Sexuation

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (293)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.184

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Some preliminary remarks

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with tragedy is not a poetization but a first attempt at formalization—myth and tragedy function as instantiations of formal structures analogous to mathemes—and traces a triadic movement (Oedipus→Hamlet→Sygne de Coüfontaine) in which the relationship between knowledge, desire, and guilt is progressively transformed, culminating in a radical destitution of the subject that exceeds classical symbolic debt.

   the famous 'formulae of sexuation' are nothing but the attempt to present graphically something that cannot be given a written or symbolic description - namely, a 'successful' sexual relationship.

2. #02

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

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

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

   whereas theoretically 'being' and 'having' – two relations are sometimes taken to be indicative of feminine and masculine sexuation respectively – are perhaps mutually exclusive, in clinical reality they overlap (471, 4).

3. #03

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

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

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

   Among the most important and influential features of Lacan's late teaching are his formulas of sexuation, his gloss on Freud's famous question 'What does a woman want?' Lacan's scheme is based on two modes of relating to the universal.

4. #04

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.233

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

   Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section providing scholarly citations and brief parenthetical remarks; it contains minimal sustained theoretical argument, though several notes gesture toward substantive theoretical connections (Rumi as Lacanian, religion as symptomatic, das Ding and divinity, sexuation formulas, jouissance and the Other as locus of truth).

   Lacan elaborates the formulas of sexuation in Seminar XX: Encore.

5. #05

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.247

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

   Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 244–247) listing conceptual terms, proper names, and their page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage but reveals the conceptual architecture of Boothby's text by mapping Lacanian concepts (das Ding, objet a, jouissance, sujet supposé savoir, sexuation, etc.) onto comparative religion.

   and sexuation, 195–97; as term, 19, 126 … and sexuation, 196–97

6. #06

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.250

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

   Theoretical move: This is an index page (pp. 250) from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive in itself but maps the key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts deployed throughout the work, including das Ding, objet a, sexuation, the subject supposed to know, the symbolic, symptom, and the void in relation to religion and the sacred.

   sexuation, formulas of, 195–98

7. #07

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

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

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

   part objects: and exchange between subject and Other, 43–44; Freud on, 42–43; and sexuation, 195–96

8. #08

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.168

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

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

   We might think of the ways that society relates to its own enjoyment in terms of the different types of logic articulated in sexual difference.

9. #09

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.173

   I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > From Enjoyment to Pleasure

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social bond is constituted through the enjoyment of traumatic loss rather than through pleasure, and that every social project (war, monument-building, political identification) uses pleasure as an alibi for this foundational enjoyment—while the structure of the signifier itself generates paranoia about the Other's enjoyment, rendering utopian equality impossible.

   This bond was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside... The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss — that is, only according to the female logic of not-having.

10. #10

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.179

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > From Enjoyment to Pleasure

    Theoretical move: By accepting the logic of female sexuation — that enjoyment is constitutively tied to loss rather than impeded by it — subjects can dissolve the envy that drives social antagonism, because a 'nothing' that can only be lost admits no hierarchy of possession and thus enables an authentic social bond.

    accepting the logic of female sexuation — allows subjects to emphasize enjoyment at the expense of pleasure

11. #11

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.329

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 6. The Appeal of Sacrifice

    Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic and citational apparatus for a chapter on sacrifice, assembling theoretical scaffolding from Hegel, Bataille, Freud, Lacan, and others; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage in itself, though several notes do brief theoretical work clarifying the chapter's arguments about singularity vs. universality, the pleasure principle, sexuation, and the enjoyment-loss link.

    The question of sexuation is not solely posed in terms of identification, but also in terms of a position of jouissance, a way of enjoyment, namely, a way of life.

12. #12

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

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

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

    Lacan's theory of sexual difference justifies Freud's apparently misogynist claim that female subjects have a less developed superego than male subjects.

13. #13

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.339

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 8. The Politics of Fantasy

    Theoretical move: This notes section advances the argument that fantasy is theoretically inescapable—neither Western philosophy nor Marxist politics can fully overcome it—and that the properly psychoanalytic (Lacanian) attitude toward fantasy is not its elimination but its dialectical traversal, which simultaneously dispels and reconfigures it.

    the inhabitants of Winter do not elude what Lacan calls the failure of the sexual relationship.

14. #14

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

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

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

    Any politicization of male subjects requires an identification with the structural position that female subjects occupy. The female position is that of the missing signifier

15. #15

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    The formulae of sexuation appear at the top of the diagram. Thus the formulae on the male side are… The formulae on the female side are…

16. #16

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    It is only by assuming castration (in both senses) that the subject can take up a sexual position as a man or a woman.

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_137"></span>**obsessional neurosis**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes obsessional neurosis not as a cluster of symptoms but as an underlying clinical structure organized around an existential question about death and being, distinguishing it from hysteria while preserving Freud's diagnostic inheritance.

    The obsessional is precisely neither one [sex] nor the other—one may also say that he is both at once

18. #18

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    unlike masculinity, which is a universal function founded upon the phallic exception (castration), woman is a non-universal which admits of no exception

19. #19

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_149"></span>**phallus**

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

    In the early 1970s Lacan incorporates this symbol of the phallic function in his formulae of sexuation. Using predicate logic to articulate the problems of sexual difference, Lacan devises two formulae for the masculine position and two formulae for the feminine position.

20. #20

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    the question of the relation between the masculine sexual position and the feminine sexual position

21. #21

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.212

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lamella as a mythic-theoretical object that names what the sexed being loses in sexuality — an immortal, undivided libidinal substance that precedes and exceeds the subject — thereby displacing Aristophanes' fable in the Symposium with a new psychoanalytic myth about the drive and loss.

    what the sexed being loses in sexuality

22. #22

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche—only its equivalents (activity/passivity) appear there—and therefore the subject must learn from the Other (via the Oedipus complex) what it means to be man or woman; sexuality is established in the psyche through lack, not through any direct biological function.

    the polarity of the male and the female being is represented only by the polarity of activity... and of passivity, which is passivity only in relation to the exterior

23. #23

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.166

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a structural affinity — not analogy — between the logic of the signifier and the biology of sexual reproduction (meiosis/reduction, expulsion of remainders), suggesting that the signifier's entry into the human world is rooted in sexual reality, and that primitive science (e.g., Chinese combinatory astronomy) bears witness to this originary link between sexuality and the signifying combinatory.

    their dance is based on dance ritual profoundly motivated by the sexual divisions in society

24. #24

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the "untenable truth" of the sexual reality of the unconscious biologically (sex as the hinge between individual death and species survival) and then structurally (matrimonial alliance as the level of the signifier), thereby positioning structuralism as the bridge between biological sex and the combinatory logic of the unconscious.

    Existence, thanks to sexual division, rests upon copulation, accentuated in two poles that time-honoured tradition has tried to characterize as the male pole and the female pole.

25. #25

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.175

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern science establishes a 'relation of non-relation' with the unconscious — a structural disconnection — and that this disconnection can only be understood at the level of desire, opening the question of the desire that subtends scientific discourse itself.

    At a time when the combinatory is coupled to the capture of sexuality, set theory cannot emerge.

26. #26

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lamella as a mythic-biological figure for what the sexed being loses in sexuality — a flattened, immortal, pre-subjective libidinal organ that operates beyond the pleasure principle and exceeds any division — thereby grounding the drive in something irreducible to language while remaining continuous with his claim that the unconscious is made of language.

    it is something—I will tell you shortly why—that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality

27. #27

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche (neither as biological reproduction nor as sexual difference), but only through the partial drive as a representative of lack; consequently, what one must do as man or woman is entirely delegated to the scenario of the Other—the Oedipus complex—and sexuality enters the subject only through the structure of lack.

    In his psyche, the subject situates only equivalents of the function of reproduction—activity and passivity, which by no means represent it in an exhaustive way.

28. #28

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.303

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the asymmetry of sexual difference — irreducible to any symmetrical dyadic opposition — is precisely what the subject encounters as the Objet petit a: every time the subject reaches toward truth, what is found is transformed into the o-object, which stands as the veiled third term linking subject to knowledge through the symptom rather than through certainty.

    it betrays a fundamental asymmetry in the two units of the duality and that it is precisely this asymmetry that is involved in what is always involved in any true apprehension of the individual (*l'être*) *qua* sexed.

29. #29

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a refused, foreclosed signifier (a "not-knowing"), and that the sexual dyad—whose nature remains fundamentally unknowable—is the radical foundation of all signifying opposition; this grounds Lacan's claim that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the subject who avoids knowledge of sex, linking the structure of the signifier to the biological fact that sex is not reducible to reproduction but is bound to death.

    the dyadic opposition has as a radical foundation only the opposition of sexes, of which we know nothing.

30. #30

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological phenomenon of meiosis and the expulsion of polar globules as a speculative material analogue for the lost object in fantasy, then turns this into a critique of psychoanalysts' systematic avoidance of biological discoveries about sex—arguing that this avoidance is symptomatic of the analyst's own structural exclusion from knowledge of the sexual relation, which aligns the analytic position with the subject defined only by the missing signifier rather than by any positive knowledge.

    this point of lateral deviation, this indicated point of a relationship to sex which in any case would not be able to overlap a mythical image that we might construct of the male and female relationship

31. #31

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.303

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual difference introduces an irreducible asymmetry into any dialectic of being and number, and that this asymmetry is what drives analytic experience to posit the objet petit a as the subject's inevitable substitute for truth — wherever the subject reaches his truth, he transforms it into the o-object, making the objet petit a the structural locus of the real beyond knowledge.

    The 2 relationship that there is in sex is an asymmetrical relationship; and everything that our experience gives rise to at the place where it is a matter of grasping this sexual difference

32. #32

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a *rejected* signifier (a not-knowing), and that this structure — the signifier representing the subject for another signifier — recapitulates the whole dialectic from Plato's Sophist to the present; further, it grounds the dyadic signifying opposition (Other/One, being/non-being) in the sexual dyad, while insisting that sex itself is radically unknowable and is not primarily a reproductive mechanism but a relationship with death.

    the dyadic opposition has as a radical foundation only the opposition of sexes, of which we know nothing.

33. #33

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological figure of meiosis and polar body expulsion as a speculative metaphor for the lost object, then pivots to argue that the analyst's position is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject — and that psychoanalytic knowledge must be sharply distinguished from 'oriental' (e.g. Taoist) traditions that begin from the male/female signifying opposition, since analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier.

    the correspondence, whatever it may be, between the male and the female… this point of lateral deviation, this indicated point of a relationship to sex which in any case would not be able to overlap a mythical image that we might construct of the male and female relationship.

34. #34

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.307

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real is constituted precisely by the impossible (what cannot be), positioning this against the Cartesian-Kantian project of grounding knowledge in conditions of possibility; the Freudian discovery returns what Descartes foreclosed by offloading eternal truths onto divine arbitrariness, and the three poles of subject, knowledge, and sexed being—articulated through Entzweiung and the Möbius strip topology—structure the fundamental psychoanalytic dialectic.

    the Zwei of the sexed being, in so far as it is forever insoluble for this 'one' of the imaginary subject, it is this relationship of the 'one' to the Zwei of sex whose agency we find at every level of the relationships between the three poles of this triad.

35. #35

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.292

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst is structurally excluded from the real — particularly the real of sex — and that this exclusion is not a deficiency but constitutive of the analytic position; furthermore, logic's historical progression toward Frege's reduction of reference to truth-value is read as a symptom of what is lacking for the designation of the real, pointing toward the triadic organisation of knowledge, subject, and sex as the proper scaffolding for analytic theory.

    the three distinct edges of knowledge, the subject, and sex allow us to situate in their relationship, at their place, this something which is going to make appear to us a certain paradox and principally the place of the sign of sense as such, in a relationship of knowledge to sex from which the subject is in a certain way extracted

36. #36

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

    there are normal perverts,

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

    both, the poor dear little darlings, as in the celebrated tale of the immortal Longus, are there with this lovely dessert of the (-phi) in their hands, looking at one another, and asking one another what they are to do with it, in order to come to an agreement about jouissance.

37. #37

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

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

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from a critique of structuralism's elision of the subject to a positive claim that the subject's fundamental relation to the body is mediated by objet petit a as the sub-product of the "difficulty of the sexual act," and that the classical alienation-formula ("I am not thinking / I am not") maps onto a "for the Other" structure that regrounds the subject's constitution in that very difficulty.

    There must indeed be two aspects there also… There is an in itself (en soi) and then a for (pour)… He cannot remain for himself… What corresponds here to our questioning… is a for the Other… namely, the male-being (l'être-male)… and much more again to the female-being

38. #38

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

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

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

    Is there this knot, definable as an act, in which the subject grounds himself as sexed, that is, as male or female… at the pure essence of male or female? I mean, at the disentangling, at the distribution, in a polar form of what is male and what is female

39. #39

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.181

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot close the gap between even and odd power series—between the sexes—thereby demonstrating that there is no sexual relation at the level of the signifier, and condemning the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism/fusion as the foundation of libidinal economy.

    it is *impossible* to give a sense, I mean an analytic sense, to the terms *masculine* and *feminine*.

