Semblance

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (48)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.79

   From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > The 'stonny ocean' of illusion

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's transcendental dialectic (the 'logic of illusion') structurally anticipates a Lacanian conception of truth and illusion: truth is not correspondence to an external object but conformity of knowledge with itself (a formal criterion), while dialectical illusion is not a false representation of a real object but an 'object in the place of the lack of an object' — a structure that aligns Kantian transcendental illusion with the Lacanian concept of le semblant.

   Transcendental illusion has to do not with the content of an 'image' but with its very existence - it deceives on the level of being. In this respect, the Kantian concept of (transcendental) illusion is very close to the Lacanian concept of le semblant.

2. #02

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

   the analyst must situate himself as the semblance of objet petit a, the cause of the analysand's desire … In 1973, Lacan links objet petit a to the concept of SEMBLANCE, asserting that a is a 'semblance of being'.

3. #03

   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_179"></span>**semblance**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of Lacan's concept of *semblant* (semblance) from a classical appearance/essence opposition, through its connection to the imaginary/symbolic distinction, to its mature formulation in the early 1970s where truth is shown to be continuous with—rather than opposed to—appearance, and where objet petit a, love, and jouissance are all theorized in terms of semblance.

   Lacan devotes his 1970–1 seminar to 'a discourse that would not be semblance', in which he argues that TRUTH is not simply the opposite of appearance, but is in fact continuous with it; truth and appearance are like the two sides of a moebius strip, which are in fact only one side.

4. #04

   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_54"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0069"></span>**discourse**

   Theoretical move: The passage systematically presents Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses as four possible social bonds founded in language, each defined by rotating four algebraic symbols (S1, S2, $, a) through four structural positions, with the discourse of the master as the generative base from which the others derive—and with the discourse of the analyst positioned as the structural inverse of mastery, making psychoanalysis inherently subversive.

   In 1971, Lacan proposes that the position of the agent is also the position of the SEMBLANCE.

5. #05

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_211"></span>**truth**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of truth is irreducibly plural in its functions: it is always particular (not universal), tied to desire and speech rather than exactitude or science, and structurally intertwined with deception, fiction, and the Real—making it impossible to reduce to a single definition while remaining central to psychoanalytic ethics and treatment.

   the analyst must take them into account (see SEMBLANCE).

6. #06

   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_180"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0203"></span>**Seminar**

   Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliographic and historical entry on Lacan's Seminar, tracing its institutional history, the oral-to-written transmission problem, and providing a complete chronological index of all twenty-seven annual seminars — functioning as reference material rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

   XVIII | 1970-1 | On a discourse that would not be semblance.

7. #07

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

   <span id="Chapter13.htm_page140"></span>Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

   Theoretical move: Fisher develops a theory of sonic hauntology through Little Axe's music, arguing that the combination of blues and dub constitutes a political-aesthetic practice that confronts American slavery as unassimilable trauma by detaching sound from presence (acousmatic production), producing a "dyschronic contemporaneity" that refuses to let the dead be silenced.

   as though it really were just a re-presentation of something that already existed in its own right

8. #08

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

   <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

   Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Joy Division's depression is not a mood but an ontological-philosophical position that operates beyond the pleasure principle—a Schopenhauerian diagnosis of the Will's obscene undead insatiability—and that what makes it theoretically distinct from ordinary sadness or rock nihilism is the total absence of an object-cause, making it structurally homologous to Lacanian melancholia while functioning as a dangerously seductive half-truth about the human condition.

   he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions

9. #09

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

   <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

   Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.

   The words are little labyrinths, enigmas with no possible solution – the appearance of enigmas, perhaps – false-fronted follies decorated with Chinese and Japanese motifs.

10. #10

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.32

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that woman occupies the structural position of truth for man precisely because she holds knowledge of the disjunction between jouissance and semblance; this truth — usually domesticated under the label "castration complex" — is what the whole formation of masculine subjectivity is organised to evade, and Lacan links this structure to a broader critique of capitalist discourse via the discourse of the master.

    the woman is precisely in this relation, this relationship, for man, the moment of truth... she is the one that the whole formation of man is designed to respond to, and now over and against everything, the whole status of her semblance

11. #11

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.17

    **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's pleasure-principle economy as a "hyper-hedonism" in which jouissance is structurally produced by discourse rather than being a natural fact, and introduces surplus-jouissance as the impossible-real effect that the emerging discourse of the unconscious names but cannot simply realise.

    That it existed up to then as a token, is indeed the reason why I put it at the source of the semblance.

