Other and implicating it in the dialectic of desire — a structural move that critiques Jones's reductive biologism (aphanisis as disappearance of desire) in favour of a properly symbolic account of the castration complex.

     I propose that Φ, the phallus, is this signifier by which the relationship to a, the little other, is introduced into A as the locus of speech, and insofar as the signifier plays a part.

395. #395

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.313

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: The symptom functions as a "mask" that presents desire in an ambiguous, closed form—addressed to nobody, articulated but not articulable—and this structure of masked desire, rooted in the hysterical identification with a situation of desire rather than a determinate object, necessitates that analytic interpretation always does more than mere recognition: it assigns an object to a desire that is fundamentally desire-for-lack-in-the-Other.

     what the subject seeks in prostitutes is, as it happens, nothing other than... the phallus - the phallus insofar as it's what inhabits the prostitute... the phallus of all the other men; it's the phallus as such, the anonymous phallus.

396. #396

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.451

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the obsessional's circuit of desire from the hysteric's by showing that the obsessional uses the signifying articulation of demand to annul the Other's desire through verbal destruction, yet paradoxically this same destructive signifying act sustains the Other's dimension — a structure illustrated by the French formula 'Tu es celui qui me tues', and contrasted with the illusory analytic 'solution' of imaginary identification.

     Within this formulation we see what the place of the phallus signifier is with respect to being and having... the obsessional to show what really is his relationship to the phallus, as the signifier of the Other's desire

397. #397

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.444

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipal structure is grounded in the castration complex as the effect of the signifier on the Other, which introduces a constitutive lack-in-being into the subject; this foundational lack then distributes into distinct clinical structures—symptom, hysteria, and obsession—each defined by a specific relationship to desire and its object.

     it's the phallus, insofar as it represents the rise of vital power, that takes its place in the order of signifiers and represents what is marked by signifiers - that which signifiers strike with the essential decline where this lack-in-being [manque-a-etre]

398. #398

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.216

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

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

     the phallus, as this imaginary object that the child has to identify with in order to satisfy the mother's desire, cannot yet be put in place

399. #399

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.244

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from jouissance by showing that desire is fundamentally structured by signifiers (not reducible to imaginary relations or need), and uses Joan Riviere's case of 'womanliness as masquerade' to demonstrate that the subject's relation to the phallus — whether as theft, mask, or sign of being — reveals the constitutive splitting of the subject between existence and signifying representation, grounding the unconscious.

     the need to avoid reprisals from men motivated by the surreptitious theft that she carries out on the source and very symbol of their power... she was saying, 'But look, I do not have this phallus, I am a woman and purely a woman.'

400. #400

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.463

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

     it's precisely for this reason that the grasp of the metaphorical chain must be playing its role, more for it than for any other, in making it a signifier, which as a result becomes the privileged signifier of the relationship to the Other of the Other.

401. #401

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.295

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

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

     it's quite clear, furthermore, that it is difficult to centre the link with this organ on the notion of the castration complex… what is at stake is something other than this or that… It is its signifying character that is predominant.

402. #402

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.357

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Against Dolto's imaginarist account of the phallus as a 'beautiful and good form,' Lacan argues that the phallus is neither image, fantasy, nor object but a signifier—specifically the signifier of desire—and that only this symbolic status allows it to articulate the heterosexual relation's irreducible complexity, which is then illustrated through close reading of Freud's hysteric's market dream.

     The phallus is not a form. It doesn't have the form of an object… It's a signifier. It's solely the fact that it is a signifier that makes it possible to conceptualize and articulate the diverse functions it assumes at different levels of the intersexual encounter.

403. #403

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.299

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

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

     The formula explains that the big S of barred A is precisely what <1>, the phallus, produces. In other words, the phallus is the signifier that introduces something new into A.

404. #404

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

     Theoretical move: Reintegration into the human order requires castration as the precondition for the phallus to be re-elevated to the status of signifier — something that can be given or withheld by the paternal figure — establishing castration as the structural hinge between desire and jouissance.

     only on condition of bringing it about that the phallus is again promoted to the status of signifier, as this something that can be given or withheld

405. #405

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

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

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

     in order to please the mother, if you will allow me to go quickly and employ words of imagery, it's necessary and sufficient to be the phallus.

406. #406

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.363

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

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

     If the phallus is the signifier of desire, the Other's desire, and the problem that presents itself to the subject from the very first step of the dialectic of desire, then the other side is this - a question of being or not being the phallus.

407. #407

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.174

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

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

     This object is called the phallus, and it's what I made our entire dialectic of the object relation revolve around last year... there is a relationship of symmetry between 'phallus', which is here, at the vertex of the imaginary ternary, and 'father', at the vertex of the symbolic ternary.

408. #408

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.362

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the butcher's wife's dream to demonstrate that the phallus functions as a *signifier* of desire—not as an object—and that the subject's dilemma is whether to *have* or *be* this signifier, a distinction that lies at the heart of the castration complex and the hysteric's relation to desire.

     The entire ambiguity of the subject's behaviour in relation to the phallus resides in this dilemma, which is that the subject may either have or be this signifier.

409. #409

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.285

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes a minimal three-term schema for secondary identification: a libidinal object is transformed into a signifier that anchors the ego-ideal, while desire undergoes substitution via a third term (the rival/father), with the phallus functioning as the universal "lowest common denominator" — the metonymic pivot through which desire must pass in any signifying economy, regardless of sex.

     The phallus is always there. It's the lowest common denominator of this common factor. And this is why we always find it there in every case, whether it's a man or a woman.

410. #410

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

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

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

     Does he want to efface himself behind what he is displaying, to be no longer anything but the phallus?

411. #411

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews the Freud-Jones debate on female sexuality to argue that the phallus functions not as a natural drive object but as a signifier — and, pivotally, that in the little girl's Oedipal relations the phallus operates as a fetish rather than a phobic object, a distinction that advances his own structural account beyond both Freud's biologism and Jones's naturalist counter-argument.

     the phallus really does intervene in the way that I have been expounding to you in the premises of today's class. This is nothing other than what I have just been outlining in other ways, namely that the phallus intervenes here as a signifier.

412. #412

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.512

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing technical terms, proper names, and page references from Lacan's Seminar V, providing no original theoretical argument but mapping the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     phallus as signifier of 257-69 Aufhebung of the phallus 323, 324 penis/phallus as 265,463,478

413. #413

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.493

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

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

     The phallus is nothing other than the signifier of the desire for desire.

414. #414

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the quadripartite structure of subject-formation by showing that the specular couple [a-a'] is always already regulated by the more primitive dyad of the unconstituted subject and the mother-as-One, and that the birth of metaphor (substitution) is the moment at which the object is symbolized and desire properly emerges — yielding the formula of fantasy ($◇a) inscribed within a four-term schema.

     the phallus is essentially related to the dialectic of Being... Klein... asserts that there can be something better than the mother's breast - namely, the phallus

415. #415

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Through close reading of Sharpe's case, Lacan demonstrates that the patient's symptomatic objects (straps, car) are instances of objet petit a, while the real analytic impasse lies in the patient's structural impossibility of accepting the castrated Other—a deadlock Lacan locates in the analyst's own resistance to naming what the phallus as signifier does in the Other.

     the Other must absolutely not be castrated. I mean that the Other carries within itself the signifier that takes on all values. And this is indeed how we should consider the phallus.

416. #416

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: The fundamental mainspring of neurosis is not castration anxiety (fear of losing the phallus) but rather the refusal to allow the Other to be castrated; this is articulated through a rereading of the analysand's fantasy in terms of aphanisis as the active hiding/escamotage of the phallus rather than its disappearance.

     Where is the phallus? It is always the mainspring of comedy... the phallus is a sort of slippery, darting animal [furet] which is nowhere, which one must find, and about which it is clear that one will never find it.

417. #417

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.326

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

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

     the phallus is already there, as such, [in the relationship between the child and the breast] and as, strictly speaking, destructive with regard to the subject

418. #418

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three-phase schema of "A Child Is Being Beaten" and the optics of the inverted bouquet to argue that the subject constitutes itself as barred subject ($) only by passing through a fantasmatic phase of near-abolition (primary masochism), and that the phallus functions as the mediating signifier through which desire is structured in the imaginary-symbolic interplay.

     'Desire for the phallus' means desire mediated by the phallus. The mediating phallus plays an essential role in the mediation of desire.

419. #419

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.360

     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."

     the phallus is the key, constitutes the essential drama of the Oedipus complex insofar as it marks, I would say, the juncture and turning point that conveys the subject from the level of demand to that of desire.

420. #420

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

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

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

     Ophelia is at that moment the phallus, the phallus qua signifying symbol of life, the phallus that the subject externalizes and rejects as such. This is the second stage of the relationship to the object.

421. #421

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: At the second level of the Graph of Desire, the subject-as-speaker is constituted through the "Che vuoi?" of the Other, which reveals that the subject does not know the message returning to him from his demand; the only true answer to that question is the Phallus as the signifier of the subject's relation to the signifier, but to articulate this answer the subject disappears — generating the threat of castration — and desire is situated precisely in the gap between code and message on this second level.

     This signifier is the phallus, and I have already told you why.

422. #422

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.217

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the chess metaphor — specifically the patient's refusal to sacrifice his queen — to argue that the phallus is a hidden signifier displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst), and that the subject's desire is structured around preserving this phallic substitute at the cost of remaining bound in a fantasy of omnipotence; the analytic task is to bring this secret relation between subject and partner into the open.

     the subject does not want to lose his queen [dame]... I would say that it is because his wife is his phallus that he made the infinitesimal slip

423. #423

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Jones's concept of aphanisis as a failed equalization of male and female desire, then rehabilitates it as a structural question about the subject's existence beyond desire, showing that when the subject encounters objet petit a, the subject vanishes ($), and that displacement/metonymy functions as the mechanism by which desire is preserved precisely through the thwarting of satisfaction.

     what Freud discovered - namely, that these relations are fundamentally different owing to the asymmetry in the different sexes with regard to the phallus as a signifier.

