Signification

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (302)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.221

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > What shall we do with Oedipus? > The hostage of the word

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Oedipus is not a subject of retroactive quilting but rather its inverse: he travels the signifying chain in the "wrong" direction, enacting a linear thrust-forward that produces the retroactive constitution of meaning as its Real—thereby simultaneously installing the big Other (symbolic order) and demonstrating that the Other doesn't exist, making him the paradigmatic ethical act as vanishing mediator.

   it is the retroactive logic of quilting the signifying chain that produces the illusion of linearity... creating the illusion that they have always-already been like this, that have always followed logically from one another.

2. #02

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.58

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Doing not believing**

   Theoretical move: The passage synthesizes Althusser's theory of ideology-as-practice with Lacanian registers (real/imaginary/symbolic) and Žižek's psychoanalytic supplement of fetishistic disavowal, arguing that ideology is not false consciousness or belief but the compulsive, materially embedded performance of social reality—a position that reframes the political problem from enlightenment to the invention of new practices.

   Reality is a matrix generated by language, signification, images, and practices (the symbolic in Lacan's theory).

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream***

   Theoretical move: Freud establishes dream interpretation as a legitimate scientific procedure by arguing that dreams, like hysterical symptoms, have a hidden meaning recoverable through a method of free, uncritical self-observation — thereby positioning the dream as a psychic formation continuous with pathological symptoms rather than a mere somatic process.

   to 'interpret a dream' means to declare its meaning, to replace it by something which takes its place in the concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of full importance and value.

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

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

   there are symbols which regularly, or almost regularly, mean the same thing ... a symbol in the dream content may have to be interpreted not symbolically, but according to its real meaning

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: The passage deploys sexual symbolism (stairs = coitus) to decode typical dreams, then pivots to introduce the concept of dream-work as the transformation between latent dream thoughts and manifest dream content, using the rebus/picture-puzzle analogy to argue that the manifest content must be read as a sign-system, not as a literal or aesthetic composition.

   the dream content appears to us as a translation of the dream thoughts into another form of expression, whose signs and laws of composition we are to learn by comparing the original with the translation

6. #06

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

   Theoretical move: Through detailed analysis of the dream-word "Autodidasker," Freud demonstrates how condensation operates by compressing multiple names, persons, concerns, and wish-fulfillments into a single verbal formation, and generalizes that dream speech is always derived from remembered speech in the dream material.

   frequently the dream speech is pieced together from various recollections of speeches, while the wording has remained the same and the meaning has possibly been changed so as to have two or more significations.

7. #07

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.38

   THE DI V I SION OF THE OBJEC T

   Theoretical move: Capitalism's psychic appeal is not grounded in human nature but in the alienation from nature produced by the signifier: because signification introduces a constitutive gap between signifier and signified, subjects are structurally oriented around lack and the impossible search for a satisfying object, and capitalism exploits this by presenting the commodity as a contingent — rather than necessary — remedy for the absence that signification installs at the heart of desire.

   The signifier causes us to see 'apples' rather than apples. Every object takes on the hue given to it by the system of signification and loses its image of self-identity.

8. #08

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.55

   THE E ND OF THE OTHE R

   Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis after Freud's 1920 theoretical revolution moves subjects not from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but from one form of satisfaction to another, and this intervention turns on the subject's relation to a non-existent Other whose desire is both the necessary stimulus for desire itself and the source of its constitutive alienation — a structure capitalism uniquely exploits by insisting the Other's desire actually exists and is interpretable.

   The problem of the desire of the Other exists wherever there is signification. But capitalism creates a singular focus on the desire of the Other in a way that no prior socioeconomic system has.

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.23

   [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing’s order

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "thing's order" names the symbolic order as a self-relating system of signifiers—structurally homologous to Hegelian dialectics—that constitutes human subjectivity, the mirror stage, and the symptom, while ego psychology's failure to grasp the unconscious is recast as foreclosure (psychotic repudiation) rather than repression.

   significations are sustained in and through perpetual passages from signifiers to other signifiers to yet more signifiers ad infinitum. Such a network is 'the unity of signification'

10. #10

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.119

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Defrosting the signifer

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Rabelais' frozen words allegory to establish the symbolic order's primacy and exteriority to the subject as the very definition of the unconscious, then develops this into a critique of Jungian archetypes, Jonesian symbolism, and existential listening practices—ultimately arguing that proper analytic technique consists in attentiveness to the literal, phonemic, polysemous signifier rather than to signification or meaning.

    signification manifest in its images falls away, having no other scope than that of conveying the signifier disguised in it

11. #11

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.136

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Introduction

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Instance of the Letter" is positioned between speech and language (*parole* and *langue*), such that the unconscious is revealed not through the linguistic system as a whole but through the failures and anomalies of specific acts of speech—making rhetoric (the study of language effects) as important as grammar/structure for analytic practice.

    the differentiation that defines language is at the level of the signifier, not the signified, along with the failures and breakdowns in specific instantiations of speech that reveal operations of the unconscious

12. #12

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.142

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious

    Theoretical move: Lacan's alignment of metaphor/metonymy with condensation/displacement establishes the signifier's logic as constitutive of both the unconscious and the subject itself: the subject is not the ego-cogito but the effect of signifying operations, and symptoms/desire are the two modes in which the letter insists through these operations.

    the value of an image is not in what it signifies (its signification) so much as its signifiance… its capacity to operate independently of the meaning of a specific signified

13. #13

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.173

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychotic hallucinations—both 'code phenomena' (autonomous neologisms) and 'message phenomena' (disrupted signifying chains)—are not symptomatic of an underlying illness but ARE the structure itself, revealing the subject's relationship to the signifier as mapped by the Graph of Desire; the subject is constituted as an effect of signifier-to-signifier reference, not of any neurological or imaginary substrate.

    Message phenomena (451, 6) refer to disruptions in the process of signification.

14. #14

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.183

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

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

    at the level of the signified metaphors disrupt continuity. Metaphors create shifts in meaning at the level of signification, and add new ideas to a line of reasoning.

15. #15

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.139

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The meaning of the letter

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of the 'letter' — the insistence of a structural element of language within concrete speech — reformulates the Saussurean sign by elevating the signifier over the signified and exposing the bar as a resistance to signification, such that the operations of metonymy and metaphor reveal how the unconscious is structured like a language, producing truth-effects that exceed the speaking subject's intent.

    the bar not only as something that divides signifier and signified within a united sign, but something that stands in for the resistance to signification that characterizes language generally

16. #16

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.68

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the original function of language is not merely indicative but also interrogative: every signifier, at its most elementary level, implicitly poses a question about the unknowable beyond of the Other-Thing, and this double function is confirmed by the phonemic structure of parental names and cross-linguistic evidence from Chinese.

    a common assumption among students of language, in this case the idea that the elemental function of signification is *indicative*

17. #17

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.69

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier performs a primordial Aufhebung — simultaneously canceling and preserving das Ding — and that this double function (distancing/disclosive, defensive/expressive) makes human subjectivity symptomatic through and through, collapsing the distinction between pathological symptom-formation and the ordinary operation of language.

    Unlike signification, which indicates the more specific semantic cargo of the signifier, signifiance names the power of the signifier… to hold open a horizon of meaning-as-yet-to-be-determined.

18. #18

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.131

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Ten Commandments as the Laws of Speech > The Letters of the Law

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Ten Commandments—especially the prohibitions on idolatry and the Sabbath—enact a Lacanian logic of the signifier: the second commandment demands the elimination of the Imaginary in favour of the Symbolic, while the Sabbath opens the productive gap/void in which pure signifiance supersedes mere signification, and the whole Decalogue thus founds a culture of irreducible interpretive contestation.

    The Sabbath suspends routine signification in order to devote oneself to pure signifiance.

19. #19

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

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

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

    the ritual of circumcision helps to symbolically establish the regime of signification itself, holding it open to meaning-as-yet-to-be-determined

20. #20

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.220

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

    Theoretical move: This notes passage traces a conceptual evolution in Lacan's use of "the big Other" across two phases of his teaching—from a term pointing toward genuine alterity and unconscious desire to one designating the defensive, meaning-policing function of the symbolic—while linking this shift to the broader move from imaginary to symbolic alienation.

    the division of ego from subject— between an essentially defensive deployment of language in simple signification to reinforce imaginary identity and another, more open and volatile dimension of resonance, for which Lacan used the term signifiance

21. #21

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.248

    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.

    naming: … and signification, 122–23; and unnamable, 132; and unthinkable, 24

22. #22

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.129

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Ten Commandments as the Laws of Speech

    Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of the Ten Commandments identifies the Hebrew God (YHWH/haShem) as S1—the master signifier without a signified that inaugurates the signifying chain—and argues that the Jewish religion is the sacral institutionalization of objet petit a as the unsymbolizable remainder of every signifier, while contrasting the Greek real/imaginary axis with Judaism's real/symbolic axis as two opposed cultural solutions to the enigma of the real.

    S1 is not so much a particular signifier as a stand-in for the function of pure signifiance, the pure expectation-of-meaning-as-yet-unspecified that accompanies every signifier.

23. #23

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.177

    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.

    The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it.

24. #24

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.251

    I > 9 > Death in Life

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a "third way" beyond the life/death binary by locating the death drive as internal to life: the subject is constituted through an originary loss (correlative to the acquisition of the signifier/name), and enjoyment derives not from life or death but from this death-in-life, which also grounds a political position that transcends the Left/Right opposition.

    The revolutionary attempt to sustain the project of pure life inevitably founders on the very act of embracing it... the theorist uses the instrument of death — the signifier — to inveigh against death.

25. #25

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.257

    I > 10 > Fighting against Faith

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that religious belief is not a contingent delusion but a structurally necessary effect of the gap within signification, and that the psychoanalytic counter-move is not Enlightenment atheism but insistence on the absolute necessity of faith — revealing belief's structural foundation in order to strip it of its political-delusional power and restore the subject to genuine political responsibility.

    It shows us that the emergence of religious belief is neither a response to miraculous signs of God's presence nor an attempt to find solace in a cold universe. It is, instead, an effect of the structure of signification.

26. #26

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.271

    I > 10 > An Unconscious God

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that cinema — particularly Iñárritu's *Babel* — can reveal God as an unconscious structuring absence by thematizing contingency at the point where the binary signifier is missing; further, the social bond itself rests not on communicative rationality but on a groundless act of belief in signification, making faith the originary form of entry into the symbolic order.

    What connects speaking subjects is not... an underlying rationality... but rather the act of belief in signification itself.

27. #27

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.288

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Hermeneutic Ethos

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "hermeneutic ethos" (exemplified by *The Da Vinci Code* and theorized by Derrida and radical democracy advocates) fails because it oscillates between treating the missing signifier as transcendent and as merely empirical, whereas its true status is transcendental — shaping the signifying structure without being either present or simply absent within it.

    Its absence serves only to shape the signifying structure in the same way that Kant conceives the regulative ideas of reason shaping the structure of our understanding.

28. #28

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.319

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 4. Sustaining Anxiety

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section traces Lacan's theoretical trajectory from an early Hegelian recognition-based psychoanalysis toward a later framework that integrates destructiveness and jouissance into subjectivity, while also mapping how anxiety, enjoyment, and the enjoying Other function in contemporary consumer society, political violence, and fascism.

    Without reference to the larger structure of signification, one could never know that 'the nakedness of the face is destituteness' and that it calls one to ethical responsibility

29. #29

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.343

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 9. Beyond Bare Life

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section theoretically anchors the main argument by linking the capitalist valorization of "bare life," the death drive's role in value-creation, the fetishistic function of afterlife imagery, and the structural necessity of the unconscious (as science's elided gap) to Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, and Agamben — positioning psychoanalysis as the discipline that occupies the subject-shaped gap that science must repress.