40. #40

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

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

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

    it is only found in what is called, anatomically, the male. It is only starting from this suspense posed on the male organ, that an orientation for the two, the man and the woman, is encountered, that the function… takes on the value of being, with respect to this hole, this gap of the castration complex, in a reversed position.

41. #41

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.225

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

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

    the sexual act, in so far as the man and woman valorise themselves in it for one another

42. #42

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

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

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

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

43. #43

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.168

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

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

    the subject has to measure himself against the difficulty of being a sexed subject.

44. #44

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.

    the question of the status, which may be founded by these terms which are properly speaking those that I have put forward under the form of man and woman

45. #45

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

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

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

    something that can be called the sexual act, in so far as the man and woman valorise themselves in it for one another.

46. #46

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio formula (1 + o = 1/o) as a matheme for the Objet petit a's incommensurability to sex, arguing that the iterative algebraic unfolding of this relation enacts both metonymy (the sliding chain) and metaphor (the substitution of the One for the enigma of sex), while grounding the operation of measurement in the unary stroke as the condition for the Other's locus.

    the *One* represents, in its first moment as enigma, the signifying function of sex… the function of the signifier sex as repressed.

47. #47

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.181

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot achieve a perfect 'One' or sexual relation—a gap always remains between even and odd power series—and then leverages this to attack the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism and the 'unitive' fantasy, asserting that the subject is 'measured by sex' as by a unit, not fused with it, and that no analytic sense can be given to 'masculine' or 'feminine' as signifiers.

    it is *impossible* to give a sense, I mean an analytic sense, to the terms *masculine* and *feminine*.

48. #48

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.208

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

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

    The totality in question is the one which establishes what we will call, provisionally and with reservations, a masculine individual (être) and a feminine individual, in this foundational act … the sexual act.

49. #49

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.168

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

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

    the subject has to measure himself against the difficulty of being a sexed subject.

50. #50

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.228

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions jouissance as the central concept linking the failure of the sexual act to subjective constitution, arguing that the signifier's introduction into the real—not thought—gives jouissance its radical analytical value; this requires both a departure from the Hegelian dialectic (where jouissance belongs to the master) and an opening toward the irreducible non-relation at the heart of sexuality.

    is there this knot, definable as an act, in which the subject grounds himself as sexed, that is, as male or female, being in itself, or, if not, proceeding in this act to something which can - even if only at its term - culminate at the pure essence of male or female?

51. #51

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

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

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

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

52. #52

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logic's defining function is precisely to resorb (conjure away) the problem of the subject supposed to know, and it is this structural feature that makes modern logic a privileged reference point for psychoanalysis — allowing it to pose the question of the analyst's existence in terms of quantification where the subject supposed to know is reduced to nothing.

    how there is posed the question of what 'a psychoanalyst exists' means in terms of quantification.

53. #53

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic act is constituted by a structural feint: the analyst must pretend (while knowing otherwise from their own analysis) that the Subject Supposed to Know is tenable, in order to set the process in motion—but the act itself exceeds doing (faire) and produces a renewal of the subject's presence precisely by excluding the analyst-as-subject from its agency.

    they are the points that concern him in so far as he has to posit himself as a sexed subject.

54. #54

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

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

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

    we are at the level of the subjectification of this function of the man and the woman... it is qua o-object, this object to be expelled, that there is going to be presented in the real the one who is called to be the sexual partner.

55. #55

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical distinction between universal and particular propositions—demonstrated through French/English linguistic examples and the Aristotelian square of opposition—to argue that the introduction of quantifiers reveals a fundamental structural asymmetry in the relation between universal and particular, which he frames as the key logical tool for psychoanalytic thinking about the subject.

    the universal affirmative, must be stated as follows. 'There is no man who is not wise' (pas d'homme qui ne soit sage)... this universal affirmative will bring into play to support itself nothing less than two negations.

56. #56

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of double negation and quantification theory to locate the divided subject—the gap between the stating subject and the subject of the statement—as the irreducible structural core of every universal proposition, thereby grounding logical form in a psychoanalytic (rather than ontological) subject.

    it is not the same thing to say man is nonwoman... but it is not quite the same as to say (universal) there is no man who does not rule out the feminine position, the woman, or (the state of exception and no longer of contradiction) there is a man who does not rule out the woman.

57. #57

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.145

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's Begriffsschrift to formalize the logical function of "all" (the universal affirmative) and then pivots to argue that the lost object (objet petit a) occupies the structural position of Frege's "argument," grounding the subject's illusion of totality—while exposing the Rankian myth of primal fusion with the mother as a symptomatic misrecognition of this originary loss.

    the gap remains open between man and woman, and that consequently, in the very constitution of the subject, we can in no way introduce, let us say, the existence in the world of male and female complementarity.

58. #58

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.131

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close logical analysis of double negation in quantification theory to argue that the universal affirmative is not a simple double-negative cancellation but rather the site where the split between the stating subject and the subject of the statement is constitutively installed—the "fissure" that formal logic tends to mask but which psychoanalysis must keep in view.

    it is not the same thing to say (this is why I made this distinction at the level of contradiction) man is nonwoman... but it is not quite the same as to say (universal) there is no man who does not rule out the feminine position, the woman, or (the state of exception and no longer of contradiction) there is a man who does not rule out the woman.

59. #59

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the Subject Supposed to Know is constitutive of the analytic situation from its very inception, and that the psychoanalytic act is defined precisely by the analyst's feigned (and potentially forgotten) displacement of that function—a displacement that is the condition of truth, not of knowledge.

    They are the points that concern him in so far as he has to posit himself as a sexed subject.

60. #60

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that modern logic is defined by its function of dissolving the problem of the Subject Supposed to Know, and that psychoanalysis can leverage logical quantification precisely because logic operates in a field where that subject is reduced to nothing — enabling analytical progress where institutional qualification has failed.

    how there is posed the question of what 'a psychoanalyst exists' means in terms of quantification

61. #61

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.75

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

    Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is defined as the analyst's acceptance of supporting the transference — specifically, sustaining the function of the Subject Supposed to Know while knowing it is destined to fall — such that the analytic process culminates not in knowledge but in castration as subjective experience: the subject's realisation of itself exclusively as lack, figured by (-φ) and the incommensurability of Objet petit a to 1.

    there is no possible subjective realisation of the subject as element, as sexed partner in what is imagined as unification in the sexual act.

62. #62

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of French and English negation ('pas tout' / 'anything') to motivate a transition from Aristotelian syllogistic (subalternation from universal to particular) to the logic of quantifiers, arguing that the latter—by expressing the universal affirmative through double negation ('there is no man who is not wise')—better captures the structural relationship between universal and particular that psychoanalytic theory of the subject requires.

    How, in our quantifying articulation, is some man is wise going to be expressed? I had said first of all there is no man who is not wise. Now we articulate there is a man who is wise.

63. #63

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.217

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual relationship cannot be grasped through biological, logical, or identificatory schemas (active/passive, male/female, +/−), and that Freudian logic ultimately reduces sex to the formal mark of castration as constitutive lack; this requires distinguishing the Other (as terrain cleared of enjoyment, site of the unconscious structured like a language) from Das Ding (the intolerable imminence of jouissance/the neighbour), and poses the central question: is the Woman the locus of desire (the Other) or the locus of enjoyment (the Thing)?

    It is a little more complicated than that to speak about sex... the masculine position or the feminine position, people say. Very quickly people slip, people talk about the homosexual position.

64. #64

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

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

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

    there is no recognition as such of the male by the female nor of the female by the male... at this level, there is no signifying coupling.

65. #65

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

    *[A porter appears]*

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

    This overturning implies the common denominator of the exclusion of the specifically male organ. Henceforth the male is and is not what he is with respect to enjoyment. And from this also, the woman is produced as an object

66. #66

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

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

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

    in psychoanalysis - because also moreover in the unconscious - man knows nothing about the woman, nor the woman about the man. It is in the phallus that there is summarised the mythical point by which the sexual is implicated in the passion of the signifier.

67. #67

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

    the function described as the phallus...renders henceforth untenable this sexual bipolarity, and untenable in a way that literally makes vanish into thin air anything involved about what can be written about this relationship

68. #68

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

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

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

    The hysteric here plays the role of functional schema, if you know what that means. This is the import of my formula of desire described as unsatisfied.

69. #69

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

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

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

    Sexual identification does not consist in believing oneself to be a man or a woman, but in taking account of the fact that there are women, for the boy, and that there are men, for the girl.

70. #70

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

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

    not two terms that are defined as male and female, but this choice between these terms of a quite different nature and function that are called being and having.

71. #71

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

    this nature as it is inscribed by the effect of language, inscribed in this disjunction between a man and a woman

72. #72

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

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

    The two bars put on the symbols on the left and with which there are respectively situated everything that is capable of answering to the semblance of sexual enjoyment... that the function of x cannot be written about every x, and that it is from this is not all that the woman establishes herself.

73. #73

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.109

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

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

    it is unthinkable to say: the woman (la femme). Why is it unthinkable? Because one cannot say: all the women.

74. #74

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

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

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

    the desire of man, written as Φ(o)... the desire of the woman is written Φ(φ), which is the phallus where people imagine it is, the little wee-wee.

75. #75

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.143

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the failure of symbolic logic to ground itself reflexively as a demonstration that the sexual relationship cannot be written, then traces the passage from Aristotelian syllogistic to quantifier logic to show how the letter—by replacing terms with holes—is the condition for any logical articulation, ultimately linking this to the function of the master signifier and the structure of discourse.

    the relationship, the sexual relationship, cannot be written.

76. #76

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

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

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

    the obsessional, the obsessional who corresponds to the formula: there is no x that exists that can be inscribed in the variable φ of x

77. #77

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

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

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

    Man is a phallic function in so far as he is every man. But as you know, there are the greatest doubts to be had about the fact that every man exists.

78. #78

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.153

    accommodate yourselves.

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.

    there is no sexual relationship, and that that is why there is a whole order that functions at the place where this relationship is supposed to be.

79. #79

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

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

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

    what is pinpointed by this prosdiorsim will take on the meaning of man or of woman according to the prosdiorism chosen. Namely, either the there - exists, or the there does not exist, either the all, or the not-all.

80. #80

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.148

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

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

    The relationship of this One that has to be counted in addition to that which, in what I state as, not as supplying for, but deploying itself in a locus that in place of the sexual relationship, is specified by there exists not Φ of x

81. #81

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.134

    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.

    this bipartition that is fleeting at every instant, of this bipartition between the man and the woman...this impossibility of applying, in this matter of gender, something that is supposed to be the principle of contradiction

82. #82

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    J Lacan - Start that again.

    Theoretical move: The passage turns on the structural homology between the logical form of double negation (as deployed in the fixed-point theorem and Lacan's own formulas), Peirce's distinction between the field of the potential (pure zero) and the field of the impossible (zero of repetition), and an empiricist prehistory of this distinction traced through Locke and Condillac — arguing that the "point that escapes" distortion in topology mirrors the logical and ontological status of the non-inscribed, which is the condition of possibility for any inscription at all.

    this theorem is symbolised... by this there exists x, because it is a formula which is very close, in short, to the one that I am in the habit of inscribing, there exists an x such that it must be denied that there is no 3*

83. #83

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.79

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

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

    $$\overline{x} \overline{\Phi} \cdot x \overline{E} \qquad \overline{x} \overline{\Phi} \cdot x E$$ $$x \overline{\Phi} \cdot x \overline{\nabla} \qquad x \overline{\Phi} \cdot x \overline{\nabla}$$

84. #84

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

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

    There are three registers, properly speaking, that have already emerged in the development of logic, three registers around which there will turn this year my effort to develop what is involved in the consequences of the fact, posited in the first place, that there is no sexual relationship.

85. #85

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

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

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

    She who is not contained in the phallic function without nevertheless being its negation. Her mode of presence is between centre and absence, between the phallic function in which she participates, singularly

86. #86

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.142

    Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the formula *Yad'lun* ("there is One") to disarticulate the One of mathematical existence from the One of individuality or class-attribute, arguing that set theory's separation of element-membership from universal predication is precisely what can ground the analyst's practice beyond the "witticism" level at which all discourse about the sexual relationship otherwise remains.

    it is quite clear that there is no way of dividing up any two series - any, I am saying - of attributes which would make up a male series on the one hand and on the other hand the woman series.

87. #87

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.28

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

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

    it is not a matter of making the distinction, of marking the signifier man as distinct from the signifier woman...That is why I put this x in the place of the hole that I make in the signifier, namely, that I put there this x as an apparent variable.