424. #424

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.400

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that initiation rites and bodily mutilation function as Objet petit a — indexical marks that orient desire toward a symbolic beyond ("being"), distinguishing this marking function from the specific negativizing (castrating) function of the phallus as signifier in the castration complex.

     at the level of the castration complex, it is the phallus that is marked and raised to the function of a signifier

425. #425

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.

     Desire is the metonymy of being in the subject; the phallus is the metonymy of the subject in being. The phallus is the signifying element that is subtracted from the chain of speech, insofar as speech is involved in any and every relationship with the Other.

426. #426

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.472

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

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

     there is never just one phallus in the game. And this is precisely what must not be seen in neurotic structure.

427. #427

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the movement from the animal's excremental territoriality through language's complication of the subject/object relation (use→exchange value), to the dialectic of desire: identification with the father fails to resolve desire's impasse, so the most general "solution" offered to the barred subject is narcissism, which structures fantasy by transferring the subject's anxiety onto object a, yielding the formula of the ego-ideal as i(a)/$ ◇ a/I.

     a real mobilization, as it were, known as the offering [prestation] of the phallus, the contractual renting out of its services

428. #428

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.204

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reappropriates Jones's term "aphanisis" — redirecting it from a fear of desire's disappearance rooted in developmental psychology toward a structurally prior effect of castration, arguing that it is precisely because the signifier is operative in castration that the subject can become alarmed at the potential disappearance of his desire; this allows Lacan to reframe the clinical material of Ella Sharpe's patient in terms of intersubjective topology rather than imaginary equivalences.

     What is the next leap I mentioned? It concerns the phallus, less that of his imagined partner in the dream than his own. The analyst agrees that the dream has a masturbatory character to it... the patient's phallus is immediately viewed by her to be an instrument of aggression

429. #429

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.358

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a structural comparison of Hamlet and Oedipus to argue that mourning's disrupted rituals expose the same fundamental gap as the phallic signifier/castration, and that Hamlet stages a 'barred Other' [S(Ⱥ)] at its very outset rather than discovering it through the hero's deed—making Hamlet's Oedipal drama a specifically modern, 'distorted' form of the Untergang of the Oedipus complex in which the subject is paralysed by an unatonable debt rather than enacting the lustral rebirth of the law.

     our investigation, as it progresses, is leading us to what is involved in retribution, punishment, and castration, and is heading toward the relationship to the phallic signifier.

430. #430

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.509

     MARGINALIA ON THE SEMINAR ON DESIRE

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial marginalia by Jacques-Alain Miller providing bibliographic references, personal anecdotes, and contextual notes on Seminar VI; it is non-substantive from a theoretical standpoint, though it contains brief allusions to several canonical concepts (Graph of Desire, Master/Slave Dialectic, Phallus, Hilflosigkeit) in passing bibliographic form.

     24. Ear, skin, even the phallus. The pointy leaves of red Romaine lettuce are known in France as oreilles du diable... The devil's tail [or: dick, queue] figures in the French expression, tirer le diable par la queue.

431. #431

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.397

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

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

     The second type is the sort of object that is involved in what is known as the castration complex, and you are aware that, in its most general form, it is the phallus.

432. #432

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.382

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a) provides desire's minimal supporting structure by articulating, synchronically rather than diachronically, how the subject must pay the price of castration—giving up a real element (objet a) to serve as a signifier—precisely because the subject cannot designate itself within the Other's discourse (the unconscious). This move directly opposes ego-psychology's conflation of object-maturation with drive-maturation, exposing it as a confusion between the object of knowledge and the object of desire.

     I have said that a is the effect of castration. I did not say that it was the object of castration. The object of castration is what we call the phallus. What is the phallus?

433. #433

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.500

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

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

     let us not forget the presence, in this cut, of what we have learned to identify as the phallic object, which is latent in every relationship involving demand as the signifier of desire.

434. #434

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is essentially the distance encoded in the barred subject's relation to objet petit a — the formula ($◇a) — and uses Ophelia as the paradigmatic figure of the phallus (girl = phallus) to dramatize how psychoanalysis has gone wrong by defining libido as object-seeking rather than grasping the object through the lens of aphanisis (fading of the subject).

     Ophelia presents us with the image of someone who is bursting with life and who, more than any other female character, I believe, illustrates for us an equation I have highlighted in my classes, the equation girl = phallus.

435. #435

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.341

     MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hamlet's final duel to demonstrate that desire is structured by the formula ($◇a) — fantasy — where the object in desire functions as a substitute for the phallus the subject sacrifices to the signifier; Hamlet's inability to act from desire proper (he engages only at the level of imaginary, specular rivalry) reveals the structural gap between the object of need and the object in desire, and exposes the mirror stage as the imaginary short-circuit that occludes the real stakes of his action.

     the subject is deprived of something of himself that has taken on the value of the very signifier of his alienation - and this something is the phallus

436. #436

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.460

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

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

     insofar as he is it, he does not have it, and insofar as he has it, he is not it.

437. #437

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage delivers the core formulation S(Ⱥ) — the signifier of the barred Other — as the "big secret of psychoanalysis": there is no Other of the Other, no metalanguage or guarantor that can give the subject back what it has sacrificed to the signifying order, and the phallus names precisely that missing, symbolically-sacrificed signifier; Hamlet is read as the dramatic figure who receives this radical revelation and whose desire is consequently structured around this absence.

     We are talking very precisely here about the enigmatic function of what we call the phallus… The phallus is something that is sacrificed from the organism, from life, from the vital pressure, and that ends up symbolized.

438. #438

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.441

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

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

     the supplemental mystery of being herself prey [ouverte] to a lack whose meaning appears to Hans to be in a certain relationship to the phallus - a phallus that he does not have.

439. #439

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier mediating between demand and desire, such that neurosis consists precisely in the inscription of desire within the register of demand; the Graph of Desire is used to map this structural tension, and the beating fantasy ('A child is being beaten') is introduced as the exemplary case through which fantasy props up desire at the imaginary level.

     Its function is privileged, it constituting the signifier of the subject.

440. #440

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the analyst (Sharpe)'s interpretive framework by arguing she conflates the omnipotence of speech—which properly belongs to the Other—with a fantasized personal omnipotence attributed to the patient, thereby missing the structural division between the Other as speaking and the Other as imaginary, and rushing past the subject's actual shrinking position relative to the signifying object.

     the inadequacy of the penis with respect to the female genitalia, assumed to be altogether enormous compared to the male organ, is much too important for us to proceed so quickly.

441. #441

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sharpe's analytic intervention by distinguishing the activation of the penis as a real (biological) organ from its function as a signifier, arguing that the patient's violent acting-out demonstrates a failure to engage the Other as the locus of speech and law — marking a missed encounter with the symbolic rather than a genuine therapeutic advance.

     I will try to provide you with several formulas indicating how we should conceptualize the function of what we should very precisely attribute to the phallic signifier in all its generality.

442. #442

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

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

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

     the funniest and most stereotypical representation of the destructive phallus one can imagine… she interpreted his fantasy in terms of reality, as reflecting a real experience he had had of the phallic mother.

443. #443

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     IMPOSSIBLE ACTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the structural analysis of Ella Sharpe's case (organised around the phallus as primal identification) to Hamlet as the privileged modern analogue of the Oedipus complex, arguing that Hamlet's "scruples of conscience" are a symptomatic, conscious formation whose unconscious correlate—structured around the castration complex and the opposition between being and having the phallus—remains to be articulated via Lacan's own concepts of desire.

     It is situated precisely in the place of primal identification, I, identification with the mother... subjects want to continue to believe their mothers have a phallus. They refuse the Other's castration.

444. #444

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.462

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

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

     the phallus which is a signifier, a signifier, I repeat - to really have it in a man... the real phallus that women can have enters into their dialectic and its unfolding as a signifier. Owing to which, they will always have it, at a certain level of their experience, en moins (as an absence, as something missing).

445. #445

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.443

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a differential dialectic of desire in neurosis: hysteria and obsession are contrasted as two distinct structural positions relative to desire and the phallus, with the phallus theorized as the signifier that ties desire to the law of exchange and fertility, such that the neurotic subject's fundamental impasse is the "to be or not to have" disjunction—being the phallus for the Other exposes one to the threat of castration, while the neurotic ego-defense is what organizes the subject's distance from the Other's desire.

     If the phallus plays a key role here, it is obviously insofar as it is a signifier... fundamentally speaking, the phallus is the subject qua object of sexual desire, this object being subjected to what I will call the law of fertility.

446. #446

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.351

     MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mourning creates a hole in the real (not the symbolic) analogous to the Verwerfung of psychosis, and that funeral rites function as the total mobilization of the symbolic order to fill this hole — thereby linking the structural logic of mourning to fantasy ($ ◇ a) and the economy of the real, imaginary, and symbolic as dramatized in Hamlet.

     You can only redeem [or: pay for, payer] this signifier with your flesh and blood. It is essentially the phallus behind the veil.

447. #447

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

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

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

     The subject is the phallus qua object within the mother, and he has it in [or: possesses it via] the object of his desire.

448. #448

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.345

     MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's identification with the "foil" (the mortal phallus) as the structural key to his desire, and then pivots to argue that mourning—illustrated by the cemetery scene—produces a hole in the Real that is the strict converse of Foreclosure: what is lost in reality irrupts as an absolute (impossible) object, and this opens onto a rearticulation of mourning via the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real rather than mere object-relations.

     The subject thus identifies with the mortal phallus itself here. 'I'll be your foil,' he says to Laertes, 'to showcase your skill'

449. #449

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

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

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

     Does he have a big enough phallus? In certain cases, the question emerges in the subject's lived experience and comes to the light of day in analysis.

450. #450

     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.