    Freud's attention focused on the point at which signification stops. Though he and Breuer developed the talking cure, the key moment in this analysand's talking is what cannot be said.

30. #30

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_106"></span>**language**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces four developmental phases of Lacan's theory of language, arguing that language (langage) functions as the single paradigm of all structure, that the unconscious is structured like a language of signifiers, and that language has both symbolic and imaginary dimensions—against any reduction of it to the symbolic order alone or to a mere code.

    The imaginary dimension of language is that of the signified, signification, and empty speech.

31. #31

    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_184"></span>**sign**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's transformation of Saussure's sign into a primacy-of-the-signifier algorithm, and his selective uptake of Peirce's index, together constitute a double movement: the destruction of the sign as a stable unit and its replacement by a logic of pure signifiers as the structure of the unconscious.

    The BAR between the signifier and the signified no longer represents union but the resistance inherent in signification

32. #32

    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_190"></span>**slip**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of "slippage" (glissement) theorizes signification as an inherently unstable, fluid relationship between signifier and signified—contra Saussure's stable bond—with the bar in the algorithm marking this instability, and points de capiton serving as the only temporary arrests of endless sliding; their absence defines psychosis.

    The term thus emphasises the different ways in which Saussure and Lacan conceive of SIGNIFICATION; for Saussure, signification was a stable bond between signifier and signified, but for Lacan it is an unstable, fluid relationship.

33. #33

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_122"></span>**metaphor**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metaphor, derived from Jakobson's linguistic theory, redefines metaphor as the substitution of one signifier for another that produces signification by crossing the bar of the Saussurean algorithm, and deploys this structure across the Oedipus complex, repression, condensation, identification, and love.

    The formula is meant to illustrate Lacan's thesis that this operation, the production of meaning, which Lacan calls 'signification', is only made possible by metaphor.

34. #34

    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_196"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0223"></span>**subject suppposed to know**

    Theoretical move: The passage elaborates the Subject Supposed to Know as a transferential function—not a person but a position the analyst comes to embody—whose establishment and dissolution structure the entire arc of analytic treatment, while also showing that the function is reversible: the analyst equally institutes the analysand as a subject supposed to know via the fundamental rule of free association.

    He is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it—quite simply, signification.

35. #35

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_ncx_83"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_page_0102"></span>***H***

    Theoretical move: This passage (from Evans's introductory dictionary) articulates three interconnected Lacanian theoretical moves: (1) hallucination as the return of the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father in the Real; (2) helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) as grounding both the subject's constitutive dependence on language and the end of analysis as subjective destitution; and (3) hysteria redefined as a clinical structure organised around the question of sexual position and the desire of the Other, distinct from mere symptomatology.

    Lacan finds such definitions inadequate, since they ignore the dimension of meaning and signification (Ec, 77; see E, 180).

36. #36

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_90"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0108"></span>**imaginary**

    Theoretical move: The Imaginary order is defined not as mere illusion but as a structurally necessary, symbolically conditioned register whose basis is the mirror-stage ego-formation; the passage argues that reducing psychoanalysis to the imaginary (identification with the analyst, dual relationship) betrays the symbolic essence of analytic work, and that the only therapeutic purchase on the imaginary comes through its translation into the symbolic.

    the SIGNIFIED and SIGNIFICATION are part of the imaginary order

37. #37

    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_153"></span>***point de capiton***

    Theoretical move: The point de capiton is theorized as the minimal quilting operation that arrests the endless sliding of the signified under the signifier, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning; it operates on two axes—diachronically as the retroactive effect of punctuation, and synchronically as metaphor—and its absence or dissolution is the structural condition of psychosis.

    the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement of the signification (E, 303) and produces the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning

38. #38

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_117"></span>**mathematics**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's turn to mathematics as a formalising tool for psychoanalysis is not an attempt to produce a metalanguage or escape linguistic ambiguity, but rather to generate multiple effects of sense while foreclosing imaginary intuitive understanding, positioning mathematics as the ideal of scientific discourse complementary to—not replacing—the linguistic approach to the Symbolic.

    to produce a way of formalising psychoanalysis which produces multiple effects of sense without being reducible to a univocal signification.

39. #39

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_147"></span>**paternal metaphor**

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

    It is the fundamental metaphor on which all signification depends: for this reason, all signification is phallic.

40. #40

    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_201"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0229"></span>**Symptom**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of the symptom across his work: from a linguistic conception (symptom as signifier, signification, metaphor, message) grounded in the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis, through to a post-1962 shift toward the symptom as pure jouissance culminating in the concept of the sinthome — while consistently distinguishing symptom from clinical structure as the proper focus of psychoanalytic diagnosis and treatment.

    In 1955, Lacan identifies the symptom with SIGNIFICATION: 'The symptom is in itself, through and through, signification, that is to say, truth, truth taking shape' (S2, 320).

41. #41

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_92"></span>**index**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's redefinition of Peirce's semiotic category of the 'index' — repositioning it against the 'signifier' (rather than against the symbol) — to ground key clinical and linguistic distinctions: the psychoanalytic vs. medical concept of the symptom, and human language vs. animal codes.

    the index is a sign which has an 'existential relationship' to the object it represents (i.e. the index is always spatially or temporally contiguous with the object).

42. #42

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    Alan Sheridan and John Forrester render Lacan's opposition between sens and signification as 'meaning' and 'signification'

43. #43

    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_188"></span>**signifying chain**

    Theoretical move: The signifying chain is theorized as simultaneously linear/syntagmatic/metonymic and circular/associative/metaphoric, with the two dimensions cross-cutting each other — a move that integrates Saussure's two axes of linguistic relationship while displacing the unit from sign to signifier, and grounds the metonymic structure of desire in the chain's irreducible incompleteness.

    signification is not present at any one point in the chain, but rather meaning 'insists' in the movement from one signifier to another

44. #44

    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_185"></span>**Signification**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'signification' undergoes a trajectory from a vague association with meaningfulness to a precise, imaginary-order process in which the play of signifiers produces the illusion of the signified through metonymy and metaphor, with the bar in the Saussurean algorithm marking not a bond but a rupture—a theoretical move that radically inverts Saussure's stable sign relation.

    Signification is, in Lacan's work, not a stable bond between signifier and signified, but a process—the process by which the play of signifiers produces the illusion of the signified via the two tropes of metonymy and metaphor.

45. #45

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_186"></span>**Signified**

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Saussurean symmetry between signifier and signified by asserting the supremacy of the signifier: the signified is not a pre-given conceptual entity but a retroactive effect produced by the play of signifiers through metaphor, opposing any expressionist view of language.

    the signified is a mere effect of the play of signifiers, an effect of the process of signification produced by metaphor

46. #46

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_123"></span>**metonymy**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metonymy, derived from Jakobson, defines the diachronic, combinatorial relation between signifiers along the signifying chain as the structural condition for signification and the very logic of desire; the formula for metonymy shows that the bar between signifier and signified is maintained (no new signified produced), and metonymy is identified with displacement and posited as the condition of possibility for metaphor.

    Together, metaphor and metonymy constitute the way in which signification is produced.

47. #47

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.232

    xvra > **The symbolic order**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the holophrase and a critique of Balint's displacement-theory of transference to establish that the symbolic order constitutes, rather than merely represents, reality: speech introduces the dimension of truth/falsity/being into the real, making the symbolic order irreducible to any psychological or two-body imaginary relation.

    It is not empty. It is as full of meaning as the speech of the adult.

48. #48

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    **II**

    Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's intermediate technique between hypnosis and dialogue (hand-pressure, the lifting of the barrier), Lacan identifies the embryonic form of the analytic relationship to discourse and resistance, using the Lucy R. and Anna O. cases to contrast elegant, compressed symptom-resolution with the extended labour of working-through.

    hysterical symptoms, and their signification was detected, with locations and dates, in an altogether happy manner

49. #49

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    **XX**

    Theoretical move: By reading Augustine's *De Magistro* alongside Freud, Lacan argues that the sign cannot be anchored to the thing term-by-term, that signification always refers back to signification (the self-demonstrating character of speech), and that *nomen* as symbol-pact encodes a function of recognition (*reconnaissance*) that Augustine anticipates but cannot fully articulate because he lacks Hegel's dialectic of recognition.

    Signification alone is recovered in our call, because signification always refers to signification.

50. #50

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.248

    **XX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference must be understood on the symbolic plane, and grounds this in a theory of signification where every signifier refers to another signifier within a system—a structural feature of language that makes every symbol polyvalent and every signification a referral to another signification. This is elaborated through a dialogue with Benveniste's unpublished distinction between two zones of signification (word vs. sentence), and through Augustine's *De Magistro*, whose doctrine that speech is essentially intersubjective teaching (docere/discere) is presented as anticipating modern linguistics.

    every signification only ever refers back [renvoyer] to another signification. So linguists have resigned themselves to this, and it is from within this field that from now on they are developing their science.

51. #51

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    **XVII**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that intersubjectivity is not grounded in imaginary dyadic relation but in the symbolic function itself: the child's use of language (naming, presence/absence) demonstrates that the symbolic and the real are primary, with the imaginary only becoming accessible retrospectively through adult realisation - thus critiquing object-relations theory (Balint) for missing the constitutive role of the symbolic.

    Everything begins with the possibility of naming, which is both destructive of the thing and allows the passage of the thing onto the symbolic plane

52. #52

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    **XXI**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth does not stand opposed to error but rather propagates itself through error — and that psychoanalysis is the site where this structure becomes operationally legible: in the slip, the failed act, and the dream, truth irrupts from within discourse without requiring either confrontation with the real object or Hegelian absolute knowing. Speech is thereby established as the constitutive third term of the transference, irreducible to any two-body, imaginary psychology.

    This problem is raised by the question of the relation between speech and signification, what relation the sign bears to what it signifies.

53. #53

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.260

    **XX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Augustine's De Magistro (relayed by Beirnaert) to argue that speech operates in the register of truth not because signs teach things, but because speech constitutes truth's very dimension—and that Augustine's three poles of error, mistake, and ambiguity in speech map directly onto Freud's triumvirate of Verneinung, Verdichtung, and Verdrängung, grounding the analytic discovery of meaning.

    it is in relation to truth that the signification of everything which is expressed is to be located.

54. #54

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.238

    **XIX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that signification never refers to an extra-linguistic reality but only ever refers back to another signification, and that speech — defined as the demand for recognition — constitutes a new order of being irreducible to emotion, organic index, or mechanical communication; transference is then reframed within this symbolic order rather than as a merely imaginary (delusional) phenomenon.

    signification only ever refers back to itself, that is to say to another signification.

55. #55

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.311

    xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar I, non-substantive in theoretical argument but mapping the key conceptual terrain of the seminar across entries such as speech, subject, symbolic, transference, and signifier.

    signification 238, 247, 248, 255, 262

56. #56

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.297

    **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Piaget's developmental psychology to advance the thesis that the primordial effect of the cause (*a*) is desire-as-lack-of-effect, and that the signifier's function is not communication but the calling-forth of the signified dimension in the subject—a gap that Piaget's cognitivist framework systematically occludes.

    the effect of the signifier is to call forth in the subject the dimension of the signified

57. #57

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.170

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hallucination is only possible through the sexualization of objects (not mere need-satisfaction), and that the reality/pleasure principle opposition is grounded in desexualization; furthermore, transference reveals the weight of sexual reality running beneath the discourse of demand, which he begins to map topologically via the interior 8 figure.

    it is absolutely essential to map the dimension of signification in every hallucination if we are to grasp what the pleasure principle means.

58. #58

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Interpretation in psychoanalysis is not arbitrary meaning-making but a precise signifying operation that reverses the signifier/signified relation to isolate a kernel of non-sense — irreducible, non-meaningful signifying elements — which is what enables the advent of the subject.