12. #12

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.162

    **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.

    the irremediable division between enjoyment and the semblance. The truth is to enjoy being a semblance

13. #13

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    **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.

    it is at this level of discourse alone, that it is carried towards, allow me, some effect that might not be a semblance... the only thing which differentiates it from it, is that this semblance is conveyed in a discourse

14. #14

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVIII by arguing that discourse is a structure irreducible to any speaking subject, that the subject is necessarily alienated and split within it, and that the question of "a discourse that might not be a semblance" can only be posed from within the artefact of discourse itself — there being no metalanguage, no Other of the Other, and no true of the true from which to judge it.

    On a discourse which might not be a semblance... A semblance of discourse, for example. You know that this is the position described as logical positivism.

15. #15

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.21

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan designates the unnamed "top-left" place in the Four Discourses as the place of the *semblance*, establishing that the semblance is not the contrary of truth but its strictly correlative dimension (*demansion*), and that scientific discourse reaches the real only through the algebraic articulation of semblance—where the real appears as the impossible hole in that semblance.

    this place still not designated, I am designating by its name, by the name that it deserves, it is very precisely the place of the semblance... semblance is not only locatable, essential, to designate the primary function of truth, it is impossible without this reference to qualify what is involved in discourse

16. #16

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    **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.

    There is no discourse except a semblance... The semblance is only stated starting from the truth... As truth it can only say the semblance about enjoyment, and it wins over sexual enjoyment on every occasion.

17. #17

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.128

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses his experience of the Siberian landscape (streaming/furrowing) and Japanese calligraphy to establish that the letter/writing belongs to the Real as the 'furrowing of the signified,' while the signifier belongs to the Symbolic — thereby distinguishing the letter from the signifier and articulating the concept of 'lituraterre' (litoral/literal/literature) as the erasure that constitutes the subject.

    The letter which erases, is distinguished by being a rupture then, of the semblance, which dissolves whatever pretended to be a form, a phenomenon, a meteor.

18. #18

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that discourse is constitutively a semblance—not a semblance *of* something else, but semblance as its proper object—and that the Freudian hypothesis (repetition against the pleasure principle, introducing surplus-jouissance) is what points toward a discourse that might not be a semblance, linking the emergence of the signifier, the master signifier, and the subject to this economy of semblance.

    everything that is discourse, can only present itself as semblance, and nothing is built on it that is not at the basis of this something that is called signifier, which... is identical to this status as such of the semblance.

19. #19

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that discourse is always discourse of semblance, and that the Four Discourses—grounded in the tetrad of semblance, truth, enjoyment, and surplus-jouissance—are held together not by their content but by the formal necessity of the number four and its vectors; the analytic discourse is distinguished by placing the objet petit a in the position of semblance, thereby intervening in the gap between body and discourse.

    discourse as such, is always the discourse of a semblance. And that if there is something somewhere which authorises me some enjoyment, precisely, it is to pretend (faire semblant).

20. #20

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.137

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the sexual non-relation and the logic of sexuation in the mathematical real, arguing that the One (Y a d'l'un) does not found a binary complementarity between man and woman because the not-all prevents any consistent application of the principle of contradiction to gender; simultaneously, he insists that the analyst must hold the position of the little o-object as semblance, and that the mathematical real—which resists both truth and meaning—is the proper anchor for analytic discourse.

    it is a matter of ensuring that the one who plays the function of small o in it holds a position...of a semblance

21. #21

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.126

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the unary trait (support of imaginary identification via the mirror stage) from the *Yad'lun* (there-is-One), while arguing that the Not-all grounds both the crowd and the question of Woman; he then re-situates the Subject Supposed to Know as a pleonasm pointing to the analyst's legitimate occupation of the position of semblance with respect to jouissance.

    the analyst does not pretend, he occupies, he occupies with what? This is what I am leaving to come back to, he occupies *the position* of a semblance.

22. #22

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.181

    J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan substitutes Peirce's schema with his own articulation of analytic discourse, identifying the *objet petit a* as the sole representamen in analysis — the analyst embodies this object as semblance/waste-product so that the analysand can be born to interpreting speech; the passage closes by reframing the analytic relation as fraternal brotherhood rooted in shared subjection to discourse, while warning that bodily fraternity without symbolic mediation gives rise to racism.

    The little o- analyst makes himself the representamen precisely, at the place of the semblance.

23. #23

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.47

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (the non-orientable surface) to argue that castration is structurally ubiquitous—present at every point of the relational surface between man and woman—and then anchors this topological claim to the Four Discourses, showing that the mathemes ($, S1, S2, a) constitute the logical "walls" behind which enjoyment, surplus-enjoyment, truth, and semblance must be situated.

    truth and semblance, enjoyment, surplus enjoyment

24. #24

    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.