     Our trajectory today shows us... that the path the subject goes down to find his life anew will in any case present him with what he consents to lose: the phallus.

451. #451

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.449

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: By re-reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through the lens of metaphor and alienation, Lacan argues that the obsessive fantasy stages the neurotic's structural relation to desire: the subject sustains desire precisely by perpetuating its precariousness, finding jouissance not in satisfaction but in the symptomatic metonymy of 'être pour' (being-for) that defers 'pour être' (being as such).

     he purely and simply becomes the phallic instrument, insofar as it is the instrument here of his cancellation.

452. #452

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

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

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

     Everyone knows what is involved here - the phallus, strictly speaking. You have seen that, up until now, I have left to one side the role played in this economy by the phallus, the good old phallus of yesteryear.

453. #453

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus, operating in the signifying function, generates an asymmetrical splitting in the love/desire relation for men and women: men split love from desire (idealizing the woman as phallus while reducing her in the erotic act), while women, finding the real phallus in men, achieve a jouissance that satisfies desire yet orient their love toward castrated, speaking beings beyond that encounter.

     The phallus is busy elsewhere, in the signifying function. When faced with the other, the subject identifies with the phallus, but he fragments qua himself when he is in the presence of the phallus.

454. #454

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.401

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT > A few tangential remarks are in order here.

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops the voice as the third form of objet petit a — specifically as a pure cut or gap — by contrasting it with ordinary vocal function and analysing the hallucinatory voice in psychotic delusion, where the interrupted sentence (Schreber's Sie sollen werden…) produces a call to signification that swallows the subject; he then frames this alongside the mirror-stage, narcissism, and the phallus to insist that fantasy's "dimension of being" cannot be collapsed into any reality-adaptation model of analytic technique.

     the relationship of the subject to himself that makes him most apprehensive - namely, that of tumescence - naturally designates the phallus as the object that is most often offered up to the cutting function

455. #455

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.365

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a structural account of the phallus in Hamlet to show that the subject's radical position—at the level of deprivation—is to *not be* the phallus, and that the phallus, even when empirically real (Claudius), remains a shadow that cannot be struck without the total sacrifice of narcissistic attachment; this leads Lacan to coin "phallophanies" as the lightning-fast appearances of the phallus that momentarily expose the subject's desire in its truth.

     the subject's radical position is that of not being the phallus - he himself being a negative object, as it were.

456. #456

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses close reading of a clinical dream-text to argue that the phallus functions as a perpetually absent signifier whose structural elusiveness—not aggressive retaliation or castration anxiety in the ordinary sense—organises the neurotic subject's symptomatology, thereby critiquing hasty analytic interpretations that reduce the material to castration as cause rather than context.

     Isn't it far more interesting to raise and continually renew the following questions: 'Where is the phallus?' 'Where must we theorize it to be?' and 'What do we know about it?'

457. #457

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

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

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

     a child's identification with the imaginary object of his mother's desire, insofar as she symbolizes it in the phallus. And he adds: 'The phallocentrism produced by this dialectic is all that need concern us here'

458. #458

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.478

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

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

     the relationship that is revealed of the subject to something detached, which progressively blossoms, presents us with the realm of the subject's identification with the phallus, inasmuch as the phallus emerges from his fantasizing about an object inside his mother.

459. #459

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.192

     THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy must not be dissolved into pre-formed imaginary significations (mouth/vagina, womb/envelopment) but must be respected as a precise object with signifying value; using the Graph of Desire, he locates fantasy midway between the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ) and the signified of the Other s(A), insisting that the object in fantasy is simultaneously a visual representation and a signifier.

     This immediately brings into play, of course, the fantasy of the phallic woman.

460. #460

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a signifier—not a privileged object (contra Klein)—and that the subject's relation to it is structured by the dialectic of being versus having: men "are not without having it" (castration enables possession of objects), while women "are without having it," making the sexual positions asymmetrical and irreducible to each other.

     without which one cannot give the function of the phallus its true position - namely, its character as a signifier.

461. #461

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Sperber's sexual-origin theory of language by insisting that the metaphorical spread of sexual signifiers proves not a reduction of meaning to sexual roots but rather that an "emptiness" or gap — the form of the female organ — is the privileged pole around which metaphorical play of the signifier is organised; (2) it pivots to Freud's treatment of the paternal function in religious experience, arguing that religious knowledge (Moses, the Name of the Father) belongs within the analytic field of inquiry precisely because all knowledge emerges against a background of ignorance.

     one finds it in the hole drilling activities of work in its most primitive of forms, with the meaning of sexual operation, of phallic penetration

462. #462

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis is grounded not in the service of goods or traditional moral regulation, but in the question "Have you acted in conformity with your desire?" — a standard derived from the topology of desire that both tragedy and comedy reveal, and which Kant's categorical imperative partially anticipates but fails to complete, leaving a void that psychoanalysis identifies as the place of desire.

     The sphere of comedy is created by the presence at its center of a hidden signifier, but that in the Old Comedy is there in person, namely, the phallus.

463. #463

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates as the elision of a signifier in the signifying chain—i.e., as constitutive forgetting—and uses this to ground an account of the good that refuses to reduce reality to a mere corrective of the pleasure principle, insisting instead that reality is produced through pleasure and that goods (exemplified by cloth/textile as a signifier) are structured from the beginning as signifiers, not natural objects of need.

     There is something hidden there, and it is always, we are told, that damned phallus.

464. #464

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a theory of the beautiful as the signifier of a limit-point between life and death, situating it alongside a shame-function (Aidōs) as barriers to jouissance, before concluding that analysis ends not at the Sovereign Good but at the experienced desire of the analyst — a desire that cannot desire the impossible — and that drive arises as the effect of the signifier's mark on need.

     the aspiration of the patient collapses into an ineradicable nostalgia for the fact that there is no way he can be the phallus

465. #465

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

     **XIV** > **XXII**

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

     the incorporation or ingestion of the phallic image to the extent that it is actualized in a relationship that is entirely governed by the imaginary

466. #466

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.442

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXVI - "A Dream of a Shadow Is Man"**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XXVI, providing philological clarifications, textual variants, bibliographic references, and explanations of Lacan's optical schema and identification formulas. It is non-substantive as theoretical argumentation, serving only as editorial apparatus.

     Such a stage of object-love with genital exclusion seems to coincide in time with Freud's 'phallic stage' in the psychosexual development of the individual

467. #467

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

     Theoretical move: Through an ekphrastic reading of Zucchi's painting of Psyche and Cupid, Lacan argues that the myth of Psyche—properly understood via Apuleius—is not about the couple (man/woman relations) but about the relation between the soul and desire, with the castration complex (the blade/phallus/threat triad) functioning as the structural pivot of this mythic articulation.

     It is truly impossible not to see designated here - in the most precise way and as if it were being directly pointed to - the organ that, anatomically speaking, must be dissimulated behind this mass of flowers: Cupid's phallus.

468. #468

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.108

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Aristophanes' myth of the spherical beings in Plato's Symposium as a mythical encoding of the castration complex, arguing that the attachment to round, seamless shapes is rooted in the imaginary foreclosure of castration, and that the repositioning of the genitalia in the myth functions as the linchpin connecting love-discourse to the phallus—the essential mainspring of comedy.

     This confirms what I told you was essential to the mainspring of comedy, which is always, in the end, a reference to the phallus.

469. #469

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

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

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

     phallus Abraham and partial love 378-9 Cupid's 221-2,229,231,236, 243-4 designation of 260-1 fear of aphanisis 255-6

470. #470

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.259

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.

     We are aware of the difficulty encountered in handling the symbol Φ in its unveiled form. As I told you earlier, what is unbearable about it is that it is not simply a sign and a signifier but the presence of desire. It is the real presence [of desire].

471. #471

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces capital Φ as the unique symbol that occupies the place of the missing signifier — not because any signifier is literally absent from the battery, but because the dimension of questioning opens a subjective gap where the signifier's own foundation becomes ungraspable, making Φ indispensable for understanding how the castration complex operates on the mainspring of transference.

     The polarity concerning the function of the phallus as a signifier involves two extremes: the symbolic and the imaginary.

472. #472

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.

     It is here that the privilege of Φ among all signifiers arises... Of all possible signs, isn't it the one that brings together in itself the sign and means of action along with the very presence of desire as such?

473. #473

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **Jacques Lacan** > **Contents**

     Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Lacan's Seminar VIII (Transference), listing chapter headings that signal the seminar's major theoretical concerns: a commentary on Plato's Symposium, the object of desire and castration dialectic, a reading of Claudel's Coûfontaine trilogy, and the relation between Capital I (Ideal) and little a (objet petit a).

     XVII. The Symbol Φ

474. #474

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.380

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not purely internal to the subject but circulates between subjects as a kind of shared energy, and that desire functions as a remedy for anxiety—yet the analyst's proper position requires not using desire merely as an expedient but sustaining a relationship to "pure desirousness" that refuses to fill the place of the anxious Other for the patient.

     the place of the object, insofar as it is aimed at by anxiety, is occupied by what I explained to you at length regarding little Hans - the function of the phobic object, namely, Φ, capital Phi. In the phobic object, it is clearly the phallus that is at stake

475. #475

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.389

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's exit from narcissistic captivity depends on the structuring function of the signifier in the field of the Other: the distinction between Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal, mapped through the optical schema, shows that it is only by traversing the dream-field of wandering signifiers that the subject can glimpse the "reality of desire" beyond the shadow of narcissistic cathexis.

     even such a diminutive insect can be the elective object that suffices to constitute what I call the signifier of a phobia. Such an object can take on the altogether sufficient, operative function of calling into question the reality and consistency of the ego as an illusion.

476. #476

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.232

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

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

     the phallus is a privileged object in the field of the Other, an object that is subtracted from the status of the Other with a capital O as such.