    Interpretation is a signification that is not just any signification. It comes here in the place of the s and reverses the relation by which the signifier has the effect, in language, of the signified.

59. #59

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternity is fundamentally transbiological—a symbolic, not natural, function—and uses the matheme of metaphor to formalize this, while cautioning against reducing the bar between signifier and signified to a simple mathematical fraction, since it also carries an irreducible "effect of meaning."

    There is between the signifier and the signified, another relation which is that of the effect of meaning.

60. #60

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.264

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metaphor cannot be handled as a simple fractional transformation of signifiers, because the signifier cannot stand in relation to itself without logical error; instead, metaphor operates by substitution where the displaced (repressed) signifier falls below the bar, not by a proportion between signifiers.

    marking the effect of meaning, one can absolutely not, therefore, without taking certain precautions, and in as bold a way as has been done, manipulate this bar in a fractional transformation

61. #61

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.144

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that transference cannot be reduced to repetition alone, and that its proper conceptual weight lies in the transfer of powers from the subject to the big Other — the locus of speech and truth — with the opacity of trauma marking the limit of remembering and the threshold of this transfer.

    its resistance to signification—is then specifically held responsible for the limits of remembering

62. #62

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.131

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the gesture from the act by a special temporality of arrest and suspension: the gesture is not an interrupted blow but something performed *in order to be* arrested, producing its signification retroactively in the suspended instant, thereby constituting a signifying rather than merely motor event.

    it is inscribed behind. It is this very special temporality, which I have defined by the term arrest and which creates its signification behind it

63. #63

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis must locate itself at the intersection of religion and science by positioning itself at the precise point of the "separation" of the subject—the same structural locus where science eludes the alienation of the subject—and that belief is not simply overcome by enlightenment but is sustained through a fundamental alienation in which the subject's being is paradoxically revealed.

    at the very moment when the signification of belief seems most profoundly to vanish, the being of the subject is revealed from what was strictly speaking the reality of that belief

64. #64

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.235

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

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: it extends the Master/Slave dialectic to reveal that the master's alienation reaches its radical limit precisely in the moment of terror (where freedom collapses into death), and it then clarifies the Freudian concept of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz by distinguishing the signifier-as-pure-representative from signification, arguing that the signifier must be understood at the opposite pole from meaning.

    Signification, on the other hand, comes into play in the Vorstellung.

65. #65

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.22

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis cannot be defined as a science through hermeneutics, praxis-field, or formula-making alone; instead, its scientific status depends on clarifying the status of its four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and, crucially, on interrogating the analyst's desire as constitutive of the analytic field itself.

    the hermeneutic demand, which is precisely that which seeks—which seeks the ever new and the never exhausted signification

66. #66

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

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

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

    He is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it—quite simply, signification.

67. #67

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.22

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalysis from both hermeneutics and alchemy by arguing that its scientific status hinges on the structural role of the analyst's desire and on the foundational conceptual status of Freud's four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive), which have been systematically distorted in the analytic literature; the passage thereby frames the central theoretical question of Seminar XI.

    the hermeneutic demand, which is precisely that which seeks—which seeks the ever new and the never exhausted signification

68. #68

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.131

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes gesture from the act by introducing a special temporality of arrest and suspension: a gesture is not an interrupted blow but something performed *in order to be* arrested, producing its signification retroactively ("behind it"), whereas the act is what carries through to completion.

    creates its signification behind it

69. #69

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.144

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that transference cannot be simply reduced to repetition, and that Lacan's own theorization re-reads Freud's concept of transference as a pivotal "transfer of powers" from the subject to the big Other—the locus of speech and truth—thereby distinguishing the structural function of transference from the mere acting-out of what cannot be remembered.

    in my terms, its resistance to signification—is then specifically held responsible for the limits of remembering

70. #70

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hallucination is possible only through the sexualization of objects, not through a simple re-presentation of need; reality is defined as desexualized in Freud's two principles, and transference restores the weight of sexual reality beneath the discourse of demand. This is mapped topologically via the "interior 8" figure placing libido at the junction of its lobes.

    it is absolutely essential to map the dimension of signification in every hallucination if we are to grasp what the pleasure principle means.

71. #71

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.227

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic interpretation targets the non-meaning (irreducible, senseless character) of the signifier chain rather than its signification, and grounds the structure of alienation in the logical form of the "vel" (or) — a forced choice that results in loss either way — finding its philosophical legitimation in Hegel's account of the master/slave dialectic.

    he isolated the sequence of the unicorn, not, as was thought in the discussion, in its significatory dependence, but precisely in its irreducible and senseless character qua chain of signifiers.

72. #72

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.235

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

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two linked theoretical moves: it radicalises the Master/Slave dialectic by showing that the master's freedom collapses into pure death (illustrated through Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine), and then distinguishes the Freudian Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from Vorstellung by aligning the former with the pure function of the signifier — stripped of intersubjective signification — against the latter's representational content.

    The signifier has to be understood in this way, it is at the opposite pole from signification. Signification, on the other hand, comes into play in the Vorstellung.

73. #73

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.262

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Victor Hugo's poem 'Booz endormi' as the exemplary case of the paternal metaphor to demonstrate how signifying condensation produces meaning, showing that metaphor's operation in the unconscious is structurally identical to its operation in poetic language.

    The dimension of meaning opened up by this metaphor is nothing less than what appears to us in the final image, that of the golden sickle carelessly thrown into the field

74. #74

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that paternity is fundamentally transbiological—exceeding biology and grounded in the symbolic order—and uses the matheme of metaphor to formalize the relation between signifier and signified, warning against a purely mathematical reading of the bar as fraction while insisting on the irreducible 'effect of meaning' that the bar also carries.

    There is between the signifier and the signified, another relation which is that of the effect of meaning.

75. #75

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.264

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier cannot stand in a relation to itself without logical error, and that the correct formal account of metaphor requires the repressed signifier to occupy the denominator position beneath the principal bar — not a simple fractional cross-multiplication of signifiers. This critique grounds a restriction on the freedom of analytic interpretation.

    marking the effect of meaning... the effect of metaphor

76. #76

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Interpretation is not open to arbitrary meaning but operates at the level of the signifier to isolate a kernel of non-sense (kern), reversing the ordinary signifier-to-signified relation and bringing out irreducible, non-meaningful signifying elements that animate the subject's desire.

    It comes here in the place of the s and reverses the relation by which the signifier has the effect, in language, of the signified.

77. #77

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

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

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

    He is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it—quite simply, signification.

78. #78

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that science occupies structurally the point of separation in the dialectic of the subject's alienation, which is what enables the scientist's peculiar mode of existence and shields him from questioning the status of his own science — making science, not enlightened critique, the only real bulwark against religion's claim on belief.

    at the very moment when the signification of belief seems most profoundly to vanish, the being of the subject is revealed

79. #79

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Klein bottle as a topological model isomorphic with the Möbius strip's one-sided surface, arguing that this figure concretely illustrates the structural property of the signifier—namely that its inside and outside communicate without abolition of closure—thereby grounding the linguistic relation between signifier and signified (front/back) in topology rather than substance.

    we rediscover here the ambiguity between meaning and sense... something which is not translated but which passes, which passes from one signifier to another in its functioning

80. #80

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    http://www.lacaninireland.com > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1964**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topology of surfaces (Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus) is not merely illustrative but structurally necessary for theorising the relationship of the signifier to the subject—specifically, that the signifier cannot signify itself except by reduplicated self-crossing, a property directly readable from the Möbius strip's topological behaviour.

    the something unexpected, fruitful, as I might say, in experience that we can recognise as being at every point comparable to an effect of sense

81. #81

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Klein bottle as a topological model to demonstrate the structural logic of the subject's relation to signification: the suture between inner and outer spheres reveals how the subject is deceived by the apparent reflexivity of consciousness, and proper names are introduced as a test case showing that signifiers cannot be reduced to mere denotation without meaning.

    signans and signatum... What we have here undoubtedly is the function of the proper name... This notion of the proper name takes on an interest because of the privilege it has won in the discourse of linguists.

82. #82

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.292

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst is structurally excluded from the Real by his position and technique, and that this exclusion—symptomatically mirrored in logic's reduction of reference to truth/falsity (Frege)—necessitates organizing a new logic around three irreducible terms (knowledge, subject, sex) in order to situate sense, meaning, and the subject's division within analytic experience.

    the distinction between sign and sense, it is through this that I tried this year to make you sensitive to its distinction from meaning. Sense exists at the level of non-sense

83. #83

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

    **Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transmission of psychoanalytic experience cannot be grounded in ego-ideal identification or immanent developmental schemas (à la Piaget), but must be seized at the level of structure—specifically the structure of language as a topology that is irreducible to any instrumental or biunivocal logic, implicating the subject as such.

    the ambiguity that we grasp... between sense and meaning... it is because it is uniquely at this level that there is resolved... patent contradictions, patent simply by revealing themselves when in connection with the same words, for example with what is called the proper name

84. #84

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.63

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle and its non-orientability to ground a structural account of the subject and language — specifically Identification — that supersedes the crude imaginary of Freud's second topology (ego-ideal, superego), while simultaneously critiquing Russell's theory of types/metalanguage as an evasion of the real problems of language and the subject.

    in certain cases there dominates what can be called the effects of meaning, but that in other cases...there are cases that operate essentially not on the meaning, not on signification, but on something I am provisionally calling other

85. #85

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    http://www.lacaninireland.com

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is irreducible to the sign and to meaning, and that language's attempt to account for itself necessarily produces a loss that cannot be recuperated—a "non-sense" that is the face the signifier presents to the signified side; against Hegelian dialectics and developmental psychology (Piaget), this loss grounds the subject's relation to the signifier and is the proper pivot of analytic praxis.

    There are no valid instances of meaning which do not make a circuit, a detour, by way of some referent.

86. #86

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

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 2 December 1964**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XII by using Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence to introduce the problem of the signifying chain: the question of what counts as "talking" is precisely what motivates the formalization of syntactic structure, staging the distinction between combinatory rules governing signifiers and semantic/referential meaning.

    The fourth word means sleep (sommeil), can also mean to go to sleep (dormir)... You will see why this is the sense (sens) that we will pause at.

87. #87

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.294

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan organizes his year's work around the triad Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit, arguing that the Freudian discovery of compulsion (Zwang as Entzweiung/Spaltung of the subject) and Plato's identification of the Good with Number together illuminate the distinctive status of Truth in psychoanalytic experience—a truth that is irreducibly personal and constituted through means that exceed ordinary medical reference.

    Sinn, is properly speaking a Fregian reference, it is in so far as Frege opposes Sinn to Bedeutung in his conceptual elaboration of what the being of number is for him

88. #88

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.2

    http://www.lacaninireland.com

    Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," Lacan argues that grammaticality and signification must be rigorously distinguished: any grammatical chain generates meaning when placed in a context/dialogue, which means meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on a referent and the function of sense — and crucially, the unconscious cannot be located through metaphorical meaning-hunting in grammatical structures.

    For what interests me is the reason why this example was forged. It was forged to distinguish the grammatical from another term that the author introduces here of the order of signification. In English that is called meaning.

89. #89

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Mannoni's extended anecdote about the proper name argues that the signifier's attachment to the signified is irreducible and escapes the subject's mastery of nomination — the proper name, constructed from pure phonemic sequence, acquires a quasi-autonomous identity that resists substitution, illuminating Leclaire's earlier claim about the irreducibility of the proper name in the fundamental phantasy.

    The name Venaisson has obviously no meaning by itself. Has it a signified? Undoubtedly, but on an identity card there is a photograph, fingerprints, and a description

90. #90

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage illustrates, via a Dostoevsky anecdote, how a single word (a signifier) can function differently depending on its enunciative mode—as information, as revelation, as caution—demonstrating the way the same signifier generates radically different significations through iterative repetition and tonal variation.

    reproduces the same word, this time in the manner of a revelation, of a eureka! The truth has dawned on him, it is this word which is the key to everything.