    It is this pole that I designate as a semblance... the man and the woman make a pretence (font semblant) each one in this role.

25. #25

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.21

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

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

    It is truth or it is a semblance, a distinction that has nothing to do with the opposition between the true and the false. Because if it is a semblance, it is a semblance of truth precisely.

26. #26

    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.

    a discourse that might not be a semblance, in one case as in the other none exists, neither a discourse nor such an act

27. #27

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.88

    **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.

    What analytic discourse brings out is precisely the idea that that meaning is based on semblance (ce sens est du semblant).

28. #28

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.181

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's discourse is uniquely positioned to examine the truth of knowledge by placing the objet petit a in the place of semblance; he then develops a theory of knowledge as grounded in the Other (as locus of the signifier), where knowledge must be 'paid for' through use/enjoyment rather than exchange, and where the Letter reproduces without reproducing the same being—culminating in the claim that the Other's structural not-knowing constitutes the not-all, linking feminine sexuality, unconscious, and castration.

    it is indeed the analyst who, by putting the small o object in the place of the semblance, is in the most appropriate position for doing what it is right to do

29. #29

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.91

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real cannot constitute a universe on its own but only through its knotting with the Imaginary and Symbolic via the Borromean structure, and that the torus — not the simple ring — is the proper topological unit for this knotting; he further exploits the distinction between metaphor and structure to insist that topology here is structural (not merely analogical), while his anecdote about his grandson reframes the Unconscious as the intrusion of words one does not understand — language as parasitic.

    It is a semblance of metalanguage and since I make use in the text, I make use of this way of writing, s'embler, s'emblant to metalanguage.

30. #30

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.100

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relation between the Real, the universal, and sense: Lacan argues that the Real is defined by the exclusion of all sense and by impossibility (what does not cease not to be written), yet psychoanalysis as a practice depends on words having import — a tension he navigates by revisiting the Four Discourses, specifically the Discourse of the Analyst, to show how the barred subject holds the place of Truth through Knowledge, while the gap between S1 and S2 marks an irreducible incompletion.

    I remind you that the place of semblance where I put the object…that the place of semblance is not where I articulated that of the Truth.

31. #31

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.121

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates the Real, the Sinthome, and the Unconscious through a meditation on undecidability, negation, and the sign: the Real is defined by what does not cease not to be written (impossibility), the Unconscious is recast as 'bévue' (the structural stumbling of language), and the sinthome is identified with the mental as such — the upshot being that psychoanalysis produces only a 'semblance' of truth, not truth itself, because S1 never fully represents the subject for S2.

    psychoanalysis, is, is what seems true (fait vrai), but how must one understand this seems true? It is an effort at sense, but it is a sensblance (sens blant).

32. #32

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.165

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Pick Up Your Cave!

    Theoretical move: By reading Plato's cave allegory through Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and cognitive neuroscience, Žižek argues that the 'true Real' is not substantial reality behind appearances but rather the irreducible gap between modes of appearance itself—a parallax gap that culminates in the absolute split between the lived experience of selfhood and the 'nothing' of the open skull.

    what happens in this shift, rather, is that the very irreducibility of the appearance to its substantial support, its 'autonomy' with regard to it, engenders a Thing of its own, the true 'real Thing.'

33. #33

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.31

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "concrete universality" is not a neutral container of particulars but the irreducible tension and non-coincidence between levels—demonstrated through the logic of the frame (appearance appearing as such), the supernumerary exception that *is* the universal, and the "temporal parallax" by which the same principle cannot actualize simultaneously across domains, requiring retroactive reading (après-coup) to become legible.

    a thing is its own best mask... reality itself turns into its own appearance.

34. #34

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.150

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject of the unconscious has the structure of a Kierkegaardian apostle—a pure formal function of impersonal Truth rather than an expression of ego or id—and that the "Thing from Inner Space" (which modern art strains toward beyond the pleasure principle) is not the Kantian Thing-in-itself but rather the site of the direct inscription of subjectivity into reality, emerging through fantasy-staging of what is "actually" a rational phenomenon.

    Within the horizon of traditional metaphysics, art is about (beautiful) appearances with elusive and confused meanings, while science is about the reality beneath appearances.