88. #88

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the title "...Ou pire" as a vehicle for the claim that "there is no sexual relationship" — a truth that can only be half-said, such that any attempt to escape it produces something worse — and grounds this in a logical analysis of the empty place in language, the impossibility of metalanguage, and the introduction of the "not-all" as what exceeds Aristotelian quantification, thereby linking the structure of language to castration and sexuation.

    there is no sexual relationship... sex does not in its case define any relationship... it is indeed because a being speaks that there is a castration complex.

89. #89

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.107

    Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 April 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces 'Yad'lun' (there is something of the One) as the foundational concept linking set theory's existential quantifier to the analytic discourse's production term (S1), arguing that the Real One—distinct from natural individual existence and from reality—is accessible only through the Symbolic, and that this re-reading of Plato's Parmenides confirms the analytic discourse's priority over scientific discourse.

    the upper two of these four formulae in which I attempt to fix what supplies for what I described as the impossibility of writing, precisely, what is involved in the sexual relationship.

90. #90

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship as the anchor for a theory of the Real, the Matheme, and the function of language, arguing that what cannot be written (the sexual non-rapport) is precisely what drives both logic/mathematics and the floundering of metaphysics (exemplified by Aristotle's confusion of the One and Being), while positioning the matheme as the only genuine mode of transmission.

    man and woman, we do not know what they are. For a time, this bipolarity of values was taken as sufficiently supporting, suturing what is involved in sex.

91. #91

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.35

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of quantifiers (∃x and its negations) to ground sexuation and castration in a structural-logical necessity rather than anecdote, positioning the Real as that which affirms itself through the irreducible impasses of logic (Gödel), and insisting that castration cannot be reduced to myth or trauma but constitutes the impossible foundation of any articulation of sexual bipolarity in language.

    If we should find in logic, a means of articulating what the unconscious demonstrates in terms of sexual value, we would not be surprised.

92. #92

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two forms of negation—foreclosure and discordance (not-all)—arguing that foreclosure operates at the level of the said (the unsayable), while the not-all is a form of discordance; the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship is the real ground that determines discourse as structurally broken.

    for everything that is involved in the speaking being, sexual relationship poses a question... the modes in which this question is posed, namely, the responses, are precisely what it is a matter of writing in this function.

93. #93

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

    Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

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

    It is possible to propose the function of truth which is the following, namely, that all men are defined by the phallic function, is properly speaking what obturates the sexual relationship.

94. #94

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

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

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

    on one side we have the Universal founded on a necessary relationship to the phallic function and on the other side a contingent relationship because the woman is 'not all'.

95. #95

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.148

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the necessity of the paternal exception (the One who is not castrated) as the logical precondition for all thought about human relations, then maps the modal square (necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility) onto the sexuation formulas, arguing that the Real occupies the place of the impossible and that the 'Not-all' expresses contingency—reordering Aristotle's modal logic through the lens of the analytic discourse.

    where does it go? It goes there, where the Woman is distinguished by not being unifying. You see here...the alternation of necessity, of contingency, of the possible and the impossible

96. #96

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.139

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

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

    Simply by articulating it in this way, makes us sense that there is something remarkable... that what is stated about it is that there is not one of them who, in the statement, in the statement that H is not true that the phallic function dominates what is involved in the sexual relationship

97. #97

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.23

    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.

    What am I talking about? Well then, about nothing other than what is called in common language men and women... it is not a matter of dogs and bitches. It is a matter of what is really involved for those who belong to each of the sexes starting from the speaking being.

98. #98

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

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

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

    there exists an x such that there is a subject determinable by a function which is what dominates the sexual relationship, namely, the phallic function... there exists an x which determines the fact that he has said no to the function.

99. #99

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.83

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

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

    it is very precisely in that to the 'All' there is opposed the 'not all' (Pas Toutes) that there is a chance of a division between the left and the right of what is grounded as male and as female.

100. #100

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

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

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

     the opposition of a 3 x and of a non-3 x, of a 'there exists' and of 'there does not exist', at the same level, that of 'it is not true that $ of x' and on the other hand 'every x is in conformity with the function of ^x' and of this 'not all'

101. #101

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

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

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

     the masculine Universal can be based on the assurance that there does not exist any woman who has been castrated... the woman is not any more assured of it in her universal essence

102. #102

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.79

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entry of language into the speaking being structurally voids the "second sex" (the Other as *heteros*), making sexual difference not a natural binary but a topological-linguistic problem: there is no sexual relationship because "the Other" is the very locus that language empties of being, and universals like "Man" and "Woman" are linguistic constructs required by language itself, not grounded in animal copulation.

     how the universal 'Man' is related to the universal 'Woman'? This is the question which is imposed on us from the fact that language very precisely requires that it should be through this that it is grounded.

103. #103

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.76

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

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

     no relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings, for it is on that basis alone that what makes up for that relationship can be enunciated.

104. #104

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

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

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

     The 'doesn't stop not being written,' on the contrary, is the impossible... it is with this that I characterize the sexual relationship - the sexual relationship doesn't stop not being written.

105. #105

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.72

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that jouissance is structurally 'inappropriate' to the sexual relationship, making repression a secondary effect that generates metaphor; he then aligns Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (exemplified by seeing/smell/hearing) with the analytic function of objet petit a as that which, from the male pole, substitutes for the missing partner and thereby constitutes fantasy, while announcing that the female pole requires a different supplement to the non-existent sexual relationship.

     One must see the radical difference of what is produced at the other pole, on the basis of woman... for Woman, something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for (suppléer) the sexual relationship that does not exist.

106. #106

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.20

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine sexuality is constituted by a logical "one by one" (une par une) structure that derives from the Other rather than from bodily substance, making sexual jouissance "compact" and the feminine sexed being "not-whole"—a claim illustrated through the Don Juan myth and grounded in a topology that refuses any reference to being or substance.

     As for being (Ce qui est de Vêtre), a being that would be posited as absolute, it is never anything but the fracture, break, or interruption of the formulation 'sexed being,' insofar as sexed being is involved (intéressé) in jouissance.

107. #107

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

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

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

     what appears on bodies in the enigmatic form of sexual characteristics - which are merely secondary - makes sexed beings (êtres sexués). No doubt. But being is the jouissance of the body as such, that is, as asexual

108. #108

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **VII** > 92 Complement

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

     I base myself on that when I produce this quartering (écartèlement) that posits an existence that Recanati has very well qualified as eccentric to the truth.

109. #109

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every wisdom tradition—Taoism, Buddhism, mythology, Christianity—fails to satisfy the "thought of being" except at the price of castration, positioning psychoanalytic discourse as a contingent, non-mathematical pathway toward an economy of jouissance that science and religion alike cannot reach.

     un chacun baise convenablement sa une chacune

110. #110

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of metalanguage to pivot toward topology: because the symbolic ex-sists rather than being, and because language can only be transmitted through further language, the matheme/formalization points beyond itself to the Borromean knot as the structural figure that can 'operate' on the first knot—linking writing, jouissance, and the non-rapport of sexuation under a single topological framework.

     that idealism related to the impossibility of inscribing the sexual relationship between two bodies of different sexes.

111. #111

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.85

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

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

     There are men who are just as good as women... One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens.

112. #112

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Borromean knots and rings of string to ground a theory of desire, the subject, and the Other: object a is the void presupposed by demand, the subject's division is structurally equivalent to the 'bending' of a ring, and the Other is not additive to the One but is the 'One-missing' — a difference internal to the One rather than supplementary to it.

     object a can be said to be, as its name indicates, a-sexual (a-sexué). The Other presents itself to the subject only in an a-sexual form.

113. #113

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.14

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Seminar XX's inquiry by defining jouissance as "what serves no purpose," distinguishing it from love (which is always mutual and demands more), positioning the superego as the imperative of jouissance ("Enjoy!"), and asserting that jouissance of the Other's body is not the sign of love — thereby opening the problem of what, beyond necessity or sufficiency, can answer with jouissance.

     The body's being (l'être du corps) is of course sexed (sexué), but it is secondary, as they say. And as experience shows, the body's jouissance, insofar as that body symbolizes the Other, does not depend on those traces.

114. #114

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

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

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

     when I write VxOx, a never-before-seen function in which the negation is placed on the quantifier, which should be read 'notwhole,' it means that when any speaking being whatsoever situates itself under the banner 'women,' it is on the basis of the following - that it grounds itself as being not-whole in situating itself in the phallic function.

115. #115

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     **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.

     Every speaking being situates itself on one side or the other. On the left, the lower line - Vx$x indicates that it is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription

116. #116

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

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

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

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

117. #117

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.66

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

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

     There is thus the male way of revolving around it, and then the other one... how that is elaborated in the female way. It is elaborated on the basis of the not-whole.

118. #118

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

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

     the sexual relationship, for the speaking being, to being only in the regime of encounter...the phallus...has ceased not being written.

119. #119

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     J.Lacan-... of this?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'not-all' logic governing Woman cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity (which would imply an exceptional existence), but only through the infinite—where no determinate exception can be constructed—grounding Lacan's claim that Woman is properly half-said, and that her enjoyment is of the order of the infinite rather than the phallic universal.

     The disjunction that passes between the man and the woman, between the all and the not-all runs the risk of remaining, as long as there has not been determined the imaginary relation of the woman to the Other and the place of man in this relation

120. #120

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

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

     these open spaces capable of covering this limited, closed space in this case of sexual enjoyment... can be taken one by one or rather une par une

121. #121

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot topology to ground the asymmetry between the One and the Other (woman as "less One"), arguing that mathematisation alone accesses the Real—defined as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious—while distinguishing the Real from both fantasy and traditional reality.

     the One is not truly knotted to anything that resembles the sexual Other... in any relationship of the man with the woman she who is implicated, it is from the angle of the less One that she ought to be taken.

122. #122

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

     Theoretical move: Recanati's presentation, guided by Lacan, develops the concept of "sectioning of the predicate" as the structural impossibility at the heart of predication — the cut that divides yet cannot find the indivisible — linking it through ordinal number theory, Platonic myth (Aristophanes' sexion/cut, Diotima's intermediary/interpretant), and the logic of nomination to show that the 'encore' names the infinite index that escapes any system of covering-over, while the 'non' names the radical initial negation that infinitises all nomination.

     this is the way for Groddeck to refer to Plato... the myth of original androgyne which is supposed to have been cut in 2. That is what that was, sexion with an x.

123. #123

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.132

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

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

     what analytic experience allows us to locate as being from at least one side of sexual identification, the male side, to name it... Starting from the woman... it is something other than the o-object... that is at stake

124. #124

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 Ma y 1973

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no metalanguage by distinguishing the Symbolic from being, grounding formalisation in the act of saying rather than in ontological subsistence, and then demonstrates how topology—specifically the Borromean knot and the torus—provides the only adequate 'writing' of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject.

     this idealism that emerges with the impossibility of inscribing the sexual relation between two bodies of different sexes.

125. #125

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     J.Lacan-... of this?

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

     We understand of course that this should not have been put to Régine who, as woman, is there without being there.

126. #126

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse diverges from scientific discourse precisely because the 'economy of enjoyment' cannot be rendered as a mathematical device, yet mythology, the Counter-Reformation, and Baroque art all attest to historically contingent attempts to regulate jouissance — attempts that are 'founded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being' and that analytic discourse may partially continue.

     it is so founded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being, that it runs the risk of being at least as well founded... as the future of science.

127. #127

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.202

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that linguistics is in a state of epistemic crisis because its foundational model of the symmetrical locutor/interlocutor subject (shared from Saussure through Chomsky) is being dissolved by linguistics' own positive syntactical exploration, which encounters phenomena (heterogeneous subjects, power relations) it cannot account for — ultimately forcing linguistics toward psychoanalysis, and opening onto Lacan's logic of the not-all and feminine jouissance.

     $$\exists x. \overline{\phi}x \longrightarrow \leftarrow \overline{\exists}x. \overline{\phi}x$$

128. #128

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

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972** > What does that mean?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic discourse resists grounding in any substance or being, and that the impossibility of predication (the absolute 'being' that cannot be completed) is revealed precisely through the fracture of sexed being as it is constituted by jouissance—thus breaking with philosophy and grounding analysis in topology rather than ontology.

     the fracture, the break, the interruption of the formula sexed being in so far as the sexed being is involved in enjoyment

129. #129

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

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

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

     It is the limit, it is the bordering function, it is the envelopment by the one that permits a set to be posited with respect to castration... With regard to this function Φ the woman can only be inscribed as not-all.

130. #130

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

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

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

     to take things from the side where it is logically that the quantor, namely: all x, is a function...on the side where one ranges oneself, in short, by choice! Women are free to rank themselves there also if they want to

131. #131

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.207

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

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

     Between the two terms3».$A. and^.^k , there is the undecidable.

132. #132

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

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

     the recalling of propositional terms, in the mathematical sense, by which any speaking being whatsoever is inscribed on the left or indeed on the right… on the left what corresponds to all men… is in function of what is described as x… On the other hand, opposite, you have the inscription of something that… is precisely not to allow any universality, to be this not all

133. #133

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

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

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

     what analytic discourse demonstrates is that the phallus is the conscientious objection... the woman is not whole — woman's sexual organ is of no interest to him except via the enjoyment of the body.