91. #91

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage performs two theoretical moves: first, it shows how the proper name functions as a signifier that splits the subject between objectification ("I am so-and-so") and self-identity ("I am me"), and second, through a clinical case and Leclaire's contribution, it argues that the phonematic decomposition of proper names enacts the primary mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, while the signifier itself is defined as a pure connotation of antinomy constitutive of the subject — with objet petit a precisely as what escapes this antinomy.

    the obligation that everyone fulfils with the help of all, and even of the police, to assure themselves that their name has a signified something that is always more or less badly assured.

92. #92

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.176

    **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

    Theoretical move: This seminar discussion, centered on Leclaire's case presentation, works through the theoretical status of the fundamental fantasy (Urphantasie) and its relation to signifier, myth, and body, while also elaborating the distinction between first name and family name as indexing the tension between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers of identification, and closing with a reading that connects transference, the Name-of-the-Father, obsessional structure, and anxiety.

    in psychoanalysis one cannot do otherwise than pass perpetually from the signified to the signifier through signification and in every sense of this passage.

93. #93

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176

    **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a multi-voice clinical-theoretical discussion of Leclaire's case presentation, turning on the distinction between fantasy and signifier, the differential status of first name versus family name for subjectivity/singularity, the question of the empty unconscious, the body's encounter with the signifier, and the role of transference and the Name-of-the-Father in an obsessional patient's structure.

    one cannot do otherwise than pass perpetually from the signified to the signifier through signification and in every sense of this passage.

94. #94

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces topology—specifically the Klein bottle—as a structural model for the signifier's relation to the signified, arguing that just as the Klein bottle has only one face (its inside communicating completely with its outside), the signifier's material and semantic dimensions are not opposed but continuous surfaces, thus replacing naive realism or substantialist accounts of meaning with a topological, combinatory account.

    it was impossible to speak about a sound element in the modern analysis of linguistics without considering it as being closely linked to what? To what is called meaning and we rediscover here the ambiguity between meaning and sense

95. #95

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.19

    All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the proper name cannot be reduced to a merely designatory function but opens onto the question of the signifier's relation to death (via the syllogism and the Death Drive), and further that language—as the primary, grammatically structured maternal tongue—is prior to and not reducible to logic or conceptual thought, as demonstrated through Dante, Vygotsky vs. Piaget, and Darwin's child-language example in which the signifier's mobility (from cry to monetary unit) reveals the two poles structuring language: the cry and money.

    it is the precession of particles, of little formulae, of 'perhaps not', of 'but still', which arise very precociously in the child's language, showing even that provided one looks at it with a bit of freshness... grammatical structure is absolutely correlative to all the first appearances of language.

96. #96

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.12

    http://www.lacaninireland.com > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1964**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the relationship of the signifier to the subject requires a non-Euclidean topology — specifically the Möbius strip — to account for the impossibility of the signifier signifying itself except by self-reduplication, thereby grounding the gap between the signifier's functioning and the production of meaning in a topological structure rather than a linear or spherical spatial intuition.

    the signifier generated the system of meanings... there is between that and everything that is constructed as meaning, this sort of neutral field

97. #97

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.49

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (Klein bottle, Möbius strip) to argue that the proper name is not a classificatory terminus but a movable function tied to lack: the subject is named not qua individual but qua something that can be absent, making the proper name a shutter that covers over a hole in the signifying structure—a point illustrated through Freud's forgetting of "Signorelli."

    its referential properties are still not specifically that they belong to the field of signification, become the properties of displacement, of a jump

98. #98

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.2

    http://www.lacaninireland.com

    Theoretical move: By working through Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" example, Lacan argues that grammaticality and meaning (signification) are structurally distinct: any grammatical signifying chain will always generate meaning, which means that meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on an external referent/context, pointing toward the real function of sense beyond semantics.

    The author thinks that in constructing this sentence he has produced a sentence which is without meaning, on the pretext that colourless contradicts green, that ideas cannot sleep and that it appears rather problematic for one to sleep furiously.

99. #99

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical pivot through the figure of Palamedes: writing confiscates the enunciating subject, and the gap between enunciation and the subject of the statement (traced via Plato's Sophist, the noun/verb relation, and the 'sliding of sense') is articulated as structurally linked to problems of arithmetic (the numbering unit within number) and linguistics - pointing toward the dyad and Sophistic discourse as a shared problematic.

    the relationship between the noun and the verb and of what happens in this sliding of sense through which the potential noun is actualised in the verb

100. #100

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     http://www.lacaninireland.com > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1964**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological comparison between the Möbius strip and the cross-cap to argue that these surfaces can illuminate logical and syllogistic relationships more adequately than classical Euler-circle set logic, positioning topology as a formal language for the signifying chain.

     the signifying chain has perhaps a much fuller meaning, in the sense that it implies a link, and another link, which interlock, that we presuppose this at first

101. #101

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**

     Theoretical move: Lacan dismantles psychological and Piagetian models of intelligence by showing that language is not the instrument of intelligence but its constitutive difficulty, and pivots to the claim that the subject is only a subject by being implicated in structure—thereby grounding analytic transmission not in ego-ideal identification but in the topology of the signifier.

     it is precisely this operation which itself constitutes the solution of the problem, that this operation of the function and what I may make bold to call for the moment ideally biunivocal is precisely what it is a matter of obtaining at the end of every research.

102. #102

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topological analysis of the Klein bottle/false torus grounds a theory of the 'structural unconscious' that surpasses Freud's second topology and its crudely imagistic concepts (ego-ideal, superego), while simultaneously demonstrating that language is non-orientable and cannot be mastered by any metalanguage—a critique directed at Russell's theory of types and its attempt to resolve the liar paradox through hierarchical meta-languages.

     in certain cases there dominates what can be called the effects of meaning, but that in other cases... there are cases that operate essentially not on the meaning, not on signification

103. #103

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Klein bottle as a topological model to argue that the proper name is not a pure denotation without meaning but rather carries a surplus of signifying effects, and that topology—not imagination—is the correct framework for understanding the structure of the subject, the unconscious, and the point of suture between interior and exterior.

     it is only necessary to add to it signans and signatum

104. #104

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 2 December 1964**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XII by using Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence to pose the foundational question of what counts as speech/talking, situating the structuralist analysis of syntax—formalisation of signifying chain linkages—as the entry point for interrogating whether any signifier can be immediately contiguous to any other signifier.

     It is precisely in order to know that this signifying chain - I scarcely dare to say sentence - was forged.

105. #105

     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.

     it is through this that I tried this year to make you sensitive to its distinction from meaning. Sense exists at the level of non-sense

106. #106

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a theory of the proper name as a "suture" — not a label that duplicates a pre-given thing, but a founding act that patches over the hole of the subject, thereby grounding the signifier's function in nomination rather than in enunciation/predication, and doing so against the backdrop of the Cratylus debate on the arbitrariness versus naturalness of names.

     The function of nomination deserves to be reserved as original, as having a status opposed to that of the enunciation or of the sentence, whether it is propositional, definitional, relational, predicative

107. #107

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Mannoni's contribution to the seminar advances the argument that the proper name is irreducible—neither fully assignable by a naming subject nor exchangeable—because it enacts a foundational adhesion between signifier and signified that resists the subject's mastery, illuminating the structural problem Leclaire raised about the fundamental phantasy's non-sense and the limits of secondary-process translation of primary-process material.

     Has it a signified? Undoubtedly, but on an identity card there is a photograph, fingerprints, and a description or the signature of the bearer

108. #108

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.294

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his year-long triadic schema (Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit) to argue that the Freudian discovery of Spaltung/Entzweiung gives a new philosophical status to truth, and that psychoanalysis is constitutively the practice of truth-as-means, distinguishing it from all other sciences and grounding its therapeutic effects in a reduplicated sense of truth proper to the subject.

     Sinn, is properly speaking a Fregian reference, it is in so far as Frege opposes Sinn to Bedeutung in his conceptual elaboration of what the being of number is for him

109. #109

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     **Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically projective geometry—provides the non-metaphorical, combinatorial foundation for the subject's relation to extension and signification, displacing the classical unifying subject (grounded in Cartesian homogeneous space) in favour of a structural account where the screen, the signifier, and the combinatorial replace imaginary unity and representational resemblance.

     The function of the screen as a support, as such, of significance is what we find immediately with the awakening of this something which, as regards man, assures us that, whatever tone of voice he emitted there, he was a speaking being.

110. #110

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     B - The problem of representation

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's logic of representation—where zero figures as the object under which no representation falls—to articulate how the subject is constituted by a cut at the expense of the object, such that desire survives the loss of the object through suture; the Hamlet passage then dramatizes this structure of cause, defect, and remainder as the very logic of desire and demand.

     the notion of an alternative movement of a representation and of an exclusion. The function of gathering together, of subsumption is solidary with the notion of a power which puts things together.

111. #111

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Jones on female homosexuality, argues that the phallus functions as an unmarked signifier of the loss of jouissance produced by the law, and that femininity is paradoxically constituted through the homosexual's retention of the father-object — with the woman's not-having the phallus raising signification (signifiance) to its highest power, i.e. castration itself.

     This is the essence of the function of significance (signifiance) and if the woman keeps, retains, raised to a higher power what is given to her by not having the phallus... it is to be able to raise the function of significance to this point by not being marked.

112. #112

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a debate between a frustration-based model of analytic treatment (Stein's) and Lacan's structural alternative, pivoting on the claim that 'lack' is more fundamental than 'frustration', and that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know rather than in the analyst's representative function of reality — while Melman's intervention presses toward the primacy of the signifier/signified distinction over mere content of speech.

     to consider the content of the words pronounced, is never enough to account for the change produced by the word in the one who hears it

113. #113

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: Lacan, rereading Jones on female homosexuality, argues that the phallus functions as a signifier of loss at the level of jouissance, and that femininity is constituted precisely through the "unmarked" position — not-having the phallus — which raises the function of signifiance to its highest point and equates the word phallus with castration itself.

     This is the essence of the function of significance (signifiance) and if the woman keeps, retains, raised to a higher power what is given to her by not having the phallus

114. #114

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     **Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology — specifically projective geometry — provides a non-metaphorical, combinatorial foundation for situating the subject, replacing the classical unified-point subject (grounded in Cartesian extension/thought dualism) with a structural account in which the screen, signification, and the subject's relation to extension are all rigorously formalised without appeal to intuitive or metrical geometry.

     everything indicates to us that a structural chain, that a distribution whose essence is properly speaking to be signifying

115. #115

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 23 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces 'writing' (l'écriture) as a theoretical operator distinct from speech, arguing that its paradoxical self-referential structure is necessary to ground the logic of fantasy—and that the formula 'there is no metalanguage' is not an abstract aphorism but a concrete consequence of how writing differs from saying.

     starting, for example, from an object-language, in order to construct on this base a certain number of differentiations. The very act of such an operation seems to imply that in order to speak about language one should use something which is not part of it

116. #116

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 30 November 1966.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan retrospectively grounds his early machine-model of the signifier (drawn from Poe's game of odds and evens) as the necessary foundation for a psychoanalytic logic, and endorses Miller's Boolean demonstration as rigorously establishing that meaning and its origin in the signifier are logically prior to and irreducible by classical consciousness-based logic.

     this logical precedence, this necessity which radically distinguishes the status of meaning and its origin in the signifier

117. #117

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76

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

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

     what is at stake is not the Ding, the unsayable thing, but the perfectly articulated affair, but in so far, in effect, as it supersedes- like Bedeutung - anything whatsoever that may order it

118. #118

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

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

     what Freud demonstrates to us as being always and strictly correlative to this syncopation of the *Trauminhalt*, to the lack of signifiers, is, precisely, once it is approached, anything whatsoever **in language** ... that would put in question what is involved in the relationships of sex as such.

