Semblance

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (84)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.37

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues, following Lacan, that analytic listening must bypass imaginary understanding and operate at the symbolic level—attending to the formal, material dimensions of speech (slips, pauses, compromise formations)—in order to localize and work with the analysand's jouissance, which belongs to the real and cannot be 'understood' but only detected and perturbed through oracular interpretation.

   understanding (the imaginary with its semblance of explanation) serves as little more than a cover and rationalization

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.67

   **Foucault's Critique of Analytic Power Dynamics**

   Theoretical move: Fink uses Foucault's critique of analytic power (analyst as "master of truth") as a foil to articulate Lacan's contrasting position: the analyst occupies a position of semblance rather than mastery, thereby redirecting the production of truth and interpretation back to the analysand, progressively dismantling the power dynamic the analysand projects onto the analyst.

   Lacan qualifies that position as one of semblance, not of mastery… the analyst is mere pretense, semblance, imposture. She is a master only as long as I see her in that way.

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.15

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING, VOLUME 2 > **My Approach to Case Studies Here**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that publishable case studies inevitably involve mastery-effects, selective framing, and suppression of contradictory material, and that the ideal of therapist-patient agreement rests on an impossible fantasy of total intersubjectivity—one Lacan's theory of structural misunderstanding forecloses.

   whether it was addiction, trauma, anxiety, hysteria, fantasy, semblance, or what have you

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.91

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Title of the Seminar**

   Theoretical move: Fink analyzes Lacan's seminar title *D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant* to show that Lacan's insistence that the discourse in question is not his own is a theoretical move asserting that psychoanalytic discourse is a structured, impersonal formation independent of the analyst's personality — a rejection of psychobiography as a basis for theory.

   D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.93

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Title of the Seminar** > COMMENTARY

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's seminar title "A discourse that would not be of semblance" operates as an overdetermined hypothesis rather than a testable proposition: semblance and truth are not opposites but strictly correlated dimensions, so any discourse aspiring to bypass semblance risks the illusion of unmediated access to truth—a move Lacan's own framework forecloses.

   Truth is not the opposite of semblance. Truth is the dimension—the demansion [...] that is strictly correlated with the dimension of semblance.

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.96

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Title of the Seminar** > COMMENTARY

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's four discourses all place a matheme in the position of semblance, which creates a productive tension with the hypothesis of a discourse not based on semblance—tentatively identified as analytic discourse, where the letter/bar figures jouissance over knowledge rather than knowledge as semblance.

   identifying the upper left-hand position in each of the discourses as that of semblance and the lower left-hand position in each of the discourses as that of truth

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.98

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance**

   Theoretical move: Fink maps Lacan's concept of semblance across the three registers (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real) and argues that all discourse is constituted by semblance, while psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by attending to the truth of the unconscious that semblance systematically excludes — with the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom serving as paradigm cases of signs whose referent remains unknown.

   At stake here is semblance as the very object by which the economy of discourse is regulated… All that is discourse can but present itself as semblance, and nothing is constructed there that is not based on what is called the signifier

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.104

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Phallus**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's concept of the phallus is not a biological organ but the structural operator of linguistic mediation itself — simultaneously the signifier of desire, the bar between signifier and signified, the obstacle to any sexual relationship, and ultimately identical with semblance — such that language as a whole possesses only one signification (the phallus), and all speech is motivated by the non-existence of the sexual relation.

   It is quite precisely the phallus as semblance [le semblant du phallus] that is the pivotal point, the center of everything that can be laid out and contained as regards sexual jouissance.

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Writing**

   Theoretical move: Writing, for Lacan, is not a metalanguage but is constitutively distinct from language (la langue/speech), and this distinction is what enables logic, the four discourses, and the formulas of sexuation—while also bearing an unexplained but significant relation to jouissance.

   Speech, which relies on language as a system (la langue), has to do with the realm of semblance, for in that realm we generally seek sens, meaning—that is, we try to make sense.

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.186

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with Women**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Wesley, Fink demonstrates how the absence of a gap/lack in the (m)Other produces a subject unable to locate female sexuality, desire, or separation, and how the mother's persistent desire for something beyond the child (rather than paternal intervention) is what partially enables separation and forestalls psychosis.

    Difficult imaginary relations with semblables, as Lacan calls them (that is, people like himself in some way)

11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.210

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Lacan's concept of semblance to analyze how culturally specific ideological systems (American individualism, Amish conformity, Communist-era Romania) constitute the material of identity construction, showing that semblance is not simply 'false ideology' but the very fabric through which subjects align themselves with or against normative ideals—with obsessional neurosis serving as the clinical lens for reading George's case.