35. #35

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.249

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

    Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

    if a girl gets a big diamond ring from her lover, this is not just a signal of his wealth but, simultaneously, a proof of it

36. #36

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.349

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

    the masks of the official ideological struggle fall off, the official opponents discover their 'deeper solidarity' and start to share their concerns

37. #37

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.312

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

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

    liberal hedonism elevates into its Cause the extra-symbolic Real of jouissance (which compels it to adopt a cynical attitude of reducing language, the symbolic medium, to a mere secondary irrelevant semblant, instrument of manipulation or seduction)

38. #38

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.133

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.

    we should introduce sexual difference here: far from indicating some kind of 'feminine' indecision and passivity... the negative feminine gesture would be the only way to break out of this deadlock

39. #39

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: By reading Henry James's *The Golden Bowl* and *The Wings of the Dove* through a Lacanian lens, Žižek argues that the network of protective lies ultimately serves to maintain the big Other's ignorance—keeping up social appearances—and that this "ethics of the unspoken" constitutes a false ethics, while "female masochism" is unmasked as a male fantasy rather than an attribute of feminine nature.

    what matters is that others do not know that he or she knows—if his or her knowledge is not known, it allows him or her to pretend not to know, and thus to keep up appearances.

40. #40

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.119

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Odradek as a Political Category

    Theoretical move: Odradek (Kafka's figure) is read as the lamella—jouissance embodied as immortal, purposeless, inhuman-human excess outside symbolic/paternal order—and this logic is extended to bureaucracy as the secular form of the divine Thing, and to the Alien series as a figuration of pure drive that capitalism exploits and sacralizes.

    The appearance of a nervous hyperactivity is, of course, a staged performance which masks a self-indulgent nonsensical spectacle of imitating, of playing 'efficient administration.'

41. #41

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.116

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Odradek as a Political Category

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Levinas and Adorno fail to account for the truly "inhuman" dimension of subjectivity—exemplified by the Muselmann—which cannot be subsumed under any ethical or normative frame; Žižek uses Agamben's Muselmann, the L Schema, and Kafka's Odradek to articulate a "neighbor" as monstrous, impenetrable Thing that exceeds Levinasian face-ethics and demands a radically different conceptualization of the human/inhuman boundary.

    the neighbor's face stands neither for my imaginary double/semblant nor for the purely symbolic abstract 'partner in communication'

42. #42

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.179

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Resistances to Disenchantment

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither the transcendental-philosophical defense of subjectivity nor the accommodationist strategy of finding neuronal correlates for psychoanalytic concepts constitutes an adequate response to the challenge of brain sciences; instead, psychoanalysis must locate itself within the brain sciences' own inherent silences and impossibilities, identifying the "absent Cause" of cognitivist accounts as the Freudian death drive / German Idealist self-relating negativity. Along the way, he maps four positions on consciousness through a Greimasian square and proposes a Badiouian framing of consciousness-emergence as Event.

    the only proper reply to this challenge is to meet the brain sciences' neuronal Real with another Real, not simply to ground the Freudian semblant within the neuronal Real.

43. #43

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.143

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

    appearances are saved, although there is an emotional desert all around

44. #44

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.281

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Heidegger's apparent opposition between "decisionist" active will and passive Gelassenheit is a symptomal torsion-point revealing their deep complicity, and extends this diagnosis to Nietzsche's ethico-political antinomy (militarism vs. peace), resolving both by showing that the Real is not an inaccessible Thing but the gap/antagonism that makes perspectives incommensurable—a solution structurally opposed to the "Oriental" Gelassenheit, which is ultimately indifference, in contrast to the violent, subject-splitting love proper to Christian/revolutionary engagement.

    So, in Alain Badiou's terms, the passion for the Real versus the passion of semblance.

45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.176

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.

    This shift from the split between appearance and reality to the split, inherent to appearance itself, between 'true' and 'false' appearance is to be linked to its obverse: to a split inherent to reality itself.

46. #46

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.261

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

    the psychiatrist as providing the 'compassionate cushion,' that is, as (re)constituting the social bond—or, rather, the semblance of such a bond

47. #47

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.58

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

    politics is reduced to a theater of appearances, to a passing phenomenon which will disappear with the arrival of the developed Communist (or technocratic) society

48. #48

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.90

    Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-81-0"></span>Realism in Psychoanalysis

    Theoretical move: Zupančič develops a Lacanian "realism of consequences" against both naïve realism and Meillassoux's correlationism, arguing that the Real is constituted not by matter or mathematical continuity but by the cut that discourse makes in nature—a cut whose reality is indexed by the impossible, i.e., the limit of consistency that discourse encounters. True materialism is grounded in contradiction and split, not in the primacy of matter.

    The articulation, and I mean algebraic articulation, of the semblance—which, as such, only involves letters—and its effects, this is the only apparatus by means of which we designate what is real.