134. #134

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.125

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that reality is approached through "systems of enjoyment" coextensive with language, that the sexual relationship fails in two ways (male/all and female/not-all), and that the object (objet petit a) is constitutively defined by failure — failure being the essence of the object and the only way the sexual relationship is "realized."

     there was a male way of failing (rater) and then an other... failing the sexual relationship which is the only way of realising it if as I posit, there is no sexual relationship.

135. #135

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.125

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of oriented Borromean knots to argue that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are homogenised by 'consistency' (similarity, not sameness), and that the necessity of 'flattening-out' the knot to demonstrate its uniqueness exposes a fundamental limitation of conceptual thought in grasping the Real — a limitation that underwrites the formula 'there is no sexual relationship.'

     there is no sexual relationship… It is to designate a very local point, to manifest the logic of the relation, to mark that R to designate the relation… is to enter here and now into the operation of writing

136. #136

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an anecdotal tour through Nice, Strasbourg, London, and his reading of Strachey's *Queen Victoria* to advance the theoretical claim that the sexual non-relationship is confirmed by historical-biographical evidence, while elaborating the resistance of different *lalangues* to the unconscious and reiterating that "The woman does not exist" but that women (as not-all) have a privileged, unmeasured relation to liberty and to the unconscious.

     If I had, which obviously would never come into my head, if I had to localise somewhere the idea of liberty, it would obviously be in a woman that I would incarnate it

137. #137

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 11: Tuesday 13 May 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Borromean knot to argue that the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are not distinguished by their threeness alone but by the specific logical properties of the knot (necessity and sufficiency of each element), and introduces 'nomination' as a fourth element that knots an otherwise unknotted triad — advancing toward a topology of four that will structure his next year's work (4, 5, 6).

     There is a completely different way of supporting the figure of the non-relationship of the sexes, it is to support them by two circles qua not knotted. That is what is at stake in what I state about non-relationship, each of these circles... is not knotted to the other.

138. #138

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

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

     the me pontes as the opposition dismissed, dismissed by Aristotle from the universal of pan, the woman is not all except in the form whose equivocation takes on a piquant quality

139. #139

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Real as fundamentally unbound and orientating-without-meaning, distinguishes a more radical foreclosure than that of the Name-of-the-Father, and ties the Death Drive to the Real itself, while the matheme (and the Borromean knot as topological device) are offered as instruments for reaching "bits of Real" that resist symbolic embroidery.

     there exists an x for which this function is negative, ∃x Φx̄

140. #140

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.140

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

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

     The notion of couple, of coloured couple, is there to suggest that in sex, there is nothing more than, I would say, the being of colour... The sexes on this occasion, if we support with the red ring what is involved in the Symbolic, the sexes on this occasion are opposed as Imaginary and Real

141. #141

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     **X**: What does systematising mean? [*Laughter]* > **Annexe to Session VIII** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 11 April 1978**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures the topological grounding of psychoanalysis by moving from a simple Möbius strip to a doubled/tripled one that flattens into a threefold knot, arguing that the absence of the sexual relationship—screened by the incest prohibition and crystallised around the Oedipus myth—requires a material geometry of thread and fabric rather than a metaphorics of thought, because the passage from signifier to signified always involves a loss that mere 'free association' cannot overcome.

     Knowledge, is always in relationship with what I write 'l'asexe', on condition of following it up with a word which is to be put in parenthesis 'ualité': l'asexe (ualité).

142. #142

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is fundamentally structured by the subject's exteriority to the signifier — where the neurotic 'inhabits language,' the psychotic is 'inhabited by language' — and that the onset of psychosis is triggered at the moment of being called upon to 'speak out' one's own speech, a failing rooted in the prior foreclosure of the primordial signifier (Verwerfung).

     The two sides, male and female, of sexuality are not given data, are nothing that could be deduced from experience. How could the individual situate himself within sexuality if he didn't already possess the system of signifiers

143. #143

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Through a case of traumatic hysteria (Eisler's 1921 analysis), Lacan argues that hysterical symptoms are not reducible to imaginary or libidinal contents (anal, homosexual) but are formulations of a fundamentally symbolic question—"Am I a man or a woman? Am I capable of procreating?"—thereby grounding neurosis in the subject's failed symbolic identification with a sexed position, and linking this to Dora's question to establish a structural dissymmetry in the Oedipus complex between the sexes.

     Am I a man or a woman? and Am I capable of procreating? … The problematic nature of his symbolic identification underlies any possible understanding of the observation.

144. #144

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the historical evolution of debates around the Oedipus complex onto three structural poles—superego, reality, and ego-ideal—arguing that the function of the father and the Oedipus complex are co-extensive, and uses Melanie Klein's own findings to demonstrate that the paternal third term (the phallus) is irreducible even in supposedly pre-Oedipal imaginary relations, thus preparing the ground for his formal account of the paternal metaphor.

     Virility and feminization are the two terms that translate what is essentially the function of the Oedipus complex.

145. #145

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a signifier—not a privileged object (contra Klein)—and that the subject's relation to it is structured by the dialectic of being versus having: men "are not without having it" (castration enables possession of objects), while women "are without having it," making the sexual positions asymmetrical and irreducible to each other.

     This suffices to indicate that, when it comes to sexuality, male subjects and female subjects begin from different points.

146. #146

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     It is not my point of view. I didn r mention religion.

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two registers of the real: the symptomatic real (how the real impinges on living/speaking beings) and the scientific real (accessible through mathematical formulas but producing only 'gadgets'), while grounding the irreducibility of sexual non-relation as the engine of symptomatic proliferation — with wordplay (foi/foire/forum) serving not as decoration but as the very key to psychoanalytic method.

     We will never get to the bottom of the relationship between speaking beings that we sexuate [sexuons] as male and the speaking beings we sexuate as woman.

147. #147

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     The Triumph of Religion

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of editorial/translator footnotes providing clarifications on French terms, bibliographic references, and terminological ambiguities in Lacan's text; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

     In Lacan's terminology, to sexuate (sexuer) might be rendered as 'to differentiate sexually'; see Seminar XX. where Lacan uses the adjective sexue... and presents his 'formulas of sexuation.'

148. #148

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.66

     chapter 2 > Shofar

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object voice — paradigmatically embodied in the shofar — is not simply opposed to logos but is its hidden support: the paternal voice that founds the Law is structurally identical to the "other" voice it ostensibly persecutes, and both are organized around an ineradicable lack (S(A/)) that links voice, jouissance, femininity, and the impossible foundation of the Other. The voice is further theorized as the missing link between bodies and languages, connecting Lacanian object-theory to Badiou's ontology.

     the point of the absent foundation of the Law, and also the point which has an intrinsic relation with femininity and the nonexistence of The Woman... Masculine and feminine positions would then be two ways of tackling the same impossibility

149. #149

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.159

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

     once under the auspices of the letter, the senseless letter of the matheme (hence the formulas of sexuation, and so on)

150. #150

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.148

     A month later:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.

     proper knowledge about sex—not its fantasmatic understanding—would be presented precisely by the notorious formulas of sexuation—we could read them as the counterpart, at the opposite end, of that uncanny incomprehensible noise

151. #151

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.220

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues for a "total incompatibility" between Butler's constructivist account of sex and the psychoanalytic position: sex, defined by the law of the drives, cannot be deconstructed or culturally re-signified because the drives are the irreducible Other of culture, and the impossibility they introduce into language is precisely what necessitates repetition and forecloses voluntarism.

     within any discourse the subject can only assume either a male or a female position.

152. #152

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.247

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamical sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share the same logic of the limit/exception (foreclosure of existential judgment), and uses this alignment to call for a new, alternative ethics proper to women—an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited"—beyond the superego's logic of exception.

     the Lacanian account of the male antinomies both align themselves with the psychoanalytical description of the superego... It is now time to devote some thought to developing an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman.

153. #153

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.224

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Phallic Function

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

     my focus will be on the formulas of sexuation proposed by Lacan in his Seminar XX: Encore. In this seminar Lacan reiterates the position of psychoanalysis with regard to sexual difference: our sexed being, he maintains, is not a biological phenomenon, it does not pass through the body, but 'results from the logical demands of speech.'

154. #154

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.214

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex is not an incomplete or unstable meaning (as Butler's historicist/deconstructionist position holds) but the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the internal failure of signification itself—and that this makes sexual difference a Real rather than Symbolic difference, unlike race or class, while grounding a conception of the subject as radically unknowable and thus the only guarantee against racism.

     Sex is the stumbling block of sense... sex is produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification.

155. #155

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.213

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, first, that film noir's visual techniques and the femme fatale figure both function as failed symbolic defenses against the drive/jouissance; and second, pivoting to Butler's Gender Trouble, that the sex-as-substance vs. sex-as-signification binary is inadequate because it smuggles in an imaginary (complementary) conception of sexual difference, which Lacanian sexuation can displace.

     Must sexual difference be conceived only as an imaginary relation? Or, is there a different way to think the division of subjects into two sexes, one that does not support a normative heterosexuality?

156. #156

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.237

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" formula for woman functions as an indefinite judgment in the Kantian sense — affirming a negative predicate rather than negating a copula — which means woman's ex-sistence is neither denied nor confirmed, her non-collectibility into a whole stems from an internal limit (the failure of castration's "no"), and she is ultimately the product of lalangue, a symbolic without the guarantee of the Other.

     The relation of the woman to the symbolic and to the phallic function is considerably complicated by this argument.

157. #157

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.228

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

     Theoretical move: By mapping Kant's first mathematical antinomy (the "not-all" structure of phenomena) onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation for the female side, the passage argues that "the woman does not exist" is a rigorously Kantian thesis about the internal limit of reason—not a historicist claim about particular, discursively constructed women—thereby distinguishing Lacanian universality from both Aristotelian particularity and Butler-style anti-universalism.

     we will discuss only the first, since it is this one that seems to us to correspond most closely to the antinomy found on the 'female side' of the formulas of sexuation.

158. #158

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

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

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

     the left hand, or male, side of the formulas of sexuation repeats the logic of Kant's resolution: 'There is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function' and 'All x's are submitted to the phallic function' are both taken to be true

159. #159

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.245

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation desubstantialize sex entirely: masculinity is an imposture and femininity a masquerade, because being escapes the symbolic for men just as universality is impossible for women—the sexual relation fails doubly (prohibition for men, impossibility for women), meaning no complementary universe of the sexes can be constructed.

     Rather than defining a universe of men that is complemented by a universe of women, Lacan defines man as the prohibition against constructing a universe and woman as the impossibility of doing so.

160. #160

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's encounter with lost objects produces identification as a structural residue, and that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex specifically generates the super-ego/ego-ideal as a precipitate of those identifications — establishing the super-ego as an internal agency that actively opposes the rest of the ego and is constitutively linked to sublimation, narcissism, and bisexuality.

     Whether the final outcome of the Oedipus situation is a father-identification or a mother-identification thus seems to depend in both sexes on the relative strength of the male and female elements in the individual's make-up.

161. #161

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny II: Male Illusions and Female Choices

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" through the asymmetry between male and female developmental logics, Ruda argues that the female logic—as a forced choice of one's own unconscious that precedes and exceeds the Oedipus complex—reveals a non-arbitrary, non-conscious freedom irreducible to the male totalizing illusion, making "woman" the name for an emancipatory act rather than a fixed entity.

     Male and female children develop according to distinct logics. There is no parallelism, no relation, so to speak.

162. #162

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.260

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 8**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 8, listing scholarly references (Kant, Butler, Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Lyotard, etc.) without advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

     Jacques-Alain Miller develops this Lacanian distinction between inconsistency and incompleteness in relation to sexual difference in his unpublished seminar 'Extimité' (1985–86).

163. #163

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Butler's critique of sex-as-substance illegitimately slides into a voluntarist constructivism by treating the instability of signification as evidence for the incompleteness of sexual being itself; against this, Copjec advances the Lacanian/Freudian thesis that sex is produced not by the success but by the *internal limit* of signification—its constitutive failure—and that the antinomy this generates cannot be resolved by either the dogmatic-structuralist or the skeptical-constructivist solution.

     the attempt to contemplate sex also throws reason into conflict with itself and will here declare my opposition to the alternatives we face as a result

164. #164

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.179

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "locked-room paradox" in detective fiction is the structural equivalent of language's internal limit: the excess element is not a hidden surplus beneath the structure but the limit immanent to it, which is why the detective's interpretive act is constitutively desire—the quasi-transcendental principle that posits a gap irreducible to evidence—and why the sexual relation is structurally foreclosed from the genre by the absence of the final, woman-signifier.

     the absence of this signifier makes the sexual relation impossible… The detective is structurally forbidden any involvement with a woman.