477. #477

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.392

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

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

     The phallus is the pivotal function, I would say, in that it allows us to situate what is distinguished from it, namely a and, in little a qua little a, the general function of the object of desire.

478. #478

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.429

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XV - Oral, Anal, and Genital**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, clarifying terminological, textual, and referential details; it is non-substantive in theoretical terms but does briefly gloss key Lacanian concepts such as aphanisis, the barred Other, and sublimation as they appear in the surrounding lecture text.

     Lacan seems to be saying here that phi is at the root of barred A - that is, 'the Other as designated by the lack of a signifier.'

479. #479

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.431

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVIII - Real Presence**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XVIII, providing philological clarifications, textual variants, and source identifications. It contains no independent theoretical argument.

     Est tout phallicisme (is all about phallicism) could alternatively be rendered as 'to be all phallic.'

480. #480

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.401

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural function of objet petit a as the remainder that animates desire: the partial object is constituted by the elision of the phallus from the narcissistic image, such that libidinal cathexis (Besetzung) circulates around a central blank, and the object of desire is precisely what is 'saved from the waves' of narcissistic love — establishing the dialectic between being and having through the oral, anal, and phallic stages of demand.

     Where we symbolically see the phallus is precisely where it is not. Where we assume it to be behind a veil, having manifested itself in the erection of desire, is to the left side of the mirror in the schema.

481. #481

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.153

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

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Alcibiades' speech in Plato's *Symposium* and a verse from Euripides' *Hecuba*, Lacan argues that *âgalma* names the hidden precious object inside the other that captures desire — a specifically psychoanalytic notion whose fetishistic function displaces the dyadic dialectic of beauty with a triadic topology of the subject's relation to the symbolic.

     This cannot fail to remind us, at least we analysts, of the register or theme of the phallus, insofar as the fantasy of the phallus is here, as we know, on the horizon, situating this infantile object.

482. #482

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.

     What does Φ in fact represent? The function of the phallus in its generality, for all subjects who speak.

483. #483

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst must preserve the gap between demand and desire by resisting premature interpretation: the "margin of incomprehension" is precisely the margin of desire, and collapsing it—whether by satisfying the obsessive's demand, offering phallic communion, or nourishing the subject with metaphor—forecloses desire in favour of symptom, while the object of desire is shown to pre-exist the subject who seeks it.

     what the neurotic most commonly wants to be is the phallus... The phallic object as an imaginary object cannot, in any case, help completely reveal the fundamental fantasy.

484. #484

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE** > Further along, we read.

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

     the phallus, Φ, can function in such a way as to signify the structural point that represents a lack in the signifying system [le défaut du signifiant]. What does this mean? What defines as a signifier something about which I have just said that, by hypothesis, by definition, from the very outset, it is the signifier that is excluded from the signifying system

485. #485

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Psyche and Zucchi's painting as an image for the castration complex, arguing that the phallus becomes a signifier precisely by being cut off from the organ, making it the signifier of the point where the signifying chain is lacking — S(Ⱥ) — and thereby rendering the subject unconscious and barred, rather than the castration complex being reducible to a fear of aphanisis.

     if Phi, the phallus as a signifier, has a place, it is precisely that of supplementing the Other at the point at which signifierness disappears - at the point at which the Other is constituted by the fact that a signifier is lacking somewhere.

486. #486

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's trilogy to argue that castration is constitutive of the desiring subject—not as frustration of need but as the structural elevation of the phallus to a signifying function—and locates the composition of desire across three generational stages: the mark of the signifier, the undesired object, and finally the constitution of desire proper, while critiquing ego-psychology's reduction of desire to need and the concurrent eclipse of the father function.

     the object that desire lacks - since desire is [based on] lack - is in our experience identical to the very instrument of desire: the phallus.

487. #487

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.405

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.

     the phallus is incarnated precisely in that which is lacking in the image. The entire subsequent relationship between the subject and the object of desire originates therein.

488. #488

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.354

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the ideal ego (imaginary, narcissistic image of self-display) from the ego-ideal (the introjected paternal signifier that organizes narcissistic benefit from a specific point), arguing that the imaginary phallus (lowercase phi) slips between the two terms [S and a] in fantasy, and that the analyst occupies the place of the ego-ideal for the patient — a structural position that must remain morally intact precisely to make the patient's libidinal disorder possible.

     We see that there must be something that slips between the two terms here [S and a], so that one of the two can be elided so easily. We know which term it is that slips in. There is no need to comment on it further - it is lowercase phi, the imaginary phallus.

489. #489

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the obsessive's structure to articulate aphanisis as the specific failure of the Φ (phallic) function when it encounters the real dead end of fantasy, distinguishing this from Jones's naturalistic reading and tying the subject's vanishing to the barred Other—while introducing "real presence" as a homonym for Eucharistic dogma that illuminates this phallic function at the surface of obsessive phenomenology.

     it is insofar as, and solely inasmuch as, it is the putting to the test - which always turns into defeat - of the Φ function of the phallus.

490. #490

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.223

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.

     The jouissance of the praying mantis. The Other, depository of desire. Desire's dependence on demand. The privilege of the phallus as an object.

491. #491

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must take the form of "nescience qua nescience" — not ignorance but the structural position of holding lack without filling it — such that the only sign the analyst can give is the sign of the lack of a signifier, which alone opens the analysand to the unconscious; this is grounded in the phallus as signifier structuring the entire economy of desire through the tension between being and having.

     the phallus as a signifier - which means as given over to an entirely different function than its organic function - is the center of all coherent apprehension of what is at work in the castration complex.

492. #492

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.397

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallic object, functioning as a constitutive blank spot on the body image, retroactively conditions the structure of all objects as separable and potentially lost; narcissistic cathexis is thereby shown to be rooted in castration, not opposed to it.

     the central characteristic of the relationship between one's own body and the phallus conditions the relationship to the most primitive objects after the fact, nachträglich.

493. #493

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must be understood not as natural harmony or ethical perfection but as occupying the empty place of the missing signifier (Φ), being the barred subject in the very locus where the patient expects knowledge — so that fantasy, as the final register of transference, can be entered and the object *a* discerned.

     We must occupy the empty place where a signifier is summoned that can exist only by canceling out all the others, and that is the signifier Φ whose central position and condition in analytic practice I have been trying to demonstrate for you.

494. #494

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVII - The Symbol Φ**

     Theoretical move: This is a translator's endnotes section providing textual variants, clarifications of French idioms, and cross-references to the Graph of Desire in the Écrits and other seminars; it contains no independent theoretical argumentation.

     On "phallophany," see Seminar VI, p. 419.

495. #495

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.425

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter ΧΠ - Transference in the Present**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's endnotes providing bibliographic and conceptual glosses on Seminar VIII's discussion of transference, desire, and the Graph of Desire; it is largely non-substantive but contains two theoretically pointed glosses: one clarifying the aim of *Aidos* as the fall of the Other (A) into *objet a*, and one identifying the analysand's desire as the question "What does the analyst want?"

     On Aidos, see 'Signification of the Phallus,' Écrits, p. 692.

496. #496

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.301

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object (objet petit a) is specifically the object of castration — distinguished from objects of privation or frustration — and demonstrates this through topological analysis of the cross-cap, showing that the object of desire only rejoins its intimacy by a centrifugal (outside-in) path, structurally irreducible to Aristotelian logic's object of privation.

     This point designated here is the point Φ thanks to which the circle indicated by this little cut can be for us the mental schema of an original identification; this point... can, up to a certain point harbour for you too many satisfying properties; here is this phallus with this magical function

497. #497

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

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

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

498. #498

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 3*: *Wednesday 29 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses phonetics (the silent P between implosion and explosion), animal communication, baby-talk, pidgin, and cross-species identification to clear the ground for a theory of the signifier and the function of the One — arguing that what specifies a tongue is not simply speech but a differential structure of presence/absence, and that identification (not pre-logical participation) is the fundamental phenomenon underlying the human subject's relation to language and the Other.

     the consonance of P is, as in the case of your daughter, to be mute. The meaning of P is between this implosion and this explosion. The P is heard precisely because it is not heard

499. #499

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

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

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

500. #500

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.167

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

     There is no fear of aphanisis, there is the fear of losing the phallus because only the phallus can give its proper field to desire.

501. #501

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.313

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of the seminar, Lacan consolidates the year's teaching by articulating the structural difference between i(o) and o (the specular image and the object), grounding desire in the phantasy formula $◊a, identifying the desirer as always already implicated in the object of desire via the "Che vuoi?", and situating castration's object as the very object of analytic science—while using Blanchot's prose and the hysteric's relation to the Other's desire as literary and clinical anchors.

     it is the only thing that she does not have, namely the phallus? The whole dialectic of these last years, up to and including the Kleinian dialectic, which nevertheless gets closest to it, remains falsified because the accent is not put on this essential divergence.

502. #502

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the Other — not an affect without an object in reality but one where the lack of object is on the subject's side — and positions the phallus as the mediating term between demand and desire, showing how hysteria and obsessional neurosis are each specific strategies for managing the desire of the Other.

     This middle term has a name, it is called the phallus. The phallic function has absolutely no other meaning than to be what gives the measure of this field to be defined within the demand as the field of desire.

503. #503

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the privileged function of the phallus in identification is grounded in the signifier's logic of non-identity (Russell's paradox), and proposes a decisive reversal: in place of Kantian Einheit (synthetic unity as norm), psychoanalytic logic requires Einzigkeit (unary trait as exception/singularity), thereby replacing transcendental logic with a logic of the signifier.

     it is in so far the signifier phallus is what comes at a certain stage as a factor revealing the meaning of the signifying function, it is in so far as the phallus comes to the same place in the symbolic function where the breast was

504. #504

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.

     it is not because the penis is not there that the phallus is not there. I would even say on the contrary.

505. #505

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.195

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

     Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

     that which as 'natural support' is the place where desire manifests itself as affect, as bodily feeling, must become, must yield its place to a signifier… The subject demands and the phallus desires says Lacan, the phallus but never the penis.