    It is not exactly because this way of thinking is stupid that I associate it with what Lacan calls semblance, for it is not necessarily any stupider than Hillary Clinton's opportunistic book title, It Takes a Village

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.215

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance** > SEMBLANCE IN "IDENTITY" CONSTRUCTION

    Theoretical move: Semblance structures identity-formation by generating a gap between consciously endorsed ideals (ego-ideal) and actual desire/jouissance; psychoanalytic practice works by cutting through semblance and misrecognition, forcing the analysand to confront what they effectively desire and enjoy rather than what they believe they should desire.

    One believes that one lives in accordance with semblance, whether the dominant semblance or one formed perhaps in opposition to the dominant semblance.

13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.234

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **In Conclusion**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's presentation of clinical material is necessarily selective yet productive, and extends this to speculate that certain hysterical fantasies may originate not from felt neglect but from felt suffocation by the Other's excessive love — inverting the standard interpretive axis of desire while still pointing toward a fundamental fantasy structure.

    the hysteric's attempt to highlight even the merest semblance of a desire for someone else

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > [INDEX](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages from an index section of Bruce Fink's "Against Understanding, Volume 2"), listing concepts and page references with no substantive theoretical argument.

    semblance in 190–6; psychoanalysis techniques related to semblance 195–6

15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.94

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Title of the Seminar** > COMMENTARY

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that Seminar XVIII's title "On a discourse that would not be based on semblance" encodes a layered equivalence: semblance = signifier = speech = symbolic, against which Lacan posits the letter = writing = real, making the seminar's central theoretical move a privileging of the real over the symbolic as the ground of a non-deceptive discourse.

    This semblance is the signifier in itself… The signifier is identical to the status as such of semblance… The signifier, namely semblance par excellence.

16. #16

    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.

17. #17

    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'.

18. #18

    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.

19. #19

    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.

20. #20

    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).

21. #21

    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.

22. #22

    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

23. #23

    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

24. #24

    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.

25. #25

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.50

    **2** > <span id="page-38-0"></span>**The Adversary**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's critique of his analytic "adversaries" (ego psychologists and Kleinian object-relations theorists) turns on two axes: their fetishization of clinical forms over Freud's living spirit, and their reductive pre-Oedipal reductivism—both of which are shown to be impossible by the Nachträglichkeit structure that permanently mediates and liquidates any access to a pre-Oedipal "real." The passage's deeper theoretical move is to show that transference neurosis maps the analysand's libidinal economy onto the analyst-as-Ur-Other, and that psychoanalytic truth, once discovered, propagates itself even through its falsifications.

    treating everything other than pre-Oedipal pee pee and caca…as 'the mirage of truth' (i.e., as superficial subliminatory façades…) is itself nothing more than a 'mirage-like truth' (i.e., a specious semblance of the Freudian discovery)

26. #26

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.62

    **3**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive redeployments of the aphorism "Moi la vérité, je parle" across several seminars, arguing that this formula encapsulates a Hegelian-inflected thesis that unconscious truth is irrepressibly self-manifesting, strictly immanent, and structurally equivalent to language—while simultaneously being tied to three interrelated negations (no meta-language, no Other of the Other, no truth about the truth) that foreclose any depth-hermeneutical or transcendent grounding.

    this vérité by essence is given, or gives itself over, to semblances

27. #27

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.166

    **9**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian ego is constitutively paranoid, rivalrous, and regressive—structured by the mirror stage, the superego/ego-ideal dynamic, and the Master/Slave dialectic—and that ego-psychological analysis, by placing ego against ego in a transferential dyad, reproduces and aggravates this imaginary passion rather than dissolving it, producing only dead-end outcomes.

    ego-psychological defense analysts rely for 'corroboration' of their interventions' purported successes upon 'semblances of regression' (semblants de la régression) (with the ego itself, whether strong or weak, as an inherently regressed/regressive semblance).

28. #28

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.157

    **9**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces how the mirror stage co-constitutes the ego through a primordial alienation—méconnaissance—whereby the imaginary imago-Gestalt installs amour-propre (rivalrous, other-dependent desire) as more primitive than any pre-social self-love, and simultaneously shows how the symbolic order overwrites the mirror-formed body image with signifiers from the big Other, making the ego irreducibly extimate.

    a semblance like those of the not-me others the 'me' sees too…Humans get sucked into the disorienting hall of mirrors of a virtual reality in which seemings and semblances become more valued and important than anything 'real.'

29. #29

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.251

    **13** > <span id="page-248-0"></span>**Conclusion Taking It to the Dogs: Actaeon's Revenge**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the continuity and evolution of Lacan's "return to Freud" from "The Freudian Thing" (1955) through the early 1970s seminars, arguing that while Lacan jettisons his mid-1950s Heideggerianism (recasting ontology as "hontology"), he remains faithful to Freudian truth-as-unconscious, now reframed through the mythological figures of Diana and Actaeon as condensations of das Ding, the sexual non-rapport, jouissance, and the half-said.

    la Chose comme vérité as a "mi-dire" (half-saying) situated between "jouissance" and "semblance."