165. #165

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.210

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex must be understood as the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the Real failure of language with itself—rather than as an incomplete or unstable signification (Butler), and that only this Kantian/psychoanalytic definition of sex as radically unknowable preserves the subject's sovereignty and protects against the voluntarism and calculability that underwrite racism and homogenization.

     within any discourse the subject can only assume either a male or a female position.

166. #166

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

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

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

     the left-hand, or male, side of the formulas of sexuation repeats the logic of Kant's resolution: 'There is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function' and 'All x's are submitted to the phallic function' are both taken to be true

167. #167

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.218

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Female Side: Mathematical Failure**

     Theoretical move: By mapping Kant's first mathematical antinomy onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation for the female side, Copjec argues that "the woman does not exist" follows the same logic by which the world cannot be constructed as a totality: both the universal and the not-all formulas arise not from empirical limitation but from the constitutive impossibility of an unconditioned whole, a logic irreducible to Aristotelian particularity or historicist critique.

     the formulas we have produced from Kant's two statements regarding the solution of the first mathematical antinomy formally reduplicate those that Lacan gives for the woman, who, like the world, does not exist.

168. #168

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.213

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

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

     I intend, then, for the rest, to interpret psychoanalysis's sexuation of the subject in terms of Kant's analysis of the antinomies of reason. More specifically my focus will be on the formulas of sexuation proposed by Lacan in his Seminar XX: Encore.

169. #169

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.235

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's sexuation formulas desubstantialize sex by showing that masculine existence is grounded in a negative judgment that excludes the real object (guaranteeing objectivity while keeping being inaccessible), and that the sexual relation fails doubly—by prohibition (masculine side) and impossibility (feminine side)—so that men and women cannot form complementary universes and every claim to positive sexual identity is imposture or masquerade.

     Lacan defines man as the prohibition against constructing a universe and woman as the impossibility of doing so. The sexual relation fails for two reasons: it is impossible and it is prohibited.

170. #170

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **Sexual Difference and the Superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamically sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share a common logic of the limit/exception—wherein a terrifying force is posited as possible but not existent, converting the father into an impossible Real—and concludes by calling for a new ethics grounded in the "not-all" logic proper to feminine sexuation, rather than the superegoic logic of exception.

     the field of ethics has too long been theorized in terms of this particular superegoic logic of exception or limit. It is now time to devote some thought to developing an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman.

171. #171

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.219

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "phallic signifier" is not a gesture of phallocentrism but of desublimation: it reattaches the mystery of the Phallus to the piece of the Real whose veiling produced sublime Meaning, and comedy is the human practice that structurally performs the same move—materializing the "behind" as a finite, trivial object rather than an infinite abyss, thereby showing that castration always arrives in a concrete form, not as pure lack.

     its effect is called castration. The 'phallic signifier' as the signifier of castration ... is, one could say, the signifier of the *missing link* between the biological and the Symbolic (or between nature and culture) *as the generic point of sexuation.*

172. #172

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.217

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the phallus functions as the signifier of castration not because anatomy is destiny, but because an anatomical peculiarity comes to incarnate a pre-existing symbolic impasse — the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment — and psychoanalysis, by disclosing this contingent linkage, dethrones the phallus from necessity to contingency and reveals human sexuality as itself the problematic junction of nature and culture.

     This junction is the site of sexuation in the strict meaning of the word

173. #173

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.201

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the structural core of comedy is not mere bisection but the emergence of a surplus element ("comic object," factor x) from any split of an imaginary One—a logic she grounds in a re-reading of Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium*, where Zeus's second cut (relocating the genitals) introduces surplus-jouissance as the element that perpetually prevents the two halves from fusing back into One, and which Lacan identifies as the essential comic reference to the phallus.

     Although after this interlude on sexuation Aristophanes immediately resumes his talk about love and desire being founded in the longing for our other lost half, this curious detail deserves our attention.

174. #174

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's identifications with lost objects—culminating in the Oedipus complex's resolution—produce a differentiated agency within the ego (the super-ego/ego-ideal), and that this mechanism of converting object-libido into narcissistic libido via identification is the general pathway for sublimation and character formation.

     Whether the final outcome of the Oedipus situation is a father-identification or a mother-identification thus seems to depend in both sexes on the relative strength of the male and female elements in the individual's make-up.

175. #175

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.141

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter03.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx through Hegelian dialectics, Platonic anamnesis, and Lacanian subjectivity reveals: (1) capitalism's internal contradictions become visible only at its full realization; (2) liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such; and (3) Hegel's theory of labor as negativity corrects both workerist and OOO misreadings of the subject.

     Some of the representatives employ the Lacanian 'formula of sexuation' to articulate the difference between modern metaphysics (qua the masculine side of universality) and OOO (qua the feminine side of non-all).

176. #176

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Totality, Antagonism, Individuation**

     Theoretical move: Totality is not a seamless Whole but is constitutively traversed by antagonism, which is what holds it together rather than undermining it; this Hegelian-Lacanian redefinition of totality as "Whole plus its symptoms" reframes antagonism as the very principle of structuration, with sexual difference as the paradigm case of a "real-impossible" antagonism that precedes and conditions its terms.

     Its structure was deployed by Lacan apropos of sexual difference, which, as a difference, precedes the two terms between which it is the difference. The point of Lacan's 'formulae of sexuation' is that both masculine and feminine positions are ways of avoiding the deadlock of the difference as such.

177. #177

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.58

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

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

     This shift in the relationship to the In-itself can be rendered in terms of the shift from the masculine to the feminine position (in the sense of Lacan's formulas of sexuation).

178. #178

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.156

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Absolute—whether figured as posthuman singularity, communist productivity, or perfect beauty—is constitutively dependent on the obstacle (finitude, mortality, sexuality, contradiction) that seems to prevent its full actualization; the objet petit a logic shows that removing the obstacle simultaneously destroys what the obstacle was obstacle to, so the Absolute persists only as a virtual vanishing point within failure, not beyond it.

     we will no longer be singular mortal and sexed subjects. We will lose our singularity (and with it our subjectivity) as well as our distance towards 'external' reality.

179. #179

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.117

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

     one way to read Lacan's formulas of sexuation is also that, from the masculine standpoint, sexual difference is the difference between (masculine) human universality and its (feminine) exception, while from the feminine standpoint, it is the difference between (feminine) non-all and (masculine) no-exception.

180. #180

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.425

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "empty ritual" — one whose traditional content is lost and whose artificiality is fully acknowledged — can be more authentically operative than an immersive, "authentic" one, and uses this case to construct a four-term Greimasian matrix of ethical gestures organized around the axes of negative/positive and ritual/non-ritualized act, while also distinguishing hegemonic false universality from the authentic universality embodied by those excluded from the hegemonic order.

     One should notice how sexual difference is at work here: the two negative gestures are feminine and the two positive acts masculine.

181. #181

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for the chapter "Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute," providing citations and brief theoretical asides. The substantive theoretical moves appear only in the footnote annotations (notes 9, 10, 21, 28, 30), not in the citations themselves.

     sexual difference is here structured as the opposition of two (potentially, at least) antinomic positions: men are committed to their word, reliable, and simultaneously adventurous; women are stable, inert, and simultaneously flimsy, unstable, in their speech.

182. #182

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.321

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Badiou's "positivism of Truth-Event" by insisting that the Death Drive—understood as radical (self-relating) negativity rather than any ontic positivity—is the primordial opening that makes an Event possible, and that sexuality (as the site of this void) cannot be reduced to the order of Being but is already a "brush with the Absolute" that love merely supplements, not elevates.

     he obfuscates the radical meaning of Lacan's axiom "il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel," there is no sexual relationship: human sexuality cannot be located in the order of Being, it introduces a cut of impossibility into this order

183. #183

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.371

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The Inhuman View](#contents.xhtml_ahd24)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian "bar" is not Butler's liberal-hegemonic bar of contingent social exclusion but the constitutive split that separates the subject as void from all objective content—grounded in primordial repression and the fundamental fantasy—and that emancipatory transformation requires not gradual inclusion but the radical act of traversing the fantasy, which institutes an entirely new mode of historicity rather than extending an existing one.

     something like this is happening today with the radical change in the relationship between sexes whose visible sign is the MeToo movement: this change is much more than a progress in the modern history of emancipation since it suspends the 'fundamental (ideological) fantasy' which sustained the notion of sexual difference

184. #184

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.253

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference (and analogous structures like class antagonism) cannot be resolved by nominalist multiplication of categories, because the "+" remainder in any classificatory series is not an epistemological gap but a positive ontological entity—the very embodiment of antagonism—homologous to objet a as the reflexive stand-in for surplus desire itself; fetishistic multiplication of identities/modernities is thus a disavowal of castration.

     the minimal formula of sexual difference is simply M+: masculine (phallic) identity plus something to be added … we can now understand why we can write sexual difference (not as M/F but) as M+

185. #185

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a programmatic argument that dialectical materialism must be reconceived as a formal materialism of unorientable surfaces—without substantial matter or teleological development—and that sexuality (understood as radical negativity following Lacan) is the privileged site where the parallax gap between ontology and the transcendental is redoubled and thus our sole contact with the Absolute, with topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) providing the structural vocabulary for this redoubling.

     sexuality is here understood as a force of negativity which disrupts every ontological edifice, and sexual difference is understood as a 'pure' difference which implies a convoluted space that eludes any binary form

186. #186

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.195

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Schematism in Kant, Hegel … and Sex

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's fantasy functions as a "sexual schematism" homologous to Kant's transcendental schematism: just as schemata mediate between pure categories and sensible intuitions, fantasy mediates between the structural lack of sexual relationship and the subject's concrete desire, constituting the very coordinates of desire rather than merely fulfilling it. This homology is then extended to ideological schematism and Benjamin's distinction between language-in-general and human language.

     the universal fact is not some set of symbolic norms but the fact that there is no sexual relationship, and the scheme is not universal but unique, an individual fantasy invention to render a sexual relation possible

187. #187

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.62

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is formally defined by the structural impossibility of its goal, such that the drive sustains itself through repeated failure rather than satisfaction; this logic of impossibility—anchored in das Ding—is what distinguishes the human from the animal, and hysteria is identified as the elementary human modality of installing this point of impossibility as absolute jouissance.

     The sexual act itself, which implies as its goal insemination and procreation, becomes an end in itself with human sexuation.

188. #188

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.375

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian subject's fear of the In-itself as external/transcendent must be displaced by the Hegelian move of internalizing that exteriority: Absolute Knowing is not omniscience but the transposition of the obstacle to knowing into the heart of the subject itself, and this shift is isomorphic with the move from the masculine (exception-based) to the feminine (non-all) position in Lacan's formulas of sexuation, where the In-itself is legible only as the cut or stain inscribed within phenomenal reality rather than beyond it.

     the shift in the relationship to In-itself... can be rendered in the terms of the shift from the masculine to the feminine position (in the sense of Lacan's formulas of sexuation).

189. #189

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.36

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement](#contents.xhtml_ahd2)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the full Hegelian move beyond Kant requires positing a crack or proto-deontological tension within reality itself (not just in its symbolic mediation), such that the emergence of the Symbolic Order retroactively constitutes its own always-already, and that the crucial theoretical reversal is to ask not what nature is for the subject but what the subject's emergence means for (pre-subjective) nature/substance—a move that displaces both transcendentalism and logo-centrism.

     the Real of sexual difference is not the difference between masculine and feminine identities but this difference 'in its becoming,' the movement of (self)differentiation which precedes the differentiated terms

190. #190

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.135

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference as Real is not the difference between two positive entities but an immanent antagonism that precedes and constitutes both terms; the 'third element' (transgender, chimney sweep, objet a) does not supplement the binary but materialises the pure difference/antagonism itself, and the Other sex is merely the reflexive determination of the impossibility of the One.

     The difference of formulas of sexuation is the difference between two antagonisms or 'contradictions' (all grounded in exception and non-all with no exception, a redoubled logical deadlock contingently attached to biological sexes).

191. #191

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Mathematical Antinomies

     Theoretical move: This passage presents Kant's first two Mathematical Antinomies (of space/time and of atomism) as raw theoretical material, establishing the antinomial structure that Žižek will map onto his account of sexuation as a "brush with the Absolute."

     Antinomies of Pure Sexuation > The Mathematical Antinomies

192. #192

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.123

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel is not a return to pre-critical ontology but a move that inscribes epistemological antinomies into the Real itself, making "subjective distortion" the very mode of contact with the Absolute—and that sexuality, as the impossible-real Absolute, is accessible only through the detours and gaps of the symbolic order, with Lacan's formulas of sexuation homologous to Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

     the already elaborated homology between Kant's duality of mathematical and dynamic antinomies of pure reason and Lacan's formulas of sexuation, a homology which asserts the ontological relevance of sexuality

193. #193

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.256

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via a dialectical reading of the Universal/Particular relation, that sexual difference is not a difference between two species-identities but a constitutive antagonism that cuts within each sex, making every particular sexual identity a failed attempt to resolve an irreducible deadlock—and that ideologies of gender fluidity or "unlearning gender" evade rather than confront this constitutive impossibility captured in Lacan's "there is no sexual relationship."