506. #506

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the critique of Kantian "pure intuition" (grounded in Euclidean geometry and refuted by non-Euclidean geometry, Gödelian incompleteness, and Fregean arithmetic) as a lever to argue that the combinatory/logical function of number and reason is independent of sensible intuition, and that this has direct consequences for how psychoanalysis must situate the subject's body, drive, and fantasy beyond any spatio-temporal naturalism.

     entirely stuck inside a machine - I mean in the material sense of the word which incarnates, manifests in such an obvious fashion the phallic phantasy, does not particularly alienate him from its relationship to the functions of weightlessness natural to male desire

507. #507

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962* > I am - I think.

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces imaginary numbers (√-1) as a formal analogy for the subject "before any nomination," arguing that replacing the unary trait (1) with the imaginary unit (i) in a continued-fraction series produces a periodic rather than convergent function — thereby modeling the subject's irreducible instability and its structural relation to the ego-ideal and the imaginary phallus, while connecting this back to the logical scansion of the three-hesitation structure of Logical Time.

     we will identify it to what we have introduced up to now in the connotation which is personal to ourselves as namely the imaginary function of the phallus

508. #508

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus (and introduces the cross-cap) to formalise the dialectical relationship between Demand and desire in the subject, showing how the torus's privileged circle—encompassing both the generating circle (Demand) and the inner circle (metonymical desire)—allows him to locate objet petit a and the phallus as structural measures of the subject's relation to desire, while insisting that identification is strictly a dimension of the subject and not of drive or image.

     it is in the radius, in the half if you wish of this diameter, that we see what is the mainspring, the final measure of the relationship of the subject to desire, namely the small qua symbol of the phallus.

509. #509

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

     at the nodal point called that of the desire of the Other, at the phallic point, in so far as it signifies the abolition as such of all significance

510. #510

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar IX by arguing that identification must be approached not through the imaginary relation to the other but through the logical problem of identity (A = A), and that the subject is constituted not by any self-present cogito but solely through the existence of the signifier and its effects — a thesis which frames the entire year's inquiry.

     this autoerotic rock whose emergence the phallus symbolises: an island in short battered by the waves of Aphrodite.

511. #511

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

     Why is it here that the function of the phallus emerges, here where in effect without it everything would be so easy to understand, unfortunately in a fashion altogether outside experience? Why the phallus thing, why does the phallus come as a measure

512. #512

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.297

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper aim of analysis is not therapeutic adaptation but the subject's entry into desire, and grounds this claim structurally by showing that the object of desire (objet petit a) is constituted not by privation or frustration but by castration, and that this castrated object uniquely "carries number with it" — a point illustrated through re-reading the Wolf Man's primal-scene fantasy.

     when its phallic radicality is manifested by a sort of singularity as accessible there where alone it can appear to us, namely when it approaches or when it may approach the outside field

513. #513

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topological surfaces—sphere, torus, Möbius strip, and cross-cap—to formalize the structural relations between cut, hole, and desire, arguing that the cross-cap is the privileged surface for representing desire-as-lack, with the phallus functioning as the structural double-point that allows the objet petit a to occupy the place of the hole.

     it is the phallus; the phallus in so far as it is through it as operator that an object o can be put at the same place where in another structure (the torus) we only grasp its contour

514. #514

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.

     I will speak to you about the phallus in its double function, the one which allows us to see it as the common point of eversion... the function of this phallus at the level of the $ of the phantasy and at the level of o that it authenticates for desire

515. #515

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

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

     this poses the question of reintegrating what we call the phallus, that this poses the urgency of the definition of phallus

516. #516

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and the Graph of Desire's four nodal points to articulate the structural difference between message and question, grounding desire as precisely that part of demand hidden from the Other—and showing how the neurotic (especially the obsessional) constitutes himself as a real/impossible in face of the Other's impotence to respond.

     there is indeed some medium, and to put it better, some instrument for this unbelievable transmutation between the object of desire and the existence of the subject and which is precisely the phallus

517. #517

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 23*: *Wednesday 6 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: By cutting the cross-cap with an interior-eight (double-loop signifier) around its privileged origin point, Lacan demonstrates that the surface divides into two topologically distinct parts—one that preserves the central point and is specularis­able, and a Möbius strip that is irreducibly non-specularis­able—thereby grounding the structural relationship between the barred subject ($) and objet petit a in fantasy in rigorous topological terms, with the phallus as the key to the constitution of the object of desire at the central (archèn) point.

     It is in articulating the function of this point that we will be able to find all sorts of auspicious formulae which allow us to conceive the function of the phallus at the centre of the constitution of the object of desire.

518. #518

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 19*: *Wednesday 9 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the pivot of desire's constitution by operating as a signifier that cannot signify itself — the transmutation from need to desire passes through the phallic function — and that this structure can only be adequately rendered through topology (torus, cross-cap), which provides the 'transcendental aesthetic model' for the subject's exclusion from the signifying field and the analyst's place as incarnated desire.

     The factor of transmutation that it is a matter of grasping, the factor of this transmutation is the function of the phallus, and there is no way of defining otherwise the function of the phallus, small phi

519. #519

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.197

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

     every object which can be the source of pleasure or the object of demand for the Other risks becoming for her the phallic equivalent she desires... we see this child - phallus equivalent happening which is centre to the origin of most neurotic structures.

520. #520

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     *Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*

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

     your oral types who adore breasts, adore breasts because breasts are a phallus. And it is even because of that that it is possible for the breast to be also a phallus

521. #521

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions desire as an unsurpassable "truth function" at the heart of analytic practice, articulates the Death Drive and Life Drive (Eros/libido) as structured around the signifier and the phallus, and uses the Kantian critique of pure reason—especially its categories, pure intuition, and the synthetic function—as an analogy to illuminate the relationship between subjectivity, the body, and desire, while invoking the Kant/Sade parallel to show that desire exceeds all pathological (comfort/need) determinations.

     the function of the phallus, since it is that around which there comes to be articulated this Eros, this libido, sufficiently designates what I intend to highlight here

522. #522

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > Where is the subject in all of that?

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates the subject neither in vital immanence nor in the pure signifying operation, but in the articulation *between* these two poles — and uses the case of Little Hans (the crumpled giraffe dream) as an exemplary figure of this in-between status, before pivoting to the proper name as the paradigmatic signifier through which a subject constitutes his minimal anchoring of being.

     the mother in so far as she is this immense phallus of desire ending again in the browsing mouth of this voracious animal

523. #523

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     *Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the subject is constituted through its relation to the signifier, where the signifier's origin lies in the subject's own effacing of a trace—a redoubled disappearance that is the mark of subjectivity itself—and that negation, the phallic object, and the obsessional's compulsion to undo are all facets of this foundational structure of the subject-as-signifier.

     the proper weight, the proper incline of this balance on which I place before you the relationship of the neurotic to the phallic object when I tell you in order to catch this relationship, one must say: "il n'est pas sans 1'avoir" (he is not without having it). This obviously does not mean that he has it.

524. #524

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

     Totem and Taboo revolves around the function of the phobic object, and it is this function that guided Freud toward the function of the Father.

525. #525

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

     The singular… role of the phallus in the fundamental disparity of its function, the virile function, is situated in the two ways of surmounting the Other's castration.

526. #526

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.77

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice structurally resists 'disacousmatization': its source is constitutively concealed, meaning ventriloquism is not an exception but the very condition of voice as object—the voice emerges precisely in the void from which it supposedly stems, operating as both surplus-of-body and no-more-body (plus-de-corps), and thus as the operator of the impossible division between interior and exterior.

     wield and brandish his or her phonic phallus as long as its attachment to a body remained hidden... when one sees the gap, the crack, the hole, the cavity, the void, the very absence of phallus

527. #527

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.225

     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.

     the peculiarity, or singularity, of the phallic signifier is due precisely to the fact that it ruins the possibility of any simple affirmation or negation. It is the phallic signifier that is responsible for the production on each side of the table not of a simple statement but of two conflicting statements.

528. #528

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis is constituted not merely by repression of a single drive-impulse but by the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (hostile aggression and passive affection toward the father), with displacement onto an animal surrogate as the structural mechanism that transforms a comprehensible emotional reaction into a true neurosis, and with regression serving as an alternative or supplementary defense to repression proper.

     a passive affectionate impulse in favour of the father, which had already attained the genital (phallic) level of libido organization.

529. #529

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation by contrasting conversion hysteria (which largely confines its defence to repression) with obsessional neurosis (where libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase, superego harshness, and reaction-formations constitute a distinct and more elaborate defence structure), proposing that the castration complex drives both and that the difference lies in constitutional/temporal factors affecting the genital organisation of the libido.

     the genital organization (of the phallic phase) is wholly or partially forced back to the earlier sadistic-anal phase.

530. #530

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs a developmental series of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) each generating its specific fear-determinant, while simultaneously revising his earlier economic theory of anxiety to recast fear as an intentional ego-signal rather than an automatic libidinal discharge, and correlating each fear-determinant with a corresponding neurotic structure.

     The high narcissistic value placed upon the penis can be attributed to the fact that possession of this organ guarantees reunification with the mother (in the form of a mother-surrogate) through the act of coitus.

531. #531

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud revises his earlier metapsychological claim that repression converts libido into fear, arguing instead—on the basis of comparative analysis of Little Hans and the Wolf-man—that castration anxiety in the ego is the *motor* that drives repression, not its product; this inversion reconstitutes the causal relationship between anxiety and repression.

     oral regression has carried it too far from the phallic phase for that to be possible

532. #532

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny II: Male Illusions and Female Choices

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" through the asymmetry between male and female developmental logics, Ruda argues that the female logic—as a forced choice of one's own unconscious that precedes and exceeds the Oedipus complex—reveals a non-arbitrary, non-conscious freedom irreducible to the male totalizing illusion, making "woman" the name for an emancipatory act rather than a fixed entity.