30. #30

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.26

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > Overture to this Collection

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "Purloined Letter" to demonstrate that the subject is constituted by the trajectory of the signifier—not by any imaginary substance—and introduces the Objet petit a as the "falling away" that marks the gap between truth and knowledge, while also establishing the primacy of the symbolic chain over imaginary effects in determining psychoanalytic outcomes including foreclosure, repression, and negation.

    Dupin seizes the opportunity to snatch, in his turn, the letter while replacing it with an imitation [semblant]

31. #31

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.73

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite* > *Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966)* > 1-3 NETWORK

    Theoretical move: Lacan retrospectively situates his intellectual trajectory — from paranoiac knowledge and Clérambault's mental automatism through the mirror stage to the triad of Imaginary/Symbolic/Real — as the progressive displacement of ego-psychology's misguided appeal to reality, arguing that the mirror stage is the paradigmatic site where imaginary capture, desire's alienation in the Other, and the function of lack are first articulated.

    the latter merely centers a power that is deceptive insofar as it diverts alienation… toward the totalitarian rivalry which prevails due to the fact that the semblable exercises a dyadic fascination on him

32. #32

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.109

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > IOI Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that aggressiveness is structurally correlated with narcissistic identification: the ego is constituted through an imaginary capture by the mirror image (the gestalt of one's own form), and this founding alienation generates an aggressive tension toward the semblable that pervades paranoia, transference, and the entire dialectic of human objectification.

    it is by identifying with the other that he experiences the whole range of bearing and display reactions—whose structural ambivalence is clearly revealed in his behaviors, the slave identifying with the despot, the actor with the spectator, the seduced with the seducer.

33. #33

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.510

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's power in treatment derives not from "being" (ego strength, emotional reeducation, autonomous ego) but from a structural position within the transference—a quadripartite division that alienates the analyst's freedom and whose misrecognition by ego-psychology and object-relations approaches collapses the analytic situation into crude suggestion or the imposition of the analyst's reality.

    one should not be deceived by the metaphor of the mirror, appropriate as it may be to the smooth surface the analyst presents to the patient

34. #34

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.600

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Signification of the Phallus 685 *Die Bedeutung des Phallus*

    Theoretical move: The phallus functions as the privileged signifier of desire precisely by being veiled—its Aufhebung (disappearance/raising) institutes the subject's Spaltung and governs the differential relations between being/having, demand/desire, and the asymmetrical positions of the sexes under the phallic mark.

    the intervention of a seeming [paraitre] that replaces the having in order to protect it, in one case, and to mask the lack thereof, in the other, and whose effect is to completely project the ideal or typical manifestations of each of the sexes' behavior... into the realm of comedy.

35. #35

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.650

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *On a book by Jean Delay and another by Jean Schlumberger¹*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Delay's biography of Gide to argue that proper psychoanalytic method—deciphering signifiers without presupposing the signified—reveals the subject's structure more faithfully than "applied psychoanalysis," and that Gide's case illustrates Spaltung (splitting of the subject) as the specific clinical phenomenon, grounded in the mother's discourse, fantasy transmission, and jouissance, over and against ego-psychological notions like "weakness of the ego."

    When Gide declares to Robert de Bonnieres that 'We must all represent,' and when in his ironic Paludes he speculates about being and appearing, those who... persuade themselves that they have a face underneath it, think 'Literature!'

36. #36

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.395

    The Freudian Thing > *The talk given was couched in the following terms:*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impasses of hysteric and obsessional neurosis cannot be resolved through imaginary exchange or ego-strengthening (as contemporary ego psychology proposes), but only by recourse to the big Other as the structural place of the symbolic and guarantor of speech—thereby indicting contemporary psychoanalysis for a fundamental misreading of Freud that produces increased alienation rather than analytic progress.

    This is how death comes to take on the semblance of the imaginary other and how the real Other is reduced to death: a borderline figure who answers the question about [one's] existence.

37. #37

    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

38. #38

    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.

39. #39

    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

40. #40

    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

41. #41

    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.

42. #42

    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

43. #43

    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.

44. #44

    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.

45. #45

    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.

46. #46

    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).

47. #47

    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

48. #48

    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.

49. #49

    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.

50. #50

    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

51. #51

    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.

52. #52

    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.

53. #53

    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

54. #54

    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).

55. #55

    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

56. #56

    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.

57. #57

    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.

58. #58

    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).