     Sexual difference is thus not the difference between the two sexes but the (same) difference which cuts from within each of the two sexes, making each of them thwarted, unequal-to-itself.

194. #194

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

     masculine sexuality [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1323)

195. #195

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is reframed as a formal rather than content-based phenomenon: an activity becomes "sexualized" when it is captured in a distorted circular temporality identical to Freud's death drive, while Sade's attempt to eliminate that circularity paradoxically de-eroticizes sexuality into a post-human mechanism.

     sexuality doesn't primarily concern content ('those matters'): it is ultimately a formal phenomenon—a certain activity is 'sexualized' the moment it gets caught in a distorted circular temporality.

196. #196

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.141

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not a binary opposition between two self-identical terms but a "crumbled" asymmetry in which one signifier (the masculine/phallic Master-Signifier S1) lacks its binary counterpart, so that the feminine position is pure difference/excess (M+) rather than a second species; this generates a double transcendental genesis in which S1 and the chain of S2 each retroactively posit the other as what fills its own constitutive lack.

     sexual difference is primarily not the difference between the two sexes but a difference (inconsistency, antagonism) that cuts from within each of the two: what defines each sex is not primarily its difference from the opposite sex but its difference from itself, its own immanent 'contradiction.'

197. #197

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The third antinomy (of spontaneity and causal determinism)

     Theoretical move: The passage presents Kant's third antinomy as a structural opposition between natural causality and spontaneity, deployed within Žižek's broader framework mapping Kantian antinomies onto the logic of sexuation.

     Antinomies of Pure Sexuation

198. #198

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

     Theoretical move: Žižek deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

     for Lacan, sexual difference is not a difference between two sexes, but a difference separating One (Sex) from itself—the One cannot ever reach the Two, its complementary counterpart, i.e., as Lacan put it, there is no Other Sex.

199. #199

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.205

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Marx, <span id="scholium_22_marx_brecht_and_sexual_contracts.xhtml_IDX-211"></span>Brecht, and Sexual Contracts

     Theoretical move: By reading Brecht's Marxist parody of Kant on sexual contracts alongside Marx's structural analysis of labor exploitation, Žižek argues that the MeToo movement's privileging of structural weakness over objective weakness reproduces a ruthless power logic that reduces sex entirely to power, foreclosing love and reinscribing the very domination it claims to contest — while the only genuine path to emancipation paradoxically runs through radical commodification (the Möbius-strip reversal).

     the woman is in the weaker position. As with the contract between worker and capitalist, one should emphasize the structural (formal) character of this weakness: even if the woman initiated sexual exchange, even if she is socially or financially much stronger, she is structurally weaker.

200. #200

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.227

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality](#contents.xhtml_ahd13)

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip serves as the topological model for dialectical "coincidence of opposites," showing how a line brought to its extreme intersects with its opposite — a structure that governs politics (Fascism), sexuation (universality/exception), the psychoanalytic relation of contingency to symbolization, and the Signifier/Signified relation in language, with the quilting point as the element of contingent Real that concludes the symbolic process by throwing it back to its origin.

     it is difficult not to note how this shift echoes Lacan's formulas of sexuation: first, we have the promotion of the universal dissolution of identities and values sustained by the Jewish exception; then, we have a non-all (inconsistent, antagonist) series with no exception.

201. #201

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

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

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

     the antinomy of masculine sexuality and the antinomy of feminine sexuality… jouissance feminine is limitless… while masculine sexual economy relies on a non-sexual (ethical, in Kant's case) exception which sustains its universality.

202. #202

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.108

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7)

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Copjec, argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation structurally reproduce Kant's antinomies of pure reason, such that the masculine/feminine opposition (universal+exception vs. non-all) maps onto the Kantian problem of reason entangling itself in irresolvable contradictions when it attempts to think reality as a totality — thereby grounding sexuality in the transcendental dimension.

     Lacan's formulas of sexuation exactly reproduce the structure of Kant's antinomies of pure reason, so that Lacan's formulas of sexuation should be designated antinomies of pure sexuation.

203. #203

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.149

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "Absolute Knowing" names a redoubled not-knowing in which ontological incompleteness is displaced into reality itself, and that this logic—exemplified by the Lacanian "subject of the unconscious" structured as a Kierkegaardian apostle—entails rejecting the human/animal exception as the origin of sexual deadlock: the rupture of sexuality is pre-human, constitutive of nature as such, with humanity merely the site where this constitutive gap "appears as such."

     In sexual individuation proper, 'the entire habit (habitus) of the individual must be bound up with its sex,' that is to say, with the principle of oppositionality that defines dialectical sexual ontology.

204. #204

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.136

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for a structural primacy of the "feminine" (mathematical) antinomy over the "masculine" (dynamical) antinomy: the dynamical antinomy is a secondary, derivative operation that resolves the mathematical deadlock by constituting a Whole/universality through the exclusion of a founding exception from the non-All field.

     the "feminine" mathematical antinomy has a primacy over the "masculine" dynamical antinomy

205. #205

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.224

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the logic of reflection, mapped onto topological surfaces (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle), culminates in a 'pure difference' that precedes and constitutes its terms rather than distinguishing pre-existing entities — sexual difference and class struggle are paradigmatic cases. From this, Žižek proposes extending Lacan's point de capiton into a triad (quilting point, quilting line, quilting tube) corresponding to the three unorientable surfaces, and defends topology against the 'Hegelian' figural/conceptual hierarchy by arguing that self-referential twists ARE conceptual thinking.

     sexual difference is not the difference between the two sexes but the name of a deadlock which every sexual position tries to stabilize

206. #206

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.131

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

     there is no sexual relationship, all polymorphous-perverse play of partial drives takes place against the background of this impossibility/antagonism.

207. #207

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage proposes a five-stage dialectical schema of sexuality's evolution—from asexual reproduction through symbolic redoubling to posthuman disintegration—where each stage marks a new mode of actualisation of sexual difference, culminating in the collapse of both biological and symbolic levels under posthuman conditions.

     five steps in the evolution of sexuality: first, asexual reproduction (parthenogenesis); then, with plants, sexual difference is posited in itself, it is not yet fully actualized "for itself"

208. #208

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

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

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

     the couple of dynamic and mathematical antinomies perfectly mirrors the two sides of Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation'

209. #209

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.184

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading the film *Arrival* through the opposition of circular (heptapod) and linear (human) temporality, Žižek argues that the circle of time is always-already an ellipse structured around a disavowed cut, and that the act of "willing the inevitable" is not empty but ontologically necessary—the finite, sexualized subject's capacity to intervene with a decision is what the holistic Other lacks and needs, making temporal finitude superior to atemporal plenitude.

     We should especially not directly link this opposition of circular and linear to the duality of feminine and masculine

210. #210

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive passage consisting of index entries (P–S) from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing topics and their page locations with no argumentative content.

     pure sexuation, antinomies of [here]

211. #211

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries (I–L) with page cross-references; it carries no independent theoretical argument.

     formulas of sexuation [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1154)

212. #212

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.238

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kant-to-Hegel move requires understanding the form/content gap as itself reflected back into content as "primordial repression," and maps this onto Lacan's sexuation formulas (form = non-all, matter = universal with exception), ultimately driving toward the cross-cap as the topological figure adequate to a radical antagonism irreducible to the Möbius strip.

     to put it in the terms of Lacan's formulas of sexuation, form is non-all while matter is universal with an exception (of form).

213. #213

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.61

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that radical materialism requires rejecting both "objective reality" and consistent subjectivity, identifying the Real not with nature-in-itself but with the crack/gap in every ontological edifice—a deficiency shared by transcendental reason and reality itself—which Freud/Lacan name 'sexuality,' and whose trans-ontological elaboration requires a concept of 'less than nothing' formalized through the Klein bottle as the minimal definition of the Absolute.

     Freud's implicit hypothesis (explicated by Lacan) is that, in human beings, the name of this 'deficiency' is sexuality.

214. #214

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.435

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

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

     Even more problematic is the sexuation of the opposition between language and lalangue, so that language follows the masculine logic of universality grounded in exception and lalangue follows the feminine logic of non-all.

215. #215

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.329

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real harbours a constitutive self-blockage that generates appearing from within, against Badiou's presupposition of appearing as given and his masculine-exceptional logic of Truth-Event; the Death Drive and the feminine Not-all formula are mobilised to articulate this as the properly Lacanian (and Hegelian) alternative to Badiou's ontology.

     One can formulate this difference between Badiou and Lacan also in the terms of Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation,' as the difference between universality grounded in its exception and the non-All with no exception.

216. #216

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.291

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

     Theoretical move: Žižek applies the Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment, mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation, to argue that true materialism is expressed not by "material reality is all there is" (which requires a constitutive exception) but by "material reality is non-all" (which asserts the non-All without implying any exception).

     in accordance with Lacan's formulas of sexuation, inherent to the positive statement 'material reality is all there is': as its constitutive exception, it grounds its universality.

217. #217

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing key terms and their page/section locations. It is non-substantive in itself but maps the conceptual architecture of the book, pointing to where core Lacanian and Hegelian concepts are developed.

     formulas of [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-2069), [here]... antinomies of [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-2067)

218. #218

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.137

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constitutively sexed by mapping the Kantian mathematical/dynamic antinomy onto Hegel's logic of Being/Essence, and then showing that each domain, when carried to its limit (via differential calculus as the paradigm case), self-sublates into a void that constitutes a distinct sexed subject: "feminine" subjectivity emerges from the self-sublation of the mathematical/Being domain, while "masculine" subjectivity emerges from the dynamic/Essence domain.

     we arrive at redoubled subjectivity: 'feminine' subject is the void that arises through the self-sublation of the 'mathematical' domain of Being, and the 'masculine' subject arises through the self-sublation of the 'dynamic' tensions of the domain of Essence.

219. #219

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.152

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human sexuality is not a "civilized" displacement of natural animal sexuality but rather the point where the dislocation/impossibility immanent in all sexed reproduction becomes registered as such—via the Unconscious and surplus-jouissance—so that culture retroactively denaturalizes nature itself, while the transition from animal to human mirrors the Hegelian move from In-itself to For-itself applied to not-knowing.

     It is only with this that we move from sexuation to sexuality proper (sexuality of speaking beings).

220. #220

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'feminine' formula of sexuation (non-All, multiplicity filling in the void of the missing binary signifier) has logical priority over the 'masculine' formula (All-with-exception), and that this asymmetry reveals feminine subjectivity as a more radical negativity — not determinate negation but pure 'without,' i.e., the barred subject ($) as such — making the feminine the constitutive operator of reality's inconsistency rather than its exception.

     these two versions point towards the logic of Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation'? Contrary to our expectations, it is the first version… which is 'feminine'… and it is the second version which is 'masculine'

221. #221

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.33

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section anchors several key theoretical moves in the introduction: the non-substantial, beingless subject (manque à être), the relationship between subject and objet petit a as a cut/gap structured like a Möbius strip (fantasy formula), the critique of neovitalist/object-oriented ontology via Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism, and Lacan's alignment of his project with dialectical materialism against nominalism.

     Bryant, in The Democracy of Objects, likewise deploys Lacan's formulas of sexuation, aligning modern metaphysics with the masculine side of universality grounded in a transcendent exception... while aligning his object-oriented onticology with the feminine side of non-all without exception

222. #222

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.162

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that while Deleuze and Lacan share a tripartite topology grounded in an originary negativity (crack/hole/Real) around which the drives congregate, Deleuze ultimately "liquefies" this topological rift into a pure dynamic movement of Difference, thereby obliterating the Lacanian Real as a third term irreducible to both the signifying chain and surplus-enjoyment.

     What Lacan adds to this . . . is that we could also see sexuation as prior to the partial drives: not as a kind of primary substance, but precisely as a pure negativity, a hole/crack (and in this sense as the Real) around which the drives 'congregate'.

223. #223

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.181

     Who Cares?

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis must be positioned against new materialism not to defend anthropocentrism but to supply what new materialism lacks: a theorization of the Real as the consequence of castration (not a pre-discursive thing-in-itself), and of sexuality as an "ontological lapse" that marks the specificity of human being without grounding a hierarchy—thereby enabling an ethics of the nonhuman other that new materialism's own "democracy of objects" forecloses.

     positing sexual difference as ontological difference forces us to consider, with new materialism, how the metaphysics of the subject is insufficient grounds for any ethical relation

224. #224

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.27

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: This introductory survey passage maps the theoretical terrain of a collection's second section on Lacan and psychoanalytic materialism, demonstrating how each chapter uses Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, death drive, extimacy, sublimation, the barred subject) to critique rival materialisms (Deleuzian, new materialist, object-oriented) and assert the irreducibility of the subject and the Real.

     the 'something special' about the human being: the ontological lapse that is sex/sexuality... positing sexual difference as ontological difference forces us to consider how the metaphysics of the subject is insufficient grounds for any ethical relation

225. #225

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.269

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     sexuation, 9, 25n34, 154

226. #226

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.189

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic account of sexuality as an ontological negativity—instantiated in the drive, fantasy, and the body as distinct from the organism—provides a properly materialist ethics that new materialism cannot supply, because it grounds freedom, difference, and ethical creativity in the constitutive gap at the core of human being rather than in a "flat ontology" that nullifies human peculiarity.