     Freud discusses different ways in which this complex can be overcome... he therefore focuses on the developmental stage that he calls phallic, in which the male child starts to use his genitals.

533. #533

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.153

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *The Allure of False Objects*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary components of the objet a function as decoys that eclipse das Ding, and that sublimation—the uniquely human capacity to create meaning from lack—can be perverted into a destructive accumulation of false objects, generating an ethical obligation to distinguish between objects that carry the Thing's echo and mere lures.

     nuclear arsenals erect a phallic barrier against the abyss at the center of the symbolic Other

534. #534

     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.

     the peculiarity, or singularity, of the phallic signifier is due precisely to the fact that it ruins the possibility of any simple affirmation or negation. It is the phallic signifier that is responsible for the production on each side of the table not of a simple statement but of two conflicting statements.

535. #535

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.292

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 4. The Master Signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian master signifier (phallus) is grounded in the paradoxical intersection of the imaginary and symbolic constituted by the objet a, and that "phallocentrism" does not underwrite masculine superiority but rather reveals that masculinity is structurally defined by lack and anxiety, such that penis envy is most acutely suffered by those who possess a penis.

     the phallus stands simultaneously for the inevitability of imaginary capture and the indefinite telos of signification.

536. #536

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

     Theoretical move: By mapping gestalt concepts (figure/ground) onto the Schema R and contrasting it with Schema L, Boothby argues that symbolic castration is the process of "demotivation" that opens the real between the imaginary axis (m-i) and the symbolically mediated axis (I-M), distinguishing the fuller picture of the Oedipus complex from the neurotic, analytic situation mapped by Schema L.

     at the outside of the upper left and lower right corners we have 03A6 (the phallus), M (the 'signifier of the primordial object,' the maternal Thing)

537. #537

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.191

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p193" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 193. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>A Love Triangle

     Theoretical move: By arguing that the phallus as signifier is retroactively inscribed into the very formation of the narcissistic ego—simultaneously its last discovery and its originary motive—Boothby establishes that the Symbolic (and specifically the Name-of-the-Father/phallus) has priority over the Imaginary even at the most primitive level of ego formation, grounding this in Lacan's retroactive temporality (Nachträglichkeit) and its Freudian precedent in trauma theory.

     the phallus derives its special status in the child's imagination not only for its role in staging the question of imaginary identity and symbolic difference but also for the way that it provides an answer to the question of the mother's desire.

538. #538

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.293

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 5. Freudian “Materialism” and the Transcendence of Desire

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian doctrine of the phallus as master signifier, together with the contradictory nature of objet a (split between the imaginary and symbolic registers), explains how the unconscious simultaneously orients desire beyond all imaging and remains tied to the imaginary body — thus Freud's "materialism" is not biological determinism but an account of how natural need is dislocated into drive and desire through the orbit of objet a, making desire structurally "useless" and open to an indefinite range of objects.

     The doctrine of the phallus as master signifier leads us to a conclusion of more general import for the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious.

539. #539

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.169

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex

     Theoretical move: Lacan's innovation on the Oedipus complex is to ground the castration complex not in contingent parental threat but in a structural, essential transition from the imaginary to the symbolic order: the fragmentation of the ego-body-image (corps morcelé) is the internal psychical correlate of accession to the linguistic signifier, with the penis functioning as the privileged imaginary support for binary opposition at the foundation of language.

     The penis, says Lacan, bears 'the mark of the cut.'... it introduces a variable factor, a basic line of cleavage in the wholeness of the body gestalt.

540. #540

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.76

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freud's neurological mechanism of "side-cathexis" (from the Project for a Scientific Psychology) and the psychoanalytic phenomena of resistance, screen memories, and fetishism all operate through the same structural logic: a gestalt shift in which a peripheral perceptual element metonymically substitutes for and occludes the threatening focal content, a logic that Lacan explicitly links to the imaginary ego's function of méconnaissance.

     the approach to the site of the maternal phallus is arrested just short of the fearful revelation of its absence. The fetishistic interest then centers upon what it finds there.

541. #541

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.235

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: The passage elaborates two registers of symbolic castration—enjoyment and meaning—by drawing on Plato's account of sexuality as organism-within-organism (the genealogy of hysteria and the phallic 'conjunction of high and low'), and on Žižek's formulation of the phallus as insignia/mask that introduces a constitutive gap between the subject's immediate being and its symbolic mandate.

     one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, my virility, and so forth but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask that I put on in the same way a king or a judge puts on his insignia

542. #542

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.227

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy is essentially the "genre of the copula" — the signifying articulation of the missing link between life and the Symbolic — and that the phallus, appearing in comedy as a partial object rather than merely a signifier, materialises this constitutive contradiction; comedy's "realism" is thus the realism of the Real of desire and drive, not the reality principle.

     The phallus is the privileged signifier of this copula, precisely inasmuch as the latter exists only in the background of a missing link.

543. #543

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.219

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "phallic signifier" is not a gesture of phallocentrism but of desublimation: it reattaches the mystery of the Phallus to the piece of the Real whose veiling produced sublime Meaning, and comedy is the human practice that structurally performs the same move—materializing the "behind" as a finite, trivial object rather than an infinite abyss, thereby showing that castration always arrives in a concrete form, not as pure lack.

     The 'phallic signifier' as the signifier of castration (also referred to as the signifier of lack) is, one could say, the signifier of the *missing link* between the biological and the Symbolic (or between nature and culture) *as the generic point of sexuation.*

544. #544

     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.

     this signifier is chosen as the most salient of what can be grasped in sexual intercourse as real, as well as the most symbolic, in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent in intercourse to the (logical) copula.

545. #545

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.208

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič redefines Lacanian castration not as mere lack/amputation but as the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability — and derives from this the comic form as the radicalization of the human norm, where comic characters are not subjects opposed to structure but "subjectivized points of the structure itself" running wild.

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

546. #546

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.212

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the phallus functions as the signifier of castration not because anatomy is destiny, but because an anatomical peculiarity comes to incarnate a pre-existing symbolic impasse — the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment — and psychoanalysis, by disclosing this contingent linkage, dethrones the phallus from necessity to contingency and reveals human sexuality as itself the problematic junction of nature and culture.

     he calls the phallus the signifier of castration (and not, perhaps, the signifier of its opposite: of some full enjoyment, symbol of fecundity, or something of that kind)

547. #547

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.202

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the structural core of comedy is not mere bisection but the emergence of a surplus element ("comic object," factor x) from any split of an imaginary One—a logic she grounds in a re-reading of Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium*, where Zeus's second cut (relocating the genitals) introduces surplus-jouissance as the element that perpetually prevents the two halves from fusing back into One, and which Lacan identifies as the essential comic reference to the phallus.

     This fact confirms what I told you about the essential driving force of the comical, namely that it ultimately always involves a reference to phallus.

548. #548

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through close analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis involves not merely repression of a single drive-impulse but the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (sadistic aggression toward the father and passive affection for him), with displacement—not reaction-formation—as the operative mechanism, and that regression can serve as an alternative or supplement to repression in warding off disagreeable drive-impulses.

     a passive affectionate impulse in favour of the father, which had already attained the genital (phallic) level of libido organization.

549. #549

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud reverses his earlier metapsychological thesis by arguing, on the basis of comparative analysis of Little Hans and the Wolf-Man, that castration anxiety in the ego *causes* repression rather than resulting from it — fear is prior to repression, not its product — while acknowledging an unresolved contradiction with evidence from the 'actual neuroses' where disrupted libido does appear to generate anxiety.

     the prerequisite of such a relationship would be the sacrifice of his genitals, i.e. of that which makes him different from a woman

550. #550

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, arguing that the distinguishing mechanism of obsessional neurosis is libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase (driven by the castration complex against the Oedipus complex), accompanied by drive de-mergence, a uniquely harsh superego, and reaction-formations in the ego — contrasting with hysteria's simpler reliance on repression alone.

     the first success it achieves is that the genital organization (of the phallic phase) is wholly or partially forced back to the earlier sadistic-anal phase

551. #551

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.117

     **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 sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

     men are doing the opposite, trying to arrive at their phallic symbolic identity which eludes them forever, haunted by a compulsive doubt: 'Am I really a man?'

552. #552

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.141

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not a binary opposition between two self-identical terms but a "crumbled" asymmetry in which one signifier (the masculine/phallic Master-Signifier S1) lacks its binary counterpart, so that the feminine position is pure difference/excess (M+) rather than a second species; this generates a double transcendental genesis in which S1 and the chain of S2 each retroactively posit the other as what fills its own constitutive lack.

     the only signifier of sexual difference is the masculine ('phallic') signifier

553. #553

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.416

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

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

     does not this obstruction, this sabotage of her own intent, testify to a dimension in her which resists the domination of the Phallus?

554. #554

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "speculative proposition" ('The Spirit is a bone', 'Wealth is the Self') structurally mirrors the Lacanian formula of fantasy ($◇a): in both, the subject's impossibility of signifying self-representation finds its positive form in an inert object that fills the void left by the failure of the signifier, and this logic is extended through the dialectic of language, flattery, and alienation in the Phenomenology, culminating in a critique of Kantian external reflection as unable to grasp this immanent reflexive movement.

     from Lacanian theory we know that the signifier of this conversion, by means of which lack as such is symbolized, is the phallus.

555. #555

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian move of "substance as subject" is accomplished not through increased activity but through an empty, purely formal gesture — the signifier — by which the subject assumes/repeats as its own act what has already happened; and it demonstrates this through the funeral rite, the Fall, and culminates in reading the phallus as the Lacanian signifier of this formal conversion, the "unity of opposites" where radical bodily externality passes into pure interiority of thought.

     'phallus' designates the juncture at which the radical externality of the body as independent of our will, as resisting our will, joins the pure interiority of our thought.