59. #59

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.179

    Ideology and Equality > Faking Critique

    Theoretical move: Comedy that appears to target authority can serve ideological functions by positioning the authority figure as a "substantial subject" who can afford self-mockery, thereby reinforcing rather than undermining the symbolic structure that sustains power; this argument extends Bakhtin's carnival critique to show how comic subversion—even when sincere—enables authority to function more efficiently rather than challenging it.

    Forcing the king to walk naked down the street while wearing a clown mask during the carnival seems to undermine the king's authority by showing a lack of authority within the appearance of authority.

60. #60

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.212

    Notes > Chapter 5

    Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus for Chapter 5 does substantive theoretical work in three areas: (1) critiquing evolutionary reductions of comedy and language to advantage/sense; (2) elaborating the Lacanian thesis that the signifier murders the thing, making desire born from impossibility; and (3) developing the claim that the phallus is the singular Bedeutung of signification itself—not potency but imposture.

    the fundamental psychoanalytic gesture involves identifying the privilege of the phallus with imposture rather than with potency.

61. #61

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.90

    5. > Conclusion

    Theoretical move: The passage concludes a study by arguing that affects cannot be grounded in originary autoaffection; instead, Derrida, Deleuze, and Damasio each radicalise a structure of heteroaffection that determines a distinct concept of alterity, a privileged metaphor, and a specific spatiality — with wonder serving as the ambivalent test-case affect that straddles the auto/hetero divide.

    Even the shore of a 'phantasm,' precisely, seems to have more affinity with the phainesthai, that is, with the semblance or shine of the visible.

62. #62

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.167

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that affects are irreducibly entangled with signifying systems (primal and secondary repression both involve displacement of affect), such that the discourse of the analyst produces a single affect—anxiety about one's status as object—by hystericizing the parlêtre, while lalangue names the pre-syntactic, libidinal substrate of language that persists into analytic free association and reveals the unconscious's private, nonsensical play with the mother tongue.

    agency itself, in any of the four discourses, is invariably a 'semblance' (semblant) beneath which lies the obfuscated 'truth' (vérité) of this agent-position

63. #63

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.172

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* (aligned with Freudian primary process) is the site where jouissance and language intertwine as *jouis-sens*, generating enigmatic affects that are structurally deceptive—with anxiety as the singular non-deceptive affect—thereby positioning affect as a product of the *parlêtre*'s capture in discourse rather than as transparent self-evidence.

    the analyst's discourse strives to interrupt the discourse of the master (as the mastery of discourse, namely, the semblance of intentional conscious control over speech, meaning, and so on)

64. #64

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.232

    13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian distinction between affects and signifiers collapses under the combined pressure of Freud and affective neuroscience: affects are not merely consciously felt feelings (Empfindungen) but can mislead as to *what* they are—not just why—which means the affect/signifier distinction is better understood as a distinction internal to the category of the signifier itself, yielding the "infinite judgment" that affects are signifiers.

    the Name-of-the-Father, as a master signifier (S1)... is a bluff, fake, fiction, illusion, myth, semblance, and so on.

65. #65

    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.'

66. #66

    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.

67. #67

    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.

68. #68

    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

69. #69

    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

70. #70

    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)

71. #71

    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

72. #72

    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.

73. #73

    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.'

74. #74

    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'

75. #75

    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.

76. #76

    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

77. #77

    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.

78. #78

    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.

79. #79

    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

80. #80

    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

81. #81

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.25

    **TRANSAMERICA**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's concept of "urinary segregation" to frame contemporary transgender bathroom debates as a structural impasse of sexual difference, then critically engages Baudrillard's reading of transsexuality as simulation/indifferent simulacrum to argue that trans subjects are not escaping sexual difference but are rather trapped within it — a point that psychoanalysis must take seriously against postmodern celebrations of groundless sign-multiplication.

    we are all transsexuals symbolically, as the body becomes a canvas for signs, less anatomical and more technological

82. #82

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.93

    **THE SWEET SCIENCE OF TRANSITION**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that being "outside sex" (hors-sex) is not a marker of psychosis but a structural feature of hysteria, and that trans men analysands often exhibit a hysterical structure characterised by an irreducible indecision about sexual positioning, dissatisfied desire, and a defensive strategy against castration — thereby relocating the clinical question of trans identity from foreclosure to neurosis.

    there is very little difference between transsexuals, hysterics, and cisgender subjects other than that the latter might enjoy a 'false monopoly' on the 'psychic experience of semblance of gender certainty'

83. #83

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.180

    **CODA**

    Theoretical move: The figure of Tiresias—as mythic sex-changer, seer, and patron saint of psychoanalysis—is deployed to argue that the trans experience is structurally instructive for psychoanalysis: it teaches that jouissance rather than biology grounds sexuation, and that the analyst must embody the semblance of objet petit a as the object of transference.

    the psychoanalyst is a being moved by a desire for pure difference, ready to embody the semblance of the eternally missing object.

84. #84

    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.