Representation
ELI5
Representation in this framework doesn't mean simply making a picture or copy of something — it means the structural trick by which a gap or absence (the subject) gets a placeholder in language or an image, so that what "represents" always points back to something that can never itself be fully shown.
Definition
Representation, as it functions across the Lacanian corpus and its secondary elaborations, names not a neutral epistemic operation (the mirroring of a world in a mind) but a structurally unstable relay between the subject and the signifying chain. The governing formulation is Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz—the "representative of representation"—which Lacan seizes upon precisely because it short-circuits the classical camera-obscura model: what is at stake is not a picture of something absent but a structural placeholder that marks, within the field of the Other, the place from which the subject is constituted as lacking. In the scopic register (Seminar XIII), fantasy is defined as the "representative of representation," linking the gaze-as-objet-a to the divided subject: the screen, not the light, is the founding structure, because what organizes the visual field is not a physics of transmission but a topology in which the looking subject is itself captured. The picture does not represent; it presentifies the structure of capture, the slot where the subject vanishes. Representation is therefore always already the representative of something that itself cannot be represented—a fold or doubling that prevents any flat correspondence theory of meaning.
This doubled, self-undermining character of representation is taken up in the Hegelian-comic register by Zupančič, who reads the dialectical succession of epic, tragedy, and comedy in Hegel's Phenomenology as a progressive dissolution of representation as such. Where tragedy holds the universal apart from the individual by the mediation of the mask, comedy collapses that distance: the individual becomes the negative power through which universal powers vanish, making the comic character essence itself in its physical actuality. This is not the mere abolition of representation but, as Zupančič formulates it, its "new notion"—one structurally homologous to the Lacanian logic whereby a signifier represents a subject for another signifier. The speculative passage from abstract to concrete universality that comedy enacts is also the passage in which substance becomes subject through an inner split, and in which representation is revealed to be not a relation between two independently existing terms but the very operation through which the gap—the subject—is produced.
Place in the corpus
The concept lives at the intersection of several source texts. In jacques-lacan-seminar-13 and jacques-lacan-seminar-13-1, Lacan's sustained engagement with Velázquez's Las Meninas deploys representation as the site where the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz—the representative of representation—marks the capture of the scopic subject. Here representation cross-references the Subject directly: just as a signifier represents a subject to another signifier (the canonical formula), the pictorial object represents not a world but the slot where the subject of the gaze is constituted and simultaneously lost. This is an extension and specification of the barred subject ($), where the scopic field replaces the chain of signifiers as the medium of the structural fold. In jacques-lacan-seminar-16, representation is interrogated critically: its spatial-idealist mythology (inside/outside, camera obscura) is identified as the hidden theological support of the Subject Supposed to Know, a critique that aligns with the concept of the Real as what the Symbolic's own failures produce rather than merely fail to reach.
In short-circuits-alenka-zupancic-the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-the-mit-press-2008 and the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-alenka-zupancic, Zupančič repositions representation within the dialectical triad of Universality, Appearance, and Dialectics. Comedy's "new notion" of representation is structurally homologous to concrete universality (as opposed to abstract universality, which is merely a neutral container): in both cases, what was held external—the universal held apart from the individual by the mask, or the represented content held apart from the representing form—collapses inward so that the gap itself becomes the generative moment. This connects representation to Splitting of the Subject and to Absolute Knowing (the self-relating movement of spirit that no longer requires an external medium). The Kantian occurrences ground this genealogy: Kant's distinction between a permanent representation and the representation of something permanent already marks the irreducibility of the temporal, inner-determinative character of representation to any simple correspondence—the epistemological precondition that Lacan inherits and radicalizes.
Key formulations
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) (p.46)
Could we not say that in comedy, one moment of the substance represents the subject for another moment of the substance?
The quote is theoretically loaded because it literally transposes Lacan's canonical formula—"a signifier represents a subject to another signifier"—onto the field of Hegelian substance, replacing "signifier" with "moment of the substance": this substitution performs the very speculative passage from abstract to concrete universality it describes, showing that representation is not a relation between pre-given terms but the operation through which substance splits itself and thereby becomes subject.
Cited examples
This is a 12-occurrence concept; the corpus extractions did not surface a curated illustrative example. See the source page(s) above for the surrounding argument and the cross-referenced canonical concepts for their cited examples.
Tensions
This is a 12-occurrence concept; intra-corpus tensions and cross-framework comparative analysis are reserved for canonical-level coverage. See the cross-referenced canonical concepts for those layers.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (12)
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#01
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221
**Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan, in dialogue with Foucault, argues that the scopic drive and its object (the gaze as objet petit a) cannot be reduced to a physics of the visual field; instead, the screen—not light—is the founding structure of analytic experience, and fantasy must be understood as the "representative of representation," linking the scopic world to the divided subject and to the unthought that psychoanalysis makes thinkable.
Velasquez's picture is not the representation of, I would say, all the modes of representation, it is, in accordance with a term which of course is only going to be there as a dessert, which is the term on which I insist when I borrow it from Freud, namely, the representative of representation.