119. #119

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy has a grammatically closed structure ("a child is being beaten") that is the correlative of the alienation-choice "I am not thinking," and that jouissance in perversion must be distinguished from the neurotic fantasy's role as a measure of comprehension/desire — with perversion defined through the impasse of the sexual act rather than through the fantasy structure itself.

     the unconscious Bedeutung which comes correlatively to bite on this I, which is qua not being. And the relation to this Bedeutung is precisely this meaning, in so far as it escapes, this closed meaning

120. #120

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

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > S *W* S

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces signifier B as the signifier of sterility—that which marks the failure of the signifier's self-relation to generate meaning—and situates it within the Universe of discourse via the 'little diamond' (lozenge), anticipating the full elaboration of the subject's relation to the Other throughout Seminar XIV.

     it marks, as I might say, this sterility... the relation of the signifier to itself does not generate any meaning.

121. #121

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > S *W* S

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the signifier B as a formalization of sterility — the signifier's constitutive inability to generate meaning in relation to itself — and situates it within the Universe of discourse via the diamond operator (◇), thereby grounding the logic of the signifier in a structural incapacity rather than a generative positivity.

     the relation of the signifier to itself does not generate any meaning.

122. #122

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.99

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation sharply from both Marxist and idealist-philosophical senses, then develops the Objet petit a as the structural support of the subject's "I am not" — the analyst occupies the position of objet a in the analytic operation, while the breast-as-object exemplifies the fundamentally non-representable, jouissance-laden character of the partial object that supplies for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein.

     it is precisely the holes, in this operation of the Bedeutung. How has there not been noticed the following… what I might call the 'stoppered' (bouche) aspect of Bedeutung, in which there is manifested everything that touches on the little o-object.

123. #123

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 23 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces 'writing' (l'écriture) as a foundational, non-metalinguistic operation distinct from speech, arguing that the logic of fantasy cannot be articulated without it, and demonstrates its paradoxical self-referential structure through the 'smallest whole number not written on the board' example — thereby grounding the claim that there is no metalanguage in a concrete, writeable paradox.

     it is not the same thing, after we have said it, to write it or indeed to write that one is saying it. Because the second operation, essential to the function of writing, precisely from the angle... immediately and from the beginning presents itself with paradoxical consequences.

124. #124

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.76

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

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

     we are dealing here with Bedeutung. Namely, that there where I am not, what happens is something that we have to locate by the same sort of inversion that guided us earlier: the I of the I am not thinking is inverted, is alienated for its part also in something which is a pense-choses.

125. #125

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an interrupted seminar session (deferred by a strike and Jakobson's presence) to sketch the theoretical stakes of the year's work on the *Logic of the Fantasy*: the Es/Unconscious cannot be substantified as an "outlaw ego"; its proper status must be derived from the barred Other as locus of speech, while topology (Möbius strip → torus) is introduced as a demonstration that structure is real, not metaphorical—culminating in the question of what authorises a teaching addressed to analysts who do not yet exist.

     the Other, the traditional big Other does not exist and that, nevertheless, there is indeed a *Bedeutung*.

126. #126

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

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

     Theoretical move: The passage uses an anecdote about an unintentional witticism to pivot toward a theoretical claim: it is the elevation of an utterance to the field of the Other that retroactively constitutes it as wit, and this logic of retroactive constitution through the Other is precisely what structures the psychoanalytic act.

     He had heard three words following one another and he applied them. But supposing that he had done it deliberately this would have been a witticism.

127. #127

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **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 argues that his formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" is not a claim to knowledge but a structural claim: the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates psychoanalytic discourse, with the Subject Supposed to Know standing in as a placeholder for the unknowable, and the logic of fantasy grounded in a cogito-like logical asceticism that resists any domestication as mere "new negation."

     The important thing in this discourse is not its sense which must first of all exist so that what I put forward with 'the unconscious is structured like a language' has its reference, its Bedeutung.

128. #128

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the asymmetry of "the unconscious is structured like a language" against its inversion, grounding the formula in a logic of consequence that ties signifying articulation to the analysable field, while distinguishing the Subject Supposed to Know from the teaching position of the analyst.

     it is because a subject has not been able in any way, to articulate something primary, that his subsequent effort to give it ... articulation in the sense properly that this articulation is made up of nothing other than a signifying sequence, which takes on a more precise form, the accent of consequence starting from the moment when scansions are established in it.

129. #129

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the asymmetry of "the unconscious is structured like a language" against its inversion, grounding analytic experience in signifying consequence and logical articulation rather than dynamic causality, while insisting that analytic teaching proceeds without positing a subject supposed to know who already holds the truth.

     his subsequent effort to give it, I would not even say meaning, sense, but articulation in the sense properly that this articulation is made up of nothing other than a signifying sequence, which takes on a more precise form, the accent of consequence starting from the moment when scansions are established in it

130. #130

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **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 argues that the formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" is not a claim to knowledge but rather a structural claim: his discourse *organises* the unconscious, and the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates Freud—not meaning/sense alone. This grounds the logic of fantasy on a logical asceticism (the cogito's cleavage) and warns against domesticating the radical gap at stake by labelling it a "new negation."

     The important thing in this discourse is not its sense which must first of all exist so that what I put forward with 'the unconscious is structured like a language' has its reference, its Bedeutung.

131. #131

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     Am I making myself understood?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a theoretical artifice but an effect of analytic discourse itself—homologous to Marx's discovery of surplus value—and uses this claim to introduce the Graph of Desire's earliest construction (1957-58) as the formal ground for understanding how a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, with meaning constituted retroactively.

     what is unfolded from the discourse will only be achieved by rejoining it, in other words only takes on its full import in the way designated here, namely, retroactively

132. #132

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the tortuous transmission history of *Le neveu de Rameau* (Diderot→Schiller→Goethe→Hegel) to argue that structurally rigorous discourse has impact regardless of institutional framing or authorial prestige, and by extension that the Ecrits' paradoxical value lies in being a "worst-seller" — institutional recognition (the thesis, psychology, proper attribution) is an obstacle rather than a guarantee of truth.

     No need in the least for psychology. To spell it out for you, to get myself out of jail, what saves the Ecrits from the accident that befell it, namely, that it was immediately read, is that it is all the same a 'worst-seller'.

133. #133

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* to push the question of truth and meta-language to its limit: because any assertion is already self-announcing as true, adding a truth-predicate is superfluous, yet this very superfluity reveals that there is no meta-language — only the desire of the Other, from which all 'blackguardism' (wanting to be the big Other for someone) is deduced.

     the signifier does not concern the object, but the sense. As subject of the sentence, there is only sense.

134. #134

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **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.

     In language there is no Bedeutung other than the phallus. Language in its function as an existent, only connotes, in the final analysis, the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship.

135. #135

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of a Mencian formula on language and nature to argue that what emerges from the effects of discourse is nothing other than the function of cause insofar as it is surplus-jouissance (li/profit), while also positioning writing as the indirect but constitutive reference for language, against logical-positivist demands for graspable meaning.

     logical positivism proceeds from this requirement that a text should have a graspable meaning, which leads it to a position which is the following: a certain number of philosophical statements find themselves in a way devalorised in principle by the fact that they are not.. .that they give no graspable result as regards a search for meaning

136. #136

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

     Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972

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

     for there to be denotation without any doubt, that it would be no bad thing to address oneself first of all, timidly, to the field of arithmetic as it is defined by whole numbers

137. #137

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces Peirce's semiotic theory — specifically the representamen, its object, and the interpretant — as a four-term structure, framing the semiotic triangle as the basis for a logic of rhetoric/semiotics relevant to Lacan's own conceptual work on the sign.

     the reception of the sign is then a second sign functioning as interpreter.

138. #138

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logical necessity is not prior to but produced by discourse itself, and that this production retroactively posits its own ground as 'inexistent' — a structure illustrated by the symptom (truth as inexistent) and the automaton/repetition (jouissance as inexistent), both grounded in Frege's zero, and culminating in the claim that the Phallus as Bedeutung (denotation/reference) is what anchors signification to discourse's necessity.

     the last supping of what is articulated in the name of significance... Die Bedeutung, nevertheless, was indeed referred to the use, to the use that Frege makes of this word by opposing it to the term of Sinn

139. #139

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Someone in the audience - That's bullshit!

     Theoretical move: The passage develops a Peircean semiotic framework by articulating the four terms (sign, object, ground, interpretant) and the three relational branches (speculative grammar, pure logic, pure rhetoric), with Lacan and Recanati using this structure to locate the conditions under which a sign produces meaning—particularly foregrounding the third relation (representamen-interpretant) as the site where one sign generates another sign, a concern directly relevant to Lacanian signification.

     It is a matter of recognising what must be true for the sign to have a meaning, the idea, in general is the focussing of the *représentante* on the object determined according to the ground or the point of view.

140. #140

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     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.

     to renew meaning, to say things that are because of this a little less short-circuited, a little less changeable, than all the imbecilities that may come to us

141. #141

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972 > Seminar 11: Wednesday 14 June 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologistic concepts of 'unian' (unien) and 'unier' as modal/existential pivots connecting a universal assertive statement ("That one says") to the question of what remains forgotten behind utterance, linking the logic of enunciation to a grounding (fondé/fondu) that structures the relation between what is said and what is understood.

     remains forgotten behind what is said, in what is understood.

142. #142

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Someone in the audience - Mirror!

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Peirce's semiotic triad (representamen-object-interpretant) to argue that signification is an interminable, infinite chain of interpretation launched from an irreducible first separation — a structural move Lacan glosses as "existence is insistence" — and aligns the Peircean triadic logic with the Borromean three-way irreducibility, where no dual relation suffices and only an irreducible triad holds.

     Such is the model of the process of signification in so far as it is interminable. From a first separation, the one that is given by a first stroke within the ground, representamen-object, from a first separation there is born a series of others

143. #143

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     J Lacan - Start that again.

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a reading of Condillac, Maine de Biran, Destutt de Tracy, and Peirce to argue that the sign-system is constitutively split: a sign fills the interval between two adjacent signs, order is the series of inter-punctual frontiers rather than punctualities themselves, and the 'flaw' between inscription and event (paralleling Lacan's split between the subject of the statement and the stating subject) is the irreducible motor of the entire sign-system.

     signs in general, are supposed, through all the theories that he, Condillac, inherits, to represent something. And that, that obviously causes him a problem, he cannot manage to get out of it, how is the liaison between the formal sign and its reference in general constructed?

144. #144

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "incomprehension of Lacan" is not a symptom, using this occasion to distinguish the symptom-as-truth-value (a one-directional equivalence introduced by Marxist thinking and refined by psychoanalysis) from mere misunderstanding or resistance, while also clarifying the structure of the Subject Supposed to Know as the ground of transference independently of any certainty about the analyst's actual knowledge.

     There is a great difference between the signifier/signified relationship and signification. Signification makes a sign.

145. #145

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus is the singular meaning (Bedeutung) through which language signifies, that this phallic function structurally prevents any harmonious sexual relation, and that the objet petit a — as metonymical cause of desire — is what determines the speaking being as a divided subject within discourse, with the semblance-pole (analyst's position) and enjoyment-pole standing as the two irreducible terms of the quadripode.

     Most of the time it supplies for the fact that the phallic function is precisely what ensures that in the case of man there are only what you know: bad relations between the sexes.