     Zupančič argues that if sexuality is an ontological lapse or negativity, it therefore short-circuits both epistemology and ontology by indexing a gap in being, the knowledge of which no materialism, however speculative, can provide.

227. #227

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.16

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: Against new materialisms and realist ontologies, the passage argues for a Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism in which the subject—understood as the void of absolute negativity and identified with the Lacanian objet petit a—is not one object among others but constitutes the very hole in reality, such that "the hole in reality is the subject," and material reality is properly characterized as "non-all" rather than a fully constituted whole.

     to employ the Lacanian language of sexuation, a chaotic 'non-all' (pastout) proto-reality

228. #228

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.29

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Capitalist Produdion a nd Human Re produdion

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's constitutive lie—its temporal narration of an originary, atemporal loss—paradoxically reveals the truth of castration by staging it as visible; crucially, the passage argues that the loss intrinsic to sexed reproduction (castration) and the loss demanded by capitalist production are structurally identical, and that fantasy's staging of the impossible object can render this connection visible and thereby open a radical political potential.

     The insight of Henry's fantasy sequence stems from the relationship that it envisions between the loss that occurs in sexed reproduction (in sexuation as such) and the loss that occurs in the laborer under capitalism.

229. #229

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.136

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus develops the theoretical architecture of the chapter on *Mulholland Drive*, deploying Lacanian concepts—desire as caused rather than aimed, fantasy as constitutive of temporality and reality, the failure of the sexual relation, and sexuation—to argue that Lynch's film stages the fantasmatic structure of subjectivity against Kantian and Hegelian epistemologies.

     The difference between male and female fantasy symptomizes the difference between Kantian and Hegelian epistemologies. In Kant, the thing in itself—the real—remains always outside of the subject's grasp... Hegel, on the other hand, sees the thing in itself as part of the subject's experience that the subject has yet to recognize as its own.

230. #230

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.115

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Going AII the Way in Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lynch's *Mulholland Drive* stages the full traversal of fantasy by driving it to its dissolution point, where fantasy's intersection with desire reveals the traumatic real; moreover, the film instantiates a specifically feminine fantasy structure—one that goes "too far" rather than stopping short—contrasting with the masculine fantasy of *Lost Highway*, and demonstrates that authentic mourning of the lost object is only possible through fantasy itself.

     Mulholland Drive offers us a specifically feminine structure to its fantasy, in contrast to Lost Highway, which employs a masculine structure.

231. #231

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.83

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

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

     BOB rapes Laura Palmer—and has done so since she was twelve years old—because he wants to experience the feminine enjoyment that he imputes to her.

232. #232

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.113

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Successful Sexua l Relationship

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's fundamental function is to produce the illusion of a successful sexual relationship, compensating for the structural impossibility of the sexual relation that results from insertion into language; yet this same function constitutes fantasy's political danger by veiling the contradictions of the symbolic order, even as Lynch's films exploit fantasy's capacity to expose the points where that order breaks down.

     the categories 'male' and 'female' indicate a structural impasse: each position is structured in a way that it looks for what the other does not have

233. #233

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.127

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man > 3. Dune ond the Poth to Solvotion

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several theoretical moves: it deploys Lacanian sexual antagonism as the primary social antagonism underlying Hollywood ideological narrative; it argues that voice-over narration's gaps testify to truth rather than obscure it; and it identifies feminine/mystical enjoyment as an authentic connection with the infinite, elevating Other Jouissance to the level of mysticism.

     For Lacan, the sexual antagonism (which has nothing to do with biology) is the primary social antagonism because it manifests the two opposed, though noncomplementary, modes of entering into language.

234. #234

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.51

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

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

     The difference between masculine and feminine enjoyment is the difference between the finite and the infinite. The finite nature of masculine enjoyment renders it quantifiable and containable; the infinite nature of feminine enjoyment renders it diffuse and ungraspable.

235. #235

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.128

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

     Theoretical move: Fink expounds Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, arguing that masculine structure is constituted by universal phallic determination grounded in the exception of a foreclosed primal father, while feminine structure is constituted by the 'not-all' — an incompleteness with respect to the phallic function that opens onto an Other jouissance whose status is ex-sistence rather than existence within the symbolic order.

     I'll begin my interpretation of this schema by commenting on several passages from Seminar XX. MASCULINE STRUCTURE ... Every speaking being situates him or herself on one side or the other.

236. #236

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.216

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

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

     those with masculine structure might be said to symbolize the real (object) of the imaginary (fantasy), which corresponds to SRI, while those with feminine structure realize the symbolic of the imaginary, which corresponds to RSI

237. #237

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.17

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a preface/road map for the book, outlining its scope, methodology, and interpretive stance—it is non-substantive theoretical content, serving primarily as an editorial and navigational frame rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     masculine structure, and feminine structure

238. #238

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.137

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

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

     The implication of Lacan's work on sexuation seems to be that subjectification takes place at different levels in differently sexuated beings: those with masculine structure must subjectify or find a new relation to the object, while those with feminine structure must subjectify or find a new relation to The signifier.

239. #239

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

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

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

     These two faces of the object, a and S(Ⱥ), allow for an understanding of sexual difference that has yet to be grasped in the English-language work on Lacan

240. #240

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.136

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that S(A)—the signifier of the lack in the Other—functions as Woman's second "partner" in the sexuation table, and that its meaning has shifted in Lacan's work from a symbolic designator of the Other's desire to a real-register signifier of a primordial loss; this asymmetry grounds two distinct paths beyond neurosis (desire/masculine vs. sublimation/feminine) and implies that feminine subjectivity is constituted through an encounter with jouissance rather than through subjection to a master signifier.

     The very existence of sexual identity (sexuation, to use Lacan's term) at a level other than that of the ego, at the level of subjectivity, should dispel the mistaken notion so prevalent in the English-speaking world that a woman is not considered to be a subject at all in Lacanian theory.

241. #241

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.207

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief clarificatory remarks on Lacanian concepts including Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, primal repression, the drive-language relation, S1/S2, and the beyond of castration; it is largely non-substantive as a theoretical text but contains several load-bearing conceptual notes.

     In chapter 8, I suggest that there are different paths that lead beyond castration for men and for women.

242. #242

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.193

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_

     Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

     Vx- According to Lacan's revamping of negation, when the bar of negation is placed over this quantifier, it means "not the whole of x" (a woman, for example) or "not all of x," as well as "not all x's." This matheme is often used independently to refer to the Other jouissance that may potentially be experienced by those with feminine structure.

243. #243

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.144

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-141-0"></span>**A New Metaphor for Sexual Difference**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's account of sexual difference introduces a genuinely new topological metaphor—grounded in the cross-cap and set-theoretic distinctions between open and closed sets—that replaces the classical Western model of concentric spheres and recasts masculine/feminine structure as closed/open sets respectively; this is further characterised as a "Gödelian structuralism" that systematically points to incompleteness and undecidability within any formal system.

     What is of interest in Lacan's way of defining masculine and feminine structure? For one thing, it involves a new topology... Like the set constituted by Man, a 'closed set' includes its own boundary or limit; like Woman, an 'open set' does not include its own boundary or limit.

244. #244

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

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

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

     We can consider it to ex-sist because it can be written: ∀x⌀x.

245. #245

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.123

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **The Phallus and the Phallic Function**

     Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized not as the cause but as the *signifier* of desire (and of lack), while objet petit a is posited as the real, unsignifiable cause of desire; the phallic function is then defined as the alienating function of language that institutes lack, which grounds the subsequent account of sexuation and jouissance's non-conservation.

     the phallic function plays a crucial role in Lacan's definition of masculine and feminine structure, for the latter are defined differently in terms of that loss, that lack instituted by alienation.

246. #246

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.118

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

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's theory of sexuation turns on a dialectic of part and whole (not all and some), and that misreadings—especially in translations of Seminar XX—have distorted this; he proposes to reframe castration as alienation, the phallus as the signifier of desire, and the Name-of-the-Father as S(Ⱥ), thereby advancing a theory of sexuation that transcends Freud's culture-specific terms.

     THE DIALECTIC of part and whole is crucial to Lacan's formulation of sexual difference or "sexuation," as he calls it.

247. #247

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.212

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

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

     I am leaving aside here a parallel gloss Lacan gives on his formulas of sexuation that seems to me (I) to distract from his most incisive and far-reaching conclusions about sexual difference

248. #248

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

     The Formulas of Sexuation

249. #249

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.125

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

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

     His formulas of sexuation thus concern only speaking subjects, and, I would suggest, only neurotic subjects: the men and women defined in these formulas are neurotic, clinically speaking.

250. #250

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

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

     Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

     Feminine structure, 105, 107, 117, 125, 196n.45 … masculine structure and, 109

251. #251

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.219

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's deployment of the "phallic signifier" is a desublimating move—not a phallocentric idealization but a demystification that reattaches the symbolic function of the phallus to the Real of castration; comedy is then positioned as the cultural practice that performs an analogous desublimation, materializing the "infinite passion" of the subject in a finite, concrete object, thereby illuminating that Lacanian castration always arrives in a particular, embodied form rather than as pure lack.

     the signifier of the missing link between the biological and the Symbolic (or between nature and culture) as the generic point of sexuation.

252. #252

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.217

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

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

     Human sexuality is not sexual simply because it includes the sexual organs... This junction is the site of sexuation in the strict meaning of the word

253. #253

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.200

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium* contains a second, overlooked "cut" — the superimposition of genitals — that introduces a surplus-enjoyment irreducible to the complementarity logic of halves seeking fusion; this "comic object" (x) is structurally equivalent to the phallus as the ultimate comic reference, confirming that comedy is grounded in a logic of heteronomous addition that perpetually prevents the return to imaginary Oneness.

     Although after this interlude on sexuation Aristophanes immediately resumes his talk about love and desire being founded in the longing for our other lost half, this curious detail deserves our attention.

254. #254

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.307

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that power is constitutively obscene—its "truth" is that it always already functions as an illegal excess—and uses this diagnosis to press the question of whether a structurally new Master Signifier (Lacan's *vers un signifiant nouveau*) is possible, or whether every revolution merely returns to the same obscene supplement, a structural problem shared by Badiou's and Miller's frameworks.

     in order to earn their acceptance into masculine society, they had secretly to murder one of the unsuspecting helots

255. #255

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.163

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

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Hölderlin's "eccentric path" and the Thermidorian problem to argue that the gap between utopian aspiration and sober actuality cannot be resolved by narrative mediation alone; the true Hegelian move—reading this gap as Concrete Universality itself—requires displacing the bipolar structure (narrative vs. dissolution) with a triple structure, reread via the drive, and ultimately locating the parallax tension between poetico-mystical and political relating to the Thing as the irreducible truth of emancipatory politics.

     Ua, who gives her age as 52... but in fact she is a shape-shifter, immortal. Eternity in the form of a woman.

256. #256

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.170

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

     we should apply Lacan's formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion 'everything is matter' … and the assertion 'there is nothing which is not matter' (which, with its other side, 'not-All is matter,' opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena).

257. #257

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.42

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

     What if, yet again, these two versions point toward the logic of Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation'?... the first version... which is 'feminine'... and the second version which is 'masculine'

258. #258

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.26

     The Kantian Parallax

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via Karatani's reading of Kant, that the "parallax view" names an irreducible structural gap between positions that cannot be synthesized or reduced; he then radicalises this by showing that transcendental subjectivity, freedom, and ontological difference all inhabit precisely this "third space" between phenomenal and noumenal—a space structurally homologous to the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism and to the Not-all logic of sexuation.

     There is a link between ontological and sexual difference (conceived in a purely formal-transcendental way, along the lines of Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation,' of course).

259. #259

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.39

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegelian concrete universality is not a peaceful synthesis of particularities but is itself the site of an irreducible antagonism or "inherent gap of the One," such that particular forms are failed attempts to resolve the universal's self-contradiction — a logic that surpasses both Kantian moral abstraction and Laclau's externally opposed logics of difference and antagonism.

     this duality again follows the logic of Lacan's formulas of sexuation—contrary to expectations, the differential multitude is 'masculine,' while the antagonism is 'feminine.'

260. #260

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.382

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

     to discern the void that separates material reality from itself, that makes it 'non-all'

261. #261

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.395

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

     Two versions of femininity: Antigone can still be read as standing for particular family roots against the universality of the public space of State Power; Medea, on the contrary, out-universalizes universal Power itself.