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#02
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a structural demonstration of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz: the picture-within-the-picture does not represent but rather *presentifies* the window-space of the gaze, showing that what constitutes the picture in its essence is not representation but the capture of the looking subject (sujet regardant) — a topology that introduces the dialectic of the subject via the scopic drive.
what constitutes the picture in its essence is not representation… the pictorial object is a Vorstellungs-representanz.
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#03
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.277
Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unquestioned presupposition of the Subject Supposed to Know—the assumption that knowledge is already organized somewhere—is the hidden theological core of idealism, and that psychoanalytic practice remains trapped in this idealism so long as it uncritically employs spatial metaphors (inside/outside, projection/introjection) derived from the camera-obscura model of representation.
the mythology of representation was able to be displaced into another mythology... Idealism could only hold up by confusing the order of thought with that of representation
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#04
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787
Theoretical move: Kant argues that while all knowledge begins with experience, not all knowledge derives from experience, establishing the distinction between a priori and empirical (a posteriori) knowledge; he further defends the objective reality of external intuition against idealism by grounding consciousness of external existence in the necessary condition for internal experience in time.
the representation of something permanent in existence, is not the same thing as the permanent representation; for a representation may be very variable and changing... and yet refer to something permanent
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#05
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECTION II. Of Time.
Theoretical move: Kant establishes time as a pure a priori form of inner intuition—not an empirical concept or objective property of things in themselves—grounding its empirical reality (as condition of all experience) while denying its absolute/transcendental reality, thereby laying the epistemological architecture of ideality that Lacan will later inherit when theorizing the subject's temporal structure and the conditions of the Symbolic and Real.
my representations follow one another, or are successive; but this means only that we are conscious of them as in a succession, that is, according to the form of the internal sense.
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#06
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > B. SECOND ANALOGY. > PROOF.
Theoretical move: Kant's Second Analogy argues that the causal principle ("everything that happens has a cause") is not derived empirically from observed regularities but is rather an a priori condition of the possibility of experience itself: only by subjecting the succession of phenomena to the law of causality can we distinguish objective temporal sequence from the merely subjective succession of apprehensions, thereby constituting phenomenal objects and empirical cognition at all.
We have representations within us, of which also we can be conscious... these representations are still nothing more than representations, that is, internal determinations of the mind in this or that relation of time.
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#07
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.46
part i
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy enacts the speculative Hegelian passage from abstract to concrete universality: not by representing the universal through the individual, but by forcing the universal to relate to itself, thereby generating the subject as the gap within substance—a movement she aligns with Lacanian representation and illustrates through Lubitsch and Chaplin.
we come not so much to the abolition of representation but, rather, to its new notion, which is in fact very close to the Lacanian concept of representation.
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#08
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.33
part i
Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy achieves a qualitative shift beyond tragedy by dissolving the gap of representation: where tragedy holds essence (the universal) apart from the actual self via the mask, comedy collapses that distance so that the individual self itself becomes the negative power through which universal powers vanish—making the comic character not the physical remainder of symbolic representation, but essence itself in its physical actuality.
The key issue of the entire section on the spiritual work of art is representation. It is precisely the (gradual) abolition of representation that puts the three genres of epic, tragedy, and comedy in a succession that is not simply historical, but also dialectical.
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#09
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.167
Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan
Theoretical move: Zupančič maps Deleuze's three-fold temporal structure of repetition (mechanical/comic, metamorphic/tragic, and unconditional/eternal-return) against Lacan's framework, arguing that Deleuze's attempt to ground selectivity and difference in a purely asubjective force (the eternal return) ultimately reinstates an absolute law that undermines the very subjective edge his political-philosophical predicates require.
instead of seeing this (through the prism of representation) as purely negative... representation of difference necessarily proceeds from categories of identity, similarity, or sameness... by producing difference as a conceptual object, it chases difference from the concept itself.
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#10
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.167
Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan
Theoretical move: Zupančič contrasts Deleuze's ontology of difference-as-repetition (three temporal modes, eternal return as selective force) with an implied Lacanian counter-position, arguing that Deleuze's asubjective account of repetition ultimately installs an absolute law that undermines the very predicates (excess, difference, nomadism) it claims to champion — thereby setting up the conceptual stakes for a Lacanian re-articulation of repetition central to comedy.
instead of seeing this (through the prism of representation) as purely negative... we have to make another shift of perspective
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#11
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.35
part i
Theoretical move: The passage traces a dialectical movement from epic to tragedy to comedy in Hegel's Phenomenology, arguing that comedy does not merely expose the failure of representation but dissolves representation altogether by making the individual self coincide with essence—the universal is no longer separated from the actual self by the mask, but appears as the physical itself.
It is precisely the (gradual) abolition of representation that puts the three genres of epic, tragedy, and comedy in a succession that is not simply historical, but also dialectical.
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#12
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.46
part i
Theoretical move: Župančič argues that the distinction between subversive and conservative comedy cannot be located in content or self-parody, but rather in the structural move comedy performs: the passage from abstract to concrete universality, in which substance becomes subject through an inner split — a move structurally homologous to Hegel's Phenomenology and illuminated by the Lacanian logic of representation.
Could we not say that in comedy, one moment of the substance represents the subject for another moment of the substance?