146. #146

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Klein bottle topology and a playful six-verse poem to demonstrate that the relation between man and woman passes through love, then substitutes the world for the sexual partner, and terminates at a wall that is not a cut but the locus of castration — the point where truth and knowledge are held apart. This topological demonstration grounds the claim that the discourse of capitalism forecloses castration, and that it is only the analytic discourse (emerging from logic, the four discourses, and language) that re-introduces castration as the hinge between truth and knowledge.

     There is sense, but there is no common one. There is probably not one among you who understands me in the same sense.

147. #147

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     XXIII > A, m, a, S > FATHER BEIRNAERT: Why?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the death drive is not a biological tendency but the mask of the Symbolic order insofar as the Symbolic has not yet been realised — the Symbolic is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, and analysis reveals not the subject's biological reality but the signification of his lot within a received symbolic speech.

     All analytic experience is an experience of signification... what analysis reveals to the subject is its signification.

148. #148

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.109

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > That's all rro saying.

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's Entwurf to argue that repetition—not harmony with an Umwelt—is the structural condition for the constitution of the human object-world, and that the Real is without fissure and only accessible through the symbolic, thereby grounding both the pleasure/reality principle distinction and the function of repetition in a proto-structuralist reading of Freud's neurological sketch.

     It tells us how Freud conceived of the psychic apparatus. This text is vital to the history of Freud's thought and, in the light of the punctuation which we will give it, it reveals the Signification of what was to follow

149. #149

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     XXIII > Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the -nature of language > LECTURE ^I

     Theoretical move: Lacan proposes that the shared axis between psychoanalysis and cybernetics is language, and argues that both sciences are grounded in the problem of chance and determinism; he further distinguishes 'conjectural sciences' (of which psychoanalysis and cybernetics are instances) from exact sciences, tracing the latter's birth to the moment man ceased to see his ritual actions as necessary to sustaining the order of the real.

     To understand what cybernetics is about. one must look for its origin in the theme. so crucial for us. of the signification of chance.

150. #150

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar discussion and the apologue of the Martian to sharpen the distinction between language (as an impersonal, geometrical, polysemantic system) and speech (as a perspectival, founding, revelatory act), culminating in the thesis that the subject is not merely an agent of language but is always-already inscribed in it as a "message" — determined by a universal concrete discourse prior to birth.

     Language may have a meaning, but only speech has a signification.

151. #151

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity > The next session: THE SEMINAR PLA YS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "beyond of the pleasure principle" is identical with the beyond of signification — i.e., the unconscious as compulsion to repeat — and that this can be isolated even in ostensibly random sequences, demonstrating a "symbolic inertia" of the unconscious subject that exceeds dual intersubjectivity.

     That is what the beyond of the pleasure principle is. It is the beyond of signification. The two are indistinguishable.

152. #152

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     XII > The dream., of Irma's injection

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's dream of Irma's injection, Lacan argues that the unconscious is neither the ego of the dreamer nor any of his imaginary identifications, but a decentred symbolic structure ('Nemo') that only comes into being through the 'inmixing of subjects' in speech — the formula for trimethylamine functioning as oracle: the answer to the dream is that there is no word of the dream other than the nature of the symbolic itself.

     What gives this dream its veritable unconscious value... is the quest for the word, the direct confrontation with the secret reality of the dream, the quest for signification as such.

153. #153

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     XXIII > Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the -nature of language > LECTURE ^I

     Theoretical move: By contrasting the symbolic with the imaginary through a cybernetic lens, Lacan argues that the symbolic order has an irreducible autonomy—it governs human beings from the outside, constitutes their non-mastery over language, and grounds the Freudian insistence of the repressed as the relation of non-being to being.

     What is the meaning of meaning? Meaning is the fact that the human being isn't master of this primordial, primitive language.

154. #154

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.45

     II > III > M. HYPPOL ITE: I don't think so.

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the symbolic universal from the generic/natural order, arguing that the symbolic is universal de jure as soon as it is formed, while defending the autonomy of the symbolic register against both naturalist reduction and masked transcendentalism — with Lévi-Strauss's wavering on the nature/culture divide serving as the pivot for this theoretical move.

     the problem he raises, which is stated in the form signatura rerum - do things themselves possess, naturally, a specifically asymmetrical character?

155. #155

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.263

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Object Relations theory (Fairbairn) for collapsing the imaginary and the real, and for reducing analytic action to an ego-normative dual relation; he argues instead that the imaginary only becomes analytically operative when transcribed into the symbolic order, where the subject's account of itself in speech constitutes the true lever of analysis.

     The legal order into which he is inducted almost from the beginning gives Signification to these imaginary relations

156. #156

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > IX

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four schemata of the psychic apparatus as a scaffold to argue that the analytic field is irreducible to psychology or individual ontology, insisting that the Imaginary and Symbolic are two distinct but intertwined dimensions of the inter-human relation, and that confusing them produces theoretical and clinical error.

     There is regression on the plane of signification and not on the plane of reality.

157. #157

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a mathematical formalization of language (via binary code and formal syntax) to distinguish language as an autonomous system of signs from speech as the temporal intervention of a subject that introduces signification — then grounds this distinction concretely in Lacan's three-prisoner logical puzzle, which demonstrates three irreducible temporal dimensions of intersubjective reasoning.

     The question of meaning comes with speech... Language enables a meaning to be established and for speech to become manifest.

158. #158

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity

     Theoretical move: By contrasting biological memory with symbolic remembering (Nachträglichkeit), and by reading Poe's "Purloined Letter" as a demonstration that signification is never where one expects it to be, Lacan argues that the subject's truth is structured by the symbolic order rather than by intersubjective psychology or empirical reality—the symbolic quod, not the living subject, is primary.

     It raises the question of the relation of signification to the living man.

159. #159

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.46

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

     Theoretical move: The letter is constituted as a radical effect of discourse — it precedes the signifier historically and functionally — and analytic discourse is distinguished by its capacity to produce a different reading of signifiers than what they signify, a capacity instantiated most purely in Joyce's work where the signifier stuffs the signified.

     What is at stake in analytic discourse is always the following — you give a different reading to the signifiers that are enunciated (ce qui s'énonce de signifiant) than what they signify.

160. #160

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **II** > Love and the signifier

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

     What remains at the center is the fine routine that is such that the signified always retains the same meaning (sens) in the final analysis.

161. #161

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the signifier topologically by insisting on the bar between signifier and meaning-effect, introduces 'signifierness' (signifiance) as the excess of the signifier over signification, and pivots from asking about 'a signifier' to the signifier 'One' (Un), arguing that the unconscious structured like a language displaces the Cartesian cogito by making the subject the one who utters stupidities rather than the one who thinks.

     signifierness (signifiance) is something that fans out (s'év-entaille), if you will allow me this expression, from the proverb to the locution.

162. #162

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.39

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

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

     Distinguishing the dimension of the signifier only takes on importance when it is posited that what you hear, in the auditory sense of the term, bears no relation whatsoever to what it signifies.

163. #163

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

     What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier cannot be collectivised through semantic or lexical predication alone, and that its proper "substance" is Jouissance — the body enjoys itself only by corporalising itself in a signifying way, making enjoyment-substance the third term beyond thinking substance and extended substance, and reframing the subject of the unconscious as the one who speaks stupidities rather than thinks.

     What is this significance? At the level we are at, it is what has a meaning effect.

164. #164

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     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.

     From the universal point of view of signification the evacuation of the signifier into its effects is something absolutely necessary; it is an a priori of the field of signification.

165. #165

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

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ontology is a product of the accentuation of the copula "to be" within philosophical/master discourse, that there is no pre-discursive reality (all reality is grounded in discourse), and that the sexual relationship cannot be written — a claim sustained by the bar in the Saussurean algorithm and the letter as a radical effect of discourse.

     the signified is the effect of the signifier. [...] what we hear is the signifier. And the signified is the effect of the signifier.

166. #166

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

     What is the signifier?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier must be understood topologically rather than purely phonologically: it produces a meaning effect, and between signifier and signified a bar is inscribed that must be crossed over — a structure whose lineage runs from the Stoics through Augustine, not merely from Saussure, and which cannot be reduced to its phonematic support.

     the signifier is first of all something that has a meaning effect, which should not be elided

167. #167

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.101

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Names-of-the-Father as identical to the RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), argues that the phallus furnishes the consistency of the Real while enjoyment ek-sists with respect to it, and situates naming/the Borromean knot as the structural answer to the philosophical impasse between realism and nominalism about language and the Real.

     this question of meaning is indeed what, nothing less, I am trying to situate this year. It takes on a meaning, but what is proper to meaning, is that one names something in it.

168. #168

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan assigns the Borromean knot to the Imaginary register (grounded in three-dimensional space), then uses it as a topological framework to redistribute Freud's triad of Inhibition/Symptom/Anxiety across the three registers: Inhibition as arrest in the Symbolic, Anxiety as arising from the Real, and the Symptom as the effect of the Symbolic in the Real—with Jouissance locatable at the intersections of the knot.

     Small o, I have written here; in the Imaginary but just as well in the Symbolic, I am write the function described as meaning.

169. #169

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: The passage poses a foundational question about the threshold at which significance (as written) distinguishes itself from the effects of phonation, locating the proper name as the privileged site where the signifier's function and phonation intersect — and framing the Borromean knot as only emerging beyond a triple relation.

     from what point on is significance (la signifiance) in so far as it is written distinguished from the simple effects of phonation?

170. #170

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes sense (double-sens, meaning-effect rooted in the duplicity of the signifier) from meaning (a purely empty knotting of word to word), and uses torus topology to articulate the relations between Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary—arguing that anxiety is the symbolically real, the symptom is the only real thing that preserves sense, and that there is no sexual relationship except incestuous, with castration as the only truth.

     it has what people call sense-effects, and it would be enough for me to connote S2, as not being the second in time, but as having a double direction (sens) for the S1 to take its place.

171. #171

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     **XV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic practice must advance beyond cataloguing instinctual meanings to recognize the autonomous action of the signifier, proposing that psychosis is not merely a disturbance at the level of meaning but stems from a structural deficiency at the level of the signifier itself — what will become the concept of Foreclosure.

     The signifier is to be thought of initially as distinct from meaning. It's characterized by not in itself possessing a literal meaning [signification propre].

172. #172

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.239

     **XVIII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of metaphor — and of signification generally — rests not on the transference of meaning but on the positional structure of the signifier itself; metonymy, as the primitive positional function, is what makes metaphor possible, not the other way around.

     The transference of the signified, so essential to human life, is possible only by virtue of the structure of the signifier.

173. #173

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the second-person pronoun 'you/thou' is not a univocal marker of the other but a punctuating signifier that 'hooks' the other into discourse; the theoretical question is what mechanism elevates this indeterminate signifier to subjectivity—answered through the copulatory ('to be') and ostensive functions, which bear directly on the structural problem of why 'it speaks' in psychosis.

     punctuation is what plays the most decisive role of hooking up, so much so that a classical text may vary in its entirety according as you place it at one point or another.

174. #174

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     **II** > **Ill** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the standard psychoanalytic account of Schreber's paranoia (homosexual tendency/castration) as ambiguous and unfalsifiable, then pivots to a properly linguistic analysis of psychotic discourse: the mark of delusion is not its content but a structural feature of the signifier—neologism at the level of the signifier, and irreducible self-referential meaning at the level of the signified—producing two poles of "delusional intuition" and "formula/refrain."

     a meaning always refers to another meaning... the meaning of these words can't be exhausted by reference to another meaning.

175. #175

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XVIII** > **Metaphor and metonymy (II): Signifying articulation and transference of the signified**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the aphasia distinction (similarity vs. contiguity disorders) to positively ground the metaphor/metonymy opposition, while insisting that the signifier/signified split cannot be collapsed into the traditional "words for thought" dualism.

     This way of putting it is, I hope, no longer sustainable for any of you.