556. #556

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the passage from positing to external to determinate reflection in Hegel requires not merely that the subject recognizes itself in the alienated Other, but that the essence must presuppose itself in the form of its own otherness—a self-fissure that constitutes subjectivity as distinct from substance, and which the Feuerbachian model of overcoming alienation fails to grasp because it omits the necessity of redoubled reflection (the incarnation motif).

     it is in this sense that the phallus is a 'transcendental signifier': if, following Adorno, we define as 'transcendental' the inversion by means of which the subject experiences his radical limitation... as his constitutive power

557. #557

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's proposition "there is no metalanguage" must be taken literally—not as post-structuralist infinite self-referentiality, but as the necessity of an irreducible object (objet petit a) excluded from yet internal to the symbolic order; the "Lenin in Warsaw" joke illustrates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz logic of the master signifier, while the conscript joke illustrates how the object is produced by, yet cannot be reduced to, the signifying texture itself.

     It is in this precise sense that the phallus is the signifier of castration. This is the logic of the phallic inversion which sets in when the demonstration of power starts to function as a confirmation of a fundamental impotence.

558. #558

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's insistence on the primacy of metaphor over metonymy and on the phallic signifier as the signifier of castration radically distinguishes him from post-structuralism: where Derrida sees the localization of lack as taming dissemination, for Lacan the phallic signifier sustains the radical gap by embodying its own impossibility, thereby preventing (rather than securing) a metalanguage position.

     The Lacanian name of this paradoxical element is, of course, the phallus as signifier, a kind of negative version of 'truth as the index of itself'. The phallic signifier is, so to speak, an index of its own impossibility.

559. #559

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.131

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > *6. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with* Me and Identificatio n with the Object

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and theoretical elaborations for a chapter on *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me*, with substantive theoretical content concentrated in notes 4, 6, 13, 17, and 25 on identity, fantasy, the phallus as signifier, and castration.

     the phallus is not a body part, not the penis, but a signifier... it is a meaningless signifier, a signifier-without-signified that signifies only itself. Thus, if one reproaches Lacan for his phallocentrism... the phallus stands out, according to Lacan's vision of things, for its stupidity and for its impotence.

560. #560

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.92

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that fantasy is not an escape from reality but a solution to the torment of desire—it stages a determinate answer to the enigma of the Other's desire, thereby producing the very "sense of reality" that we mistake for the real world, while the Real is revealed precisely at the traumatic transition-point between desire and fantasy.

     The answer, not surprisingly, is the phallus, represented by Mr. Eddy, the site of power within this fantasy construction. The phallus functions to signify the Other's desire.

561. #561

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.79

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer** > Incest as the Fantasmatic Solution

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Fire Walk with Me's apparent formal incoherence resolves once its two parts are read as contrasting worlds of desire and fantasy: the fantasy world exposes the structural (not supernatural) conditions of social violence, identifies fantasy-as-such with incest as the fantasmatic mode of accessing the prohibited object, and demonstrates how the signifier 'garmonbozia' models fantasy's function of filling the gap in the signified — all organized around the figure of BOB as embodiment of the phallus that 'can play its role only when veiled.'

     Both BOB's resistance to publicity and his ability to transgress prohibitions suggests, I would argue, that he occupies a position outside the system of signification and its rules. This is the position of the exceptional signifier, the signifier of exception, what psychoanalysis calls the phallus. The phallus, according to Lacan, 'can play its role only when veiled.'

562. #562

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Laura Palmer's ethical act in *Fire Walk with Me* consists in embracing the death drive (figured by the ring's circular absence) against phallic authority (figured by BOB/the letter), and that this act—possible only once Laura acknowledges the lack in the Other—constitutes the film's privileged ethical position, one the spectator is invited to share.

     Whereas the drive circulates around an absence, the phallus attempts to fill in this absence—the hole left by castration—with the materiality of the letter.

563. #563

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.93

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > We Can Only Go So Far

     Theoretical move: Fantasy structures enjoyment only by maintaining the subject at a distance from its object—when the subject gets too close to fully "having" the fantasy object, the fantasy dissolves, revealing that its promise of direct access to enjoyment is constitutively illusory; the father/phallus functions as the necessary barrier that keeps fantasy operative, and his status is always already fantasmatic.

     The phallus gets in the way of Peter's enjoyment of Alice... brandishing his heavily phallicized gun and threatening castration for the wayward son.

564. #564

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.69

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the failure to fully commit to fantasy — epitomised by Sailor's investment in symbolic/phallic authority and Lula's investment in imaginary authority — is not a warning against fantasy but a demonstration of what is lost when subjects orient themselves toward the Other's recognition rather than following the logic of fantasy to its gap-exposing conclusion.

     Sailor's investment in symbolic authority and its ideal of noncastration leads him ultimately to go along with Bobby Peru's heist.

565. #565

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.140

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

     phallus, 85-86,142-43,147-50, 153, 169-70. See also Lacan, Jacques

566. #566

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.82

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Struggle Between Life ond Deoth**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in *Fire Walk with Me*, the Man From Another Place figures the Lacanian libido as detached body part—the primordial lost object that institutes the death drive—while BOB figures the phallus as an attempt to short-circuit the drive by possessing the object without loss; the film shows that phallic authority is secretly subordinate to the death drive, and that fantasy makes visible the hidden dependency of the social order on this structure.

     The phallus represents an attempt to short-circuit the drive, to obtain enjoyment without suffering from the absence that characterizes the drive.

567. #567

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.128

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

     Theoretical move: Fink expounds Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, arguing that masculine structure is constituted by universal phallic determination grounded in the exception of a foreclosed primal father, while feminine structure is constituted by the 'not-all' — an incompleteness with respect to the phallic function that opens onto an Other jouissance whose status is ex-sistence rather than existence within the symbolic order.

     The formula Vx<l>x thus means that the whole of a man falls under the phallic function ... man is altogether determined by symbolic castration, that is, every bit of him falls under the sway of the signifier.

568. #568

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.76

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Introduction of a Third Term*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the paternal metaphor/function, by introducing a third term (Name-of-the-Father) that disrupts the mother-child dyad, is structurally equivalent to the operation of Separation, and that the failure of this function is what produces psychosis; language itself is thereby theorized as the protective mechanism that transforms dangerous dyadic jouissance into structured desire.

     There is a roller, made of stone, of course, which is potentially there at the level of the trap and which holds and jams it open. That is what we call the phallus.

569. #569

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

     it could be equated with the phallus (<1>), whereas my sense is that what is in question here is the mOther's desire as lost, or the lost mother-child unity.

570. #570

     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.

     the phallus (as the signifier of desire), the phallic function, sexual difference, phallic jouissance, Other jouissance

571. #571

     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.

     it is the phallus and not the man that will be her partner... Seeing herself only in terms of the phallus, that is, in terms of her position as defined in relation to a man, other women who do not seem to be thus defined are cast as Other.

572. #572

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.77

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > Signifier Mother's Desire

     Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor's substitution of S2 for the mOther's desire retroactively produces S1, constitutes the desiring subject through separation, and simultaneously precipitates all four algebraic elements (S1, S2, $, and objet petit a) as a single logical event in Lacan's metapsychology.

     in the 1960s as the phallus, we can understand it most generally as the signifier that comes to signify (to wit, replace, symbolize, or neutralize) the Other's desire.

573. #573

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.133

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that S(A)—the signifier of the lack in the Other—functions as Woman's second "partner" in the sexuation table, and that its meaning has shifted in Lacan's work from a symbolic designator of the Other's desire to a real-register signifier of a primordial loss; this asymmetry grounds two distinct paths beyond neurosis (desire/masculine vs. sublimation/feminine) and implies that feminine subjectivity is constituted through an encounter with jouissance rather than through subjection to a master signifier.

     a woman generally gains access to the signifier of desire in our culture via a man or a 'masculine instance'… the phallic signifier itself

574. #574

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.193

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

     <I> -The phallus as signifier of desire or jouissance; not negativizable.

575. #575

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.85

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *Subjectifying the Cause: A Temporal Conundrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that separation and the subjectification of the cause operate under a retroactive temporal logic (future anterior / Nachträglichkeit) that is irreducible to classical linear causality, and that this culminates in the traversal of fantasy as the moment when the Other's desire is fully "signifierized," liberating the subject from the fixity of the Name-of-the-Father and enabling genuine action.

     the phallus being the signifier of desire, i.e., of the Other's desire

576. #576

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.121

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **The Phallus and the Phallic Function**

     Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized not as the cause but as the *signifier* of desire (and of lack), while objet petit a is posited as the real, unsignifiable cause of desire; the phallic function is then defined as the alienating function of language that institutes lack, which grounds the subsequent account of sexuation and jouissance's non-conservation.

     the phallus generally serves as desire's signifier... the phallus is the signifier of lack. Its displacements and shifts indicate the movement of lack within the structure as a whole.

577. #577

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.118

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

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's theory of sexuation turns on a dialectic of part and whole (not all and some), and that misreadings—especially in translations of Seminar XX—have distorted this; he proposes to reframe castration as alienation, the phallus as the signifier of desire, and the Name-of-the-Father as S(Ⱥ), thereby advancing a theory of sexuation that transcends Freud's culture-specific terms.

     the phallus as the signifier of desire

578. #578

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.204

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Subject and the Other's Desire

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus elaborates key theoretical moves from the main text: the neurotic's fantasy structure as ($◇D) rather than ($◇a) - conflating the Other's demand with the Other's desire - and the topology of the subject/Other relation, while clarifying that separation involves replacing demand with objet a in the neurotic's fantasy.

     an intrusion-effectuated by what one can variously characterize as the father, the Father's Name, or the phallus-ousting it from a total intersection with the mother

579. #579

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.236

     <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.