262. #262

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides, including a key note on Lacan's self-critical shift in conceiving the analyst's position from a stand-in for the big Other to an embodiment of objet petit a, and scattered remarks on perversion, sexuation, the four discourses, and Badiouian politics.

     does not only refer to a sociological fact, but also bears witness to a more radical 'ontological' division of the feminine subjective position between what Lacan called the phallic order and the signifier of the lack of the Other?

263. #263

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.131

     **The Intermixing of Desire and Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The "cinema of integration" operates ideologically by blending desire and fantasy so as to domesticate the gaze—transforming the objet petit a from a constitutively impossible object into an attainable one—and this blending is homologous to neurosis, which supplements desire with fantasy to shield the subject from the traumatic Real while producing only an imaginary transgression that reinforces ideological interpellation.

     In the process of entering the order of language, the subject must take up a sexed identity, must place itself on one side or the other. In doing so, the subject accepts an identity that lacks: sexual difference is the manifestation of lack or absence in the subject.

264. #264

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.235

     29 > **6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions**

     Theoretical move: This footnote-heavy passage advances the theoretical argument that racist ideology operates at the level of fantasy (jouissance attributed to the Other), that Lee's formal excess targets this fantasmatic racism whereas Haggis's realism misses it, and that Mann's male heroes instantiate a Kantian ethics of excess structurally tied to the phallic exception.

     Men or so Mann shows—can only perform their duty by constituting themselves as an exception because of the very structure of male subjectivity (its constitution relative to the phallus as the exceptional signifier).

265. #265

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.22

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Nietzschean event has the structure of a "time loop" in which the subject who declares the event is constituted retroactively by it—the event is immanent to its own declaration—and that this constitutive splitting ("One became Two") is not a synthesis or mystical transformation but the minimal, topological difference (the "edge") that names the nonrelationship between two incommensurable terms, a logic Zupančič explicitly aligns with Lacan's formula of the sexual non-rapport.

     'Nietzsche' is the very name of the nonrelationship between Dionysus and the Crucified (this 'nonrelationship' must be taken in the Lacanian sense of the term—it does not simply imply that two things are not related, or have no relationship, but, rather, that the very impossibility of a fixed relationship constitutes the nature of the relationship between, in Lacan's case, the two sexes).

266. #266

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.152

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

     'Man' and 'woman' are two different Achilles, whereas the tortoise is the 'object' through which they try to relate to each other (objet petit a in the case of a man, and Φ in the case of a woman).

267. #267

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.151

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth is structurally "not-whole" not because of lack but because of an irreducible surplus—an auto-referential doubling where the level of enunciation always sticks to what is enunciated—and that this same structure (the Real as the gap between knowledge and jouissance, between the Symbolic and Imaginary) underlies the Nietzschean "double affirmation," the Lacanian not-all, and the ontological status of Woman/Truth as irreducible to objet petit a.

     This kind of adding is precisely what defines, according to Lacan, the 'masculine' approach to the sexual (non)relationship. The Other that a 'man' is dealing with is objet petit a.

268. #268

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on ideology critique, containing citations to Marx, Engels, Althusser, Lukács, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan, with brief substantive annotations connecting Lacan's formulas of sexuation to Žižek's theory of social antagonism and noting that the bifurcation between theories of the psyche and social theory is itself an ideological gesture.

     Lacan's formulas of sexuation play a crucial role in the development of Žižek's understanding of social antagonism, as is clear in Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute.

269. #269

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.229

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

     what Lacan calls the 'masculine' and 'feminine' side of the formulas of sexuation is not a fixed identity but the name of an irreducible deadlock, impasse.

270. #270

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

     In sexuality, this third element which gives body to sexual difference as such (as the real of an antagonism) are trans-subjects: they are not external to sexual difference, a remainder of some primordial polymorphous-perverse multiplicity; they are constitutive of sexual difference as such.

271. #271

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Universally Antagonistic

     Theoretical move: Žižek's political project is grounded in a reconceptualization of universality as constitutive antagonism rather than totalizing wholeness: particulars, identities, and social structures emerge from and are sustained by a universal antagonism that can never be resolved, making emancipation consist not in overcoming antagonism but in insisting on it—a position figured topologically through the Möbius strip and the objet a as the excremental singular point that embodies the universal.

     Lacan believes that there is no sexual relationship not because there is a problem between men and woman but because there is an internal antagonism in each sexual identity.

272. #272

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.311

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against reducing the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Western cancel culture to psychotic foreclosure or clashing paranoiac singularities, instead mapping both phenomena onto Lacan's University Discourse and formulas of sexuation, while insisting that symbolic communication (the inverted message) and fetishistic disavowal—not psychosis—are the operative mechanisms.

     the difference is the one between masculine and feminine versions of Lacan's formulas of sexuation: in Russia, the excluded/cancelled is the exception which sustains the universal unity of the people… while in the Western cancel culture not all are cancelled but there is no exception

273. #273

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.285

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     Je te demande de refuser ce que je t'offre parce que c'est pas ça

274. #274

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.223

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     how can we ensure that sexual difference, or the incompleteness of the subject, is not hypostasized as an abstract form devoid of content?

275. #275

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Žižek's account of sexuation, arguing that while sexual difference names the incompleteness/trauma constitutive of the subject, Žižek's formalism fails to theorize the body as the extimate site where the signifier's cut produces a split—a gap Butler exploits via social constructivism and which Tomsič's account of the signifier as bodily cut helps to address. The central theoretical pivot is whether the antinomies of sexuation, as the Real of the subject's incompleteness, can ground emancipatory politics without presupposing a binary heterosexual structure.

     why does Žižek maintain the feminine and masculine as an antinomical pair of sexuation? This is the fundamental objection that Žižek has received from gender theorists like Judith Butler.

276. #276

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.218

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: Bou Ali reconstructs Žižek's theory of the subject as a non-ontological point of negativity that is extimate to symbolic structure, correlative to the objet a as object-cause of desire, and grounded in the retroactive (Nachträglichkeit) constitution of the Real as cause—arguing further that this account of subjectivity is inseparable from Lacanian sexuation, read against both Hegelian dialectics and Kantian antinomies.

     Žižek explicates this difference in difference through Lacan's formulas of sexuation, which he reads as a different iteration of Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

277. #277

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

     Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

     sexuation [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-782), [here](#6_ieks_foundationless_building_ideology_critique_as_an_e.xhtml_IDX-783)

278. #278

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.114

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the death drive involves two distinct splits—the genesis of surplus satisfaction from organic need, and a constitutive negativity (inbuilt lack of being) around which the drive circulates—and that satisfaction/enjoyment is not the goal but the *means* of the drive, whose true aim is the repetition of negativity; this reframes the death drive not as a return to the inanimate but as the opening of alternative paths to death beyond those immanent in the organism.

     Sexuation itself (sexual reproduction, and the death/negativity implied in it) does not yet amount to what one could call sexuality proper; sexuality proper involves a further step in which the 'minus,' the negativity involved in sexuation and sexual reproduction, gets a positive existence in partial objects.

279. #279

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.59

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

     This is how we could read Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation': as two ways in which the constitutive minus of the signifying order is inscribed in this order itself, and dealt with.

280. #280

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

     Woman does not exist. (We shall return to this later on, in our discussion of the sexual difference or divide.)

281. #281

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that desexualizing ontology (abandoning masculine/feminine principles) is the very condition under which sexuality emerges as the Real's disruptive point within being — so to subtract sex from sex is not to dissolve the problem of sexual difference but to blind oneself to its operation.

     the desexualization of ontology (that is, ontology no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, 'masculine' and 'feminine' principles)

282. #282

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.81

     Contradictions that Matter > Hm…

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacanian formalization is not a truth *about* the Real but the formalization of the impasse of formalization itself—the point where speech "holds onto" the Real through its own impossibility—and that the proper psychoanalytic position is not passive acceptance of contradiction but active engagement with it, taking one's place within it as the condition of emancipation.

     the Lacanian formulas of sexuation force us to think: not the contradiction between 'opposite' sexes, but the contradiction inherent to both, 'barring' them both from within.

283. #283

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.25

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

     Theoretical move: Zupančič inverts the standard account of religion vs. drive sexuality: Christianity does not repress partial drives but rather represses the *link* between enjoyment and sexuality, because what is truly threatening is not perverse jouissance but the ontological negativity of the sexual relation (the missing signifier), which registers in reality as the unconscious. Humanity is thus not an exception to Nature but the site where Nature's own lack of sexual knowledge acquires its singular epistemic—unconscious—form.

     there is knowledge in Nature ('knowledge in the real,' as Lacan calls it), but this knowledge is lacking at the point of sexuation, and that includes sexuated animals.

284. #284

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.52

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacan's Real is irreducible to Butler's performative ontology because the emergence of the signifying order is coextensive with a constitutive gap (a "minus one"), and it is precisely at this place of the missing signifier that surplus-enjoyment arises — making sexuality not a being beyond the symbolic but the contradictory effect of the symbolic's own structural impossibility, which is what is lost when "sex" is translated into "gender."

     the four formulas known as the formulas of sexuation are his attempt to 'fix that which makes up for [supplée à] what I have called the impossibility to write the sexual relation'

285. #285

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.45

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the psychoanalytic insistence on sex as an ontological inquiry (rather than a moral or identity question) is what gives sexual difference its political explosiveness, and that the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender" performs a neutralization by removing sex's irreducible Real dimension — leaving psychoanalysis in a paradoxical position of being coextensive with the desexualization of reality while remaining absolutely uncompromising about the sexual as irreducible Real, not substance.

     The discussion of sexual difference in psychoanalysis, in its most venerable tradition, often sounds or reads like 'high mathematics': formulas, logical paradoxes, complicated formulations, and counterintuitive theses.

286. #286

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.156

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 3

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (Chapter 3 footnotes) containing bibliographic references and brief theoretical glosses; it is not a substantive theoretical argument in its own right.

     "the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two."

287. #287

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.55

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via a close reading of Freud and Lacan, that sexual difference does not arise from the existence of two sexes but from the non-existence of the "second sex"—a constitutive ontological deficit—and traces Lacan's shift from locating "pure loss" on the side of the body (early work) to locating it within the signifying order itself (late work), showing that surplus-enjoyment emerges at the place of a missing signifier ("with-without"), which is also the origin of sexual division.

     sexual difference, or division, also originates in this ontological deficit.

288. #288

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.66

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

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

     sexual division could be formulated from the perspective of the question of the ontological minus: masculinity is a matter of belief, femininity is a matter of pretense.

289. #289

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not merely one example of signifying differentiation but rather the ontological presupposition of the signifier's functioning: the constitutive gap and surplus-enjoyment that prevents the signifying field from being a closed, consistent structure are the very ground on which sexuation is configured, making the subject of the unconscious irreducibly sexed.

     sex(uality) is nothing but a configuring of the signifying minus and of the surplus-enjoyment: a configuring which cannot escape contradiction, the latter being the logical consequence of the one (the Other) that is not there.

290. #290

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.110

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Freud's trajectory in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"—from the monism of the death drive, through the Eros/Thanatos dualism, to a monism of sexual drives—in order to show that the Lacanian death drive is not a separate drive but the inherent negativity (the gap/void) around which every partial drive circulates, with objet petit a functioning as the "crust" that sticks to this void and makes repetition possible.

     Lacan often returns to and reaffirms this implication of death at the very heart of sexuation; sometimes in the very terms of 'death,' and sometimes in the more formal language of 'reduction' or 'loss' involved in sexual reproduction.

291. #291

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.125

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze converge in treating the death drive as a foundational "crack" around which drives congregate, but diverge crucially: where Deleuze collapses the tripartite topology (original negativity / surplus-enjoyment / signifiers) into a single dynamic movement of pure Difference, Lacan preserves the Real as an irreducible third term whose effect is the subject itself — making subjectivation the very index of an irreducible Real rather than an obstacle to realism.

     we could also see sexuation as prior to the partial drives: not as a kind of primary substance, but precisely as the hole/crack around which the drives 'congregate' (and in this sense as the Real).

292. #292

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.152

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel

     Theoretical move: Sexuality (as linked to the unconscious) constitutes a short circuit between ontology and epistemology: the lack at the heart of sex is not a contingent missing piece of knowledge but a structural incompleteness of being itself, and the unconscious names the inherent link between sexuality and knowledge in their shared fundamental negativity. The 'dream's navel' figures this gap where the lack in knowledge coincides with a lack in being.

     the navel as the elected figure of the scar left by the lapse of being—the lapse of being involved in sexuation (and sexual reproduction).

293. #293

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.72

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology > Je te m'athème … moi non plus

     Theoretical move: The Badiou-Cassin polemic over sophistry is mobilized as a philosophical performance of the Lacanian claim that there is no sexual relation: their respective stances (truth-oriented philosophy vs. language-immersed sophistry) are themselves staged as an enactment of the masculine/feminine divide in Lacan's formulas of sexuation.

     they believe that their discussion is itself a staging of this claim, its philosophical and embodied performance… a new confrontation, or a new dividing up [partage], between the masculinity of Plato and the femininity of sophistry.