176. #176

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **XVIII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy (contiguous, signifier-to-signifier coordination) is the foundational operation of language acquisition and psychic organization, upon which metaphor (transference of the signified) can only subsequently operate—and that psychotic phenomena like Schreber's delusional assonances expose this hidden signifying substructure by promoting the signifier as such.

     It's only within this framework that the transference of meaning is possible.

177. #177

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychotic subject's testimony about their relationship to language must be taken literally rather than filtered through academic clinical categories, because the psychotic's "turning" in relation to language reveals a dimension constitutive of all human subjectivity — namely, the half-external position every subject occupies with respect to the signifier. The Schreberian case is thus elevated from pathological curiosity to methodological key for understanding the signifier/signified relation and the ego's grounding in the Other.

     the perceptible mobilization of the external world concerning a meaning liable to emerge from any quarter, may give us an idea of this aspect, constantly liable to crop up, of a half-insane discourse.

178. #178

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.201

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinctiveness of the signifier — that it signifies nothing in itself — is the key to understanding both the structure of human subjectivity and the differential mechanism of neurosis versus psychosis: in neurosis the signifier remains enigmatic but operative, while in psychosis what has been foreclosed from the symbolic (Verwerfung) reappears in the real, with delusion marking the moment the initiative is attributed to the big Other as such.

     the acknowledgment of receipt [l'accuse de reception] that is essential to communication insofar as it is not significant, but signifying.

179. #179

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XVI** > *Reading from the* Memoirs, *308-10*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is structurally indivisible—its meaning-effect overruns any mechanical interruption—and uses this property to reframe the question of libidinal investment in psychosis: what is at stake is not energy per se but the subject's fundamental relationship to the signifier as such.

     The unit of meaning is constantly showing the signifier functioning according to certain laws.

180. #180

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.280

     **XXI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Through close analysis of a scene from Racine's *Athalie*, Lacan demonstrates how the quilting point (point de capiton) operates: a single signifier ('fear') retroactively and prospectively organises the floating mass of meanings in discourse, effecting a qualitative transmutation (from ambiguous zeal to faithful courage) that cannot be achieved by any accumulation of meanings alone—thus establishing the primacy of the signifier over the signified.

     No accumulation, no superimposition, no summation of meanings, is sufficient to justify it. The entire progress of this scene... resides in the transmutation of the situation through the intervention of the signifier.

181. #181

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure and signifier are inseparable concepts, and uses this identity to draw the epistemological boundary between the natural sciences (where no one uses the signifier to signify) and psychoanalysis (where subjectivity—the use of the signifier to deceive—is encountered in the real), thereby grounding clinical structures like neurosis and psychosis in a field irreducible to natural explanation.

     The idea that the signifier signifies something, that there is someone who uses this signifier to signify something, is called the Signature rerum.

182. #182

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychosis to develop a theory of the signifier in the real: the verbal hallucination is not a false perception but the limit-phenomenon where discourse opens onto a signifier that precedes and exceeds the subject's intentional grasp, reframing the ego and the Other in terms of this foreign discourse at the heart of subjectivity.

     It's of the nature of meaning, insofar as it takes shape, continually to tend to close itself off for the listener... the anticipation of meaning.

183. #183

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By analysing Schreber's psychotic language, Lacan argues that the foreclosure of the third-person 'he' (the big Other as irreducible other subject) is the structural catastrophe of psychosis: without this guaranteeing 'he', the subject's being collapses, leaving only a hallucinatory, enigmatic speech produced by an imaginary-degraded God who absorbs all otherness.

     I am thinking of this phenomenon of sentences that emerge in his asubjectivity as interrupted, leaving the sense in suspense.

184. #184

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **XXI** > **1** > **4**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the quilting point (point de capiton) between signifier and signified is the minimal structural condition for normality, and that psychosis is characterised precisely by its absence or failure — a thesis developed through the Oedipus complex as the paradigmatic quilting point and through Schreber's case as exemplary psychotic disintegration of signifier/signified unity.

     the points at which the quilting is omitted. A complete catalogue of these points would enable us to discover some surprising correlations

185. #185

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     **XXI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychotic experience and Saussure's two-flow schema to argue that the signifier is never isolable but always retroactively determines meaning through the completion of a signifying chain — a structural property illustrated through Racine's Athalie — and that this structuring priority of the signifier over the signified is the necessary foundation for understanding psychoanalytic (especially psychotic) experience.

     The sentence only exists as completed and its sense comes to it retroactively.

186. #186

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's neurosis/psychosis distinction to sharpen the concept of Verwerfung (foreclosure): whereas in neurosis a repressed element returns symbolically within the subject's psychical reality, in psychosis what has been excluded from the symbolic order entirely returns from without in the Real — a structural difference that cannot be reduced to projection. A clinical vignette (the butcher's remark) then demonstrates that the signifier can carry meaning erotically/allusively without being identical to the message received in inverted form.

     Why did she say, I've just been to the butcher's and not Pig?

187. #187

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     **XXIII** > **The highway and the signifier "being a father"**

     Theoretical move: The highway-as-signifier analogy is deployed to show that the signifier does not merely connect points but *creates* and polarizes a field of meanings; this is then applied to Schreber's psychosis by arguing that the foreclosed signifier 'being a father' leaves only a network of minor paths (imaginary/partial routes), generating hallucinatory substitute signifiers in place of the absent structuring highway.

     the entire history of human meanings maintaining themselves in a kind of equilibrium and tracing out these enigmatic lines that are the political boundaries of lands.

188. #188

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XXI** > **The quilting point**

     Theoretical move: By asking why a hallucinated voice — something as architecturally complex as speech — should appear in the hole produced by a refusal to perceive, Lacan argues that psychosis restores the theoretically neglected proper relationship between signifier and signified, which standard analytic accounts of hallucination (rooted in a crude realism) fail to explain.

     why should something as complex and architectured as speech appear in this hole? This is what we are not told.

189. #189

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.179

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the preconscious/imaginary domain and the unconscious proper, arguing that the analytic field is defined not by preverbal or imaginary communication but by the structural fact that unconscious phenomena are "structured like a language" — meaning they exhibit the signifier/signified duality where the signifier refers to another signifier, not to any object.

     This means it's a phenomenon that always presents the essential duality of signifier and signified.

190. #190

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.387

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

     someone who had made a new universe of signification loom up. This new relationship between man and his own meaning and condition

191. #191

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a "golden rule" for analytic reading: signifier-elements must first be defined by their articulation with other signifiers, never reduced to a univocal signified. This principle, illustrated through the polysemic horse in the Little Hans case, is grounded in the structural study of myth (Lévi-Strauss) and simultaneously critiques object-relations theory as trapped in the contradictions of the Imaginary.

     Is the horse to be hitched, or not? Is it hitched to a cart with just one horse, or two horses? In each case there is a different signification.

192. #192

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.323

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hans's series of fantasies as a structured permutation of signifying elements—hole, bathtub, behind, pincers—demonstrating that the signifier does not represent signification but rather fills the gap left by lost signification, while the castration complex is recast as a symbolic operation (removal and impossible return of the penis) whose incomplete execution in Hans's case may nonetheless suffice as a rite of passage.

     It is because the signification is literally lost, because the trail is lost as in the fairy tale of Hop-o'-My-Thumb, that the white stones of the signifier surge up to fill this hole and this void.

193. #193

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.336

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the reorganisation of the real into a new symbolic configuration necessarily passes through an imaginary regression, using Little Hans's case to show that anxiety is not fear of an object but confrontation with the absence of an object, and that the Oedipus myth functions as an originary truth-creating myth rather than a direct therapeutic tool.

     implanting another crystal, as it were, in the incomplete signification that little Hans is at this point representing to himself

194. #194

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's case of the young homosexual woman through the L Schema's symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes, arguing that the phallus functions as the imaginary element through which the subject enters the symbolic dialectic of the gift, and distinguishing between frustration of love (intersubjective, symbolic) and frustration of jouissance (real, non-generative of object-constitution) against Klein and Winnicott's formulations.

     pregenital objects are brought into play in the Oedipal dialectic to the extent that they lend themselves more readily to verbal representations... It is easier to symbolise an object — that is, to endow it with a plus sign or a minus sign

195. #195

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates the theoretical trajectory of Seminars I–IV to frame the new topic of "formations of the unconscious," establishing that the signifier's primacy grounds both the symbolic determination of meaning and the structural distinction between metonymy (desire's object) and metaphor (emergence of meaning), while introducing the quilting-point schema and the retroactive (*nachträglich*) action of the signifier as the key apparatus for the year's investigation.

     S is linked to S' in the chain's combination, both of them in relation to S", the result of which is to put S in a certain metonymic relationship with s at the level of signification.

196. #196

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism 'famillionaire' operates on two irreducible axes—metaphorical signifying creation and metonymic proliferation of meaning—but that the true centre of the phenomenon is the conjunction of signifiers confirmed by the Other, which is precisely what distinguishes a witticism from a symptom and grounds its status as a formation of the unconscious.

     We could trace the possible signification of the word in yet another way by decomposing it thus - 'fat-millionaire', 'conceited millionaire'.

197. #197

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes perversion not as a category of instinct or tendency but as a signifying structure, arguing that the object in perversion is a "metonymic object" — produced by the sliding of signification beneath the signifying chain — and that the phallus names the imaginary pole that anchors the subject's radical identification with this always-fleeing object.

     While the upper chain moves in one direction, this something that is in the significations moves in the opposite direction. This is a signification that is always sliding, flying and fleeing.

198. #198

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of witticisms to establish metonymy as the foundational structure of the signifying chain — the "transfer of signification along the chain" — on which metaphor (substitution) depends, while also linking the metonymic function to the sliding of meaning, fetishistic displacement of desire, and the irreducibility of linguistic ambiguity (the impossibility of metalanguage).

     It's thus a question, in the clearest way, of the transfer of signification along the chain.

199. #199

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.490

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 2 This year's schema

     Theoretical move: The passage explicates the Graph of Desire schema by showing how the retroactive action of the signifying chain on the signified produces meaning, and how desire serves as the middle term that inserts discourse into the speaking subject, distinguishing the human level (with desire and the Other) from the animal level (specular imaginary confrontation).

     Meaning is formed when the final word of the sentence has been uttered.

200. #200

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of jokes (Witz) — via a specific joke about battles and a rearing horse — to argue that the witticism's punchline operates through a retroactive "step-of-sense" that discloses how the signifier both enables and forecloses access to reality, and that the joke's satisfaction requires a tripartite structure involving the Other, distinguishing wit structurally from the merely comic.

     This is the nonsense in relation to signification which makes you say momentarily, 'I don't understand, I am confused, this sentence has no real content', marking a break in the subject's assent in relation to what he accepts.

201. #201

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's examples of 'famillionaire' and the forgetting of 'Signorelli' to argue that metaphorical creation necessarily produces a repressed residue (a 'signifying scrap') — the word that is displaced but not forgotten — demonstrating that the unconscious is structured as a combination of signifiers, not as a repository of meanings or objects.

     The distance between the signifier and the signified makes it possible for us to understand that plausible meanings can always be attributed to a well-formed concatenation.

202. #202

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.50

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious structure revealed by Freud in dreams, symptoms, and witticisms coincides entirely with the laws of signifying combination (metaphor/metonymy) identified by linguistics, and uses the 'famillionaire' witticism and Gide's 'Miglionaire' to demonstrate how signifying neo-formations produce meaning through condensation and displacement, while insisting that the subject of the unconscious cannot be equated with the synthesizing ego.

     We can detect, at the level of the functions of signifiers, an original power as the location for a certain creation of what is called meaning... the psychological effects by which meaning is created are, as he showed us, nothing but formations of the unconscious.