     Phallus, 101-25; defined, 173; imaginary, 114; jouissance and, 106-7, 120; lack and, 103; mOther's desire and, 57; Name-of-the-Father and, 58, 185n.9; phallic function and, 10 1-4; signifier of desire, 65, 102

580. #580

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.211

     <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).

     the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be merely contingent… the phallus will continue to serve as at least a signifier of desire for some time

581. #581

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.53

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > Name-of-the-Father Mother's Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Name-of-the-Father operates first as a "rigid designator" (primordial signifier) and only becomes a full-fledged signifier through a further separation that enables displacement within the dialectical chain — thus grounding the paternal function's multiple Lacanian designations (nom/non du père, phallus, S(Ⱥ)).

     Lacan to refer to the symbolic element operative in the paternal function in a variety of ways: as the Father's Name, the father's no-saying or prohibition, the phallus (as signifier of desire), and the signifier of the Other's desire, S(A)

582. #582

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

     The Phallus and the Phallic Function

583. #583

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.219

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's deployment of the "phallic signifier" is a desublimating move—not a phallocentric idealization but a demystification that reattaches the symbolic function of the phallus to the Real of castration; comedy is then positioned as the cultural practice that performs an analogous desublimation, materializing the "infinite passion" of the subject in a finite, concrete object, thereby illuminating that Lacanian castration always arrives in a particular, embodied form rather than as pure lack.

     the 'phallic signifier' as the signifier of castration (also referred to as the signifier of lack) is, one could say, the signifier of the missing link between the biological and the Symbolic (or between nature and culture) as the generic point of sexuation.

584. #584

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.83

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy's formal mechanism is the sustained visibility of the split between the ego and the id (It), which is structurally produced through the comic "Character" — defined as an enjoying incarnation of a unary trait — whose passionate attachment to an object stretches and exposes the missing link between the signifier and jouissance that normally remains veiled in imaginary unity.

     the happiness of the phallus is to be distinguished from the happiness of its bearer

585. #585

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.235

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys two registers of symbolic castration — enjoyment and meaning — using Plato's Timaeus to illuminate the paradoxical exteriority of sexuality to the organism, and Žižek's account of the phallus-as-insignia to show that symbolic castration is not symbolic-as-metaphorical but the constitutive gap opened by assumption of a symbolic mandate.

     one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, my virility, and so forth but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask that I put on in the same way a king or a judge puts on his insignia

586. #586

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.226

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Comedy is theorized as the genre of the copula—the site where the missing link between life and the signifier is made to appear—and the phallus is identified as the privileged signifier of this copula, one that appears in comedy not as signifier but as partial object, materializing the contradictions of the Symbolic. The 'realism' of comedy is then relocated from the reality principle to the Real of desire/drive as an irreducible incongruence within human existence.

     The phallus is the privileged signifier of this copula, precisely inasmuch as the latter exists only in the background of a missing link.

587. #587

     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.

     This signifier is chosen as the most salient of what can be grasped in sexual intercourse [copulation] as real, as well as the most symbolic, in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent in intercourse to the (logical) copula.

588. #588

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.212

     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.

     Lacan insists on the term castration, although what he means by it is very often misunderstood. The key to his argument is, first, that he calls the phallus the signifier of castration

589. #589

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.202

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium* contains a second, overlooked "cut" — the superimposition of genitals — that introduces a surplus-enjoyment irreducible to the complementarity logic of halves seeking fusion; this "comic object" (x) is structurally equivalent to the phallus as the ultimate comic reference, confirming that comedy is grounded in a logic of heteronomous addition that perpetually prevents the return to imaginary Oneness.

     This fact confirms what I told you about the essential driving force of the comical, namely that it ultimately always involves a reference to phallus.

590. #590

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.426

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 6The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the argument that ideological formations (anti-Semitism, the Decalogue, totalitarian power) require a fantasmatic obscene supplement, and that the structure of castration paradoxically entails losing castration itself as surplus-enjoyment; several notes further develop the structural logic of the Master-Signifier and the irreducibility of symbolic identity to private psychic content.

     the threat of castration involves the loss of the phallus as in itself the signifier of symbolic castration

591. #591

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.35

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegelian concrete universality is not a peaceful synthesis of particularities but is itself the site of an irreducible antagonism or "inherent gap of the One," such that particular forms are failed attempts to resolve the universal's self-contradiction — a logic that surpasses both Kantian moral abstraction and Laclau's externally opposed logics of difference and antagonism.

     the phallus as the organ of insemination or the phallus as the organ of urination ... Hegel's point is not that ... the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination

592. #592

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.399

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical glosses; while several substantive conceptual asides occur (on the phallus as signifier of castration, Saint Paul's comic reinterpretation of Christ's death, the banality of the Good, and Stalinist normalization), the material is primarily footnote apparatus rather than sustained theoretical argument.

     The phallus is simultaneously the 'pure' signifier, the signifier without a signified, the signifier of the lack of signifier, a signifier which, deprived of any determinate meaning, stands for the pure virtuality of meaning 'as such,' and, as Lacan never ceases to repeat, the exemplary imaginary signifier

593. #593

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.86

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

     Lacan's answer is: the phallic signifier qua 'reflexive' signifier, the signifier of the barred Other, the signifier of the lack of signifier, the signifier without signified

594. #594

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.402

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote apparatus for a chapter on Henry James, but it does substantive theoretical work by: (1) deploying the Lacanian triad of objects (objet petit a, S of barred A, big Phi) to map three types of Hitchcockian narrative objects found in James; and (2) critically noting James's failure to fully confront the ethical claim of revolutionary radicalism, contrasting this with Hegel's acknowledgment that the 'rabble' (Pöbel) is justified in its unconditional demands on society.

     the big Phi [the overwhelming phallic presence]

595. #595

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.248

     29 > **20. Steven Spielberg's Search for the Father**

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on Spielberg) argues that Spielberg's films consistently stage the failure of paternal/symbolic authority to protect the subject from the gaze, and that the subject's only recourse is to sacrifice symbolic identity rather than master the gaze, which remains an irresolvable deadlock of desire.

     Mann must cede all his emblems of masculinity and phallic power

596. #596

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.235

     29 > **6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions**

     Theoretical move: This footnote-heavy passage advances the theoretical argument that racist ideology operates at the level of fantasy (jouissance attributed to the Other), that Lee's formal excess targets this fantasmatic racism whereas Haggis's realism misses it, and that Mann's male heroes instantiate a Kantian ethics of excess structurally tied to the phallic exception.

     Men or so Mann shows—can only perform their duty by constituting themselves as an exception because of the very structure of male subjectivity (its constitution relative to the phallus as the exceptional signifier).

597. #597

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.23

     **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Gaze as Object** > **Desiring Elsewhere**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the early Lacanian film theory tradition misreads Lacan by conflating desire with a Nietzschean/Foucaultian will to mastery; the properly Lacanian gaze is not the vehicle of mastery but an objet petit a—a point of traumatic, unassimilable enjoyment in the Other that causes desire precisely by remaining out of reach, thereby reorienting film theory from the imaginary look to the real gaze.

     What he is looking for is not, as one says, the phallus—but precisely its absence.

598. #598

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.152

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

     Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

     objet petit a in the case of a man, and Φ in the case of a woman

599. #599

     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.

     the phallus is not a body part, not the penis, but a signifier...it occupies an exceptional position among signifiers--a position outside the signifying field...a signifier-without-a-signified that signifies only itself.

600. #600

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.7

     **Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary compilation that defines and elaborates several Lacanian and Hegelian concepts — Anxiety, Analysand, Appearance, Sublation (Aufhebung), the Barred subject, Beautiful Soul, Beyond (Jenseits), and Castration — drawing on Žižek, Fink, McGowan, and Kalkavage to show how each concept performs a specific theoretical function within the broader structure of desire, subjectivity, and dialectical mediation.

     The imaginary phallus is what the child assumes someone must have in order for them to be the object of the mother's desire and, as her desire is usually directed towards the father, it is assumed that he possesses the phallus.

601. #601

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.11

     **Contradiction** > **Desire**

     Theoretical move: Desire is constitutively tied to lack, structured as the desire of the Other, and operates as an endless metonymic movement through signifiers that can never arrive at a final object—making desire irreducibly different from need and rendering any fantasmatic 'solution' to desire a retreat from its fundamental logic.

     Desire and the unconscious are founded through the recognition of a fundamental lack: the absence of the phallus

602. #602

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.45

     **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.

     what Lacan calls the Master-Signifier (the phallus as signifier), the 'empty' signifier without a signified: this signifier (the paternal metaphor) is the substitute for the mother's desire.

603. #603

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

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

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

     social authority really is 'phallic' insofar as it exerts the effect of symbolic castration on its bearer: if, say, I am a king, I have to accept that the ritual of investiture makes me a king, that my authority is embodied in the insignia I wear.

604. #604

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.60

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

     Lacan makes the phallus the signifier of the difference as such… The lack of the signifier gets a signifier, and this signifier is called Phallus.

605. #605

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.47

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the psychoanalytic insistence on sex as an ontological inquiry (rather than a moral or identity question) is what gives sexual difference its political explosiveness, and that the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender" performs a neutralization by removing sex's irreducible Real dimension — leaving psychoanalysis in a paradoxical position of being coextensive with the desexualization of reality while remaining absolutely uncompromising about the sexual as irreducible Real, not substance.

     gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex… sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry

606. #606

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.56

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via a close reading of Freud and Lacan, that sexual difference does not arise from the existence of two sexes but from the non-existence of the "second sex"—a constitutive ontological deficit—and traces Lacan's shift from locating "pure loss" on the side of the body (early work) to locating it within the signifying order itself (late work), showing that surplus-enjoyment emerges at the place of a missing signifier ("with-without"), which is also the origin of sexual division.

     the phallus is famously defined by Lacan at this time as designating these 'meaning effects as a whole'

607. #607

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.65

     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.

     'putting it on' suggests femininity…The 'phallic function' is not masculine: what we perceive as 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are different ways of its deployment.