203. #203

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metonymy, through the perpetual sliding of meaning along the signifying chain, constitutes the primordial dimension of human language not as meaning but as value — a claim grounded in readings of Maupassant, Feneon's micro-fictions, and Marx's theory of general equivalence, all of which demonstrate that discourse can only grasp reality by introducing a decentring, disorganizing movement irreducible to reference.

     It is along this dimension that the type of witticism like the 'flight of the eagle' is located, that is, where discourse meets the signifying chain.

204. #204

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor and condensation operate not through injection of meaning but through signifier-to-signifier relations (homonymy, equivocation), and that this same mechanism — whereby the original signifier gets "repressed" once meaning is established — underlies all formations of the unconscious, unifying wit, slips, and forgetting under a single economy of the signifier.

     It's on the basis of the signifier-to-signifier relationship… that the action of creating signification, namely, the nuancing by 'terror' of what already existed by way of meaning on a metaphorical basis, is going to occur.

205. #205

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the joke-word 'famillionaire' to argue that the structural mechanisms of the unconscious (condensation, displacement) are irreducibly linguistic phenomena — specifically special cases of the signifier's two fundamental functions, metaphor (substitution) and metonymy (combination/contiguity) — thereby insisting that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded in a rigorous theory of the signifier.

     there is a signifying function here that is specific to witticisms, involving a signifier that is not included in the code... Something new appears

206. #206

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.360

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the butcher's wife's dream to demonstrate that the phallus functions as a *signifier* of desire—not as an object—and that the subject's dilemma is whether to *have* or *be* this signifier, a distinction that lies at the heart of the castration complex and the hysteric's relation to desire.

     what has been retained in the dream is precisely the element of language, the part that has no signification, 'Das kenne ich nicht', whereas the censor has moved the second sentence over onto the servant.

207. #207

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Graph of Desire to articulate the structural distinction between statement (énoncé) and enunciation (énonciation) in dream-reporting, arguing that the subject's asides, doubts, and stresses are not incidental but are inscribed at the level of enunciation and connect directly to the latent dream-thoughts — thereby giving the formula E(e) as the general structure of the enigma.

     The smallest unit is obviously a sentence... what the subject does or does not assume responsibility for, believes or does not believe, or calls into question is not necessarily the whole of what he tells us.

208. #208

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the Graph of Desire by differentiating desire from need and will through psychoanalytic categories (drive, fantasy), then grounds subjectivity in the signifying chain, demonstrating that the graph's two levels articulate the subject's progressive capture in language and the emergence of the Other as such.

     It is always through the retroactive play of a series of signifiers that signification is, in fact, affirmed and becomes precise.

209. #209

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs the Graph of Desire step by step to show how its two levels articulate the speaking subject's relation to the signifier, demonstrating that continuity and fragmentation on each trajectory encode the retroactive effect of the signifier's synchronic structure on need, demand, and intentionality, thereby distinguishing the repressed, desire, and the unconscious as three non-identical registers.

     what is communicated is not the sign of something else; it is simply the sign of what [or: of the fact that, de ce que], in its place, another signifier is not.

210. #210

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.

     a new signified arose from something that made it such that, for example, Sydney Smith came across in his circle as a witty man

211. #211

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

     Theoretical move: Through the anecdote of a child who replaces the adult signifier "dog" with the onomatopoeia "bowwow" and then inverts animal-sound pairings, Lacan argues that metaphor—understood as the substitution of one signifier for another—is the structural origin of predication and the signified, not a primitive or developmental curiosity but a logical necessity of language itself.

     in order for something to be generated in the realm of the signified, one signifier must be substituted for another.

212. #212

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.457

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By critically rereading Glover's adaptive theory of perversion and Klein's object-relations theory through the lens of the signifier, Lacan argues that the subject's primary structuring occurs at the level of signifying opposition (good/bad objects), not reality-testing; and that the bad internal object marks the precise point where the être/avoir (to be/to have) split institutes the subject's relation to an undemandable object — from which desire, irreducible to demand or need, emerges.

     what is involved here are not a child's actual experiences, with everything such experiences usually bring with them that is transitional, but rather a shift in the function of the object itself to that of a signifying opposition.

213. #213

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.

     the very substitution of one signifier for another signifier comes to lie at the origin of the multiplication of significations that characterize the enriching of the human world

214. #214

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium through the Alcestis/Achilles contrast, Lacan argues that the "signification of love" culminates in the reversal whereby the beloved (eromenon) acts as lover (erastes) — a structural inversion that anticipates his analytic distinction between activity and strength, and between lack and desire, particularly as these play out in the heterosexual couple.

     the signification of love leads to this… crowned by the gods who give Achilles a special place on the Isles of the Blest

215. #215

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 3*: *Wednesday 29 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that identification must be grounded not in folklore or empirical phenomena but in the logic of the signifier, where the unit constitutes itself as pure difference ('the one as such is the Other'), so that identification is structurally distinct from unification and can only be understood through the differential structure of language as analysed via Saussure and elaborated in terms of the big Other.

     the strict analysis of the function of the signifier, in so far as it is through it that I intend to introduce for you the question of signification

216. #216

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that apparent tautologies ("A is A") are never purely tautological because the signifier, following Saussure, is defined only by its difference from all other signifiers — making the self-identity of A structurally impossible; identity is always a relation between registers (real/symbolic, imaginary/symbolic) rather than a logical self-equivalence.

     it is not in so far as the first A and the second A mean different things that I say that there is no tautology, it is in the very status of A that there is inscribed that A cannot be A

217. #217

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > Where is the subject in all of that?

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the proper name cannot be adequately defined by Russell's nominalist reduction to "word for particular" nor by Gardiner's psychological accent on sonant material, and that a rigorous definition requires grounding the proper name in the subject's relationship to the letter — thereby linking proper-name function to the unary trait and the unconscious structured by the letter.

     the accent in its usage is put, not on the meaning, but on the sound qua distinctive.

218. #218

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > What results from this?

     Theoretical move: The proper name serves as privileged evidence that the signifier is essentially tied to writing rather than sound, and this tie reveals the structural function of the subject as the condition for the emergence of the signifier itself — a move that refuses both Russellian logicism and naive phonocentrism.

     we should respect it above all others, and this by reason precisely of the affinity of the proper name with the brand, with the direct designation of the signifier as object

219. #219

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the formula "A is A" is not a logical truth but a historically contingent belief whose apparent self-evidence conceals the real condition of subject-formation: the subject emerges only from the non-self-identity of the signifier, demonstrated through the Fort-Da game and the distinction between sign and signifier, between indexical and nominal uses of language.

     "A is A" signifies nothing. It is precisely this nothing (rien) that is going to be in question, because this nothing has a positive value because it says what that signifies.

220. #220

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > Is it as true as all that?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues, via the prehistory of writing, that the signifier precedes and is independent of phonetic function: writing as a "battery of distinctive traits" existed before it was phoneticised, and it is only through being named/vocalised that writing learns to function as writing—inverting the common assumption that writing represents speech, and grounding the primacy of the unary trait as the minimal unit of signification.

     what you have here are signifiers… it is clear that a collection of moveable characters of this kind is something which in any case has a signifying function.

221. #221

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     You are convinced that religion will triumph?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that religion will triumph over psychoanalysis and science precisely because it is structurally equipped to produce meaning for the distress generated by the Real that science continually expands; religion's resilience lies in its inexhaustible capacity to suture the gap between the Real and human experience with meaning.

     Somebody is going to have to give meaning to all the distressing things science is going to introduce. And they know quite a bit about meaning. They can give meaning to absolutely anything whatsoever.

222. #222

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     What do you mean by "the true religion "?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Christianity's inexhaustible capacity to generate meaning will ultimately absorb and neutralize psychoanalysis by drowning the analytic symptom in religious signification, while the analyst persists only as a symptom of the Real that religion works to repress.

     if it will be able to secrete meaning to such an extent that we will truly drown in it... It will find correspondences between everything and everything else. That's its very function.

223. #223

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     Will psychoanalysis become a religion?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is a symptom of civilization's discontents—arising correlatively with scientific discourse—and warns that rather than holding to the real of the symptom, culture will generate an excess of meaning that feeds both established religion and new pseudo-religions, threatening to absorb psychoanalysis into the religious.

     people are going to secrete as much meaning as anyone could possibly wish for, and that will nourish not only the true religion but a pile of false ones too.

224. #224

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF THE FACULTY OF JUDGEMENT OR, ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure categories of the understanding can only be applied to phenomena through transcendental schemata—temporal determinations produced by the imagination that mediate between the heterogeneous domains of pure concepts and sensuous intuition, simultaneously realizing and restricting the categories to possible experience.

     the categories, without schemata are merely functions of the understanding for the production of conceptions, but do not represent any object. This significance they derive from sensibility, which at the same time realizes the understanding and restricts it.

225. #225

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > APPENDIX.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the idea of systematic unity functions solely as a regulative principle for the employment of reason in nature; converting it into a constitutive principle by hypostatizing a Supreme Intelligence commits a "perverted reason" (usteron proteron rationis), generating circular arguments and illusions rather than extending genuine cognition.

     all the categories which aid me in forming a conception of an object cannot be employed except in the world of sense, and are without meaning when not applied to objects of actual or possible experience. Out of this sphere, they are not properly conceptions, but the mere marks or indices of conceptions

226. #226

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION I—Of Ideas in General.

     Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes Platonic Ideas (pure rational conceptions transcending possible experience) from lower representational forms, arguing that Ideas are indispensable regulative archetypes for ethics, legislation, and nature—and insisting on terminological precision to preserve the concept's theoretical integrity against empiricist reduction.

     we ought not to employ the expression improvidently, or, for the sake of variety and elegance of style, use it as a synonym for other cognate words. It is our duty, on the contrary, carefully to preserve its peculiar signification

227. #227

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the "Amphiboly of Conceptions of Reflection" — the error of treating purely logical comparisons as determinations of things in themselves — exposes the nullity of Leibniz's intellectual system, and establishes that the noumenon can only be a negative/problematical concept: phenomena are the sole domain of objective cognition, because thought without sensuous intuition has no relation to any object.

     our functions of thought would have no use or signification in respect thereof

228. #228

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION III. System of Transcendental Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes a systematic deduction of the three classes of transcendental ideas (soul, world, God) from the three forms of syllogism and the unconditioned unity they each demand, arguing that these ideas—unlike the categories—have no objective deduction and serve only the regulative function of ascending toward the unconditioned in the series of conditions.

     we have dispelled the ambiguity which attached to the transcendental conceptions of reason, from their being commonly mixed up with other conceptions in the systems of philosophers, and not properly distinguished from the conceptions of the understanding

229. #229

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.28

     A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as the material support of speech, functions as a "vanishing mediator" that disappears into meaning, and that the structural-linguistic gesture of phonology is precisely the annihilation of the voice as substance—yet this operation always produces an irreducible remainder that cannot be subsumed into the signifier, establishing the voice as the non-signifying leftover of signification.

     Phonemes lack substance, they are completely reducible to form, and they lack any signification of their own. They are just senseless quasi-algebraic elements in a formal matrix of combinations.

230. #230

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.65

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause: Lac:an and Aristotle

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the opacity of the signifier — which bars language from transparently reflecting reality or intention — necessarily generates doubt, desire, and a subject constituted ex nihilo rather than as the fulfillment of a social/historical demand; the Lacanian formula 'desire is the desire of the Other' means not mimetic identification with the Other's image but a causation by the Other's indeterminate, unsatisfied lack, with objet petit a as the historically specific but content-less cause of the subject.

     Signification gives rise inevitably to doubt, to the possibility of its own negation; it enables us to think the annihilation, the full scale destruction of our entire signified reality.

231. #231

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.67

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Achilles and the Tortoise

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacanian theory inverts the Derridean logic of deconstruction: rather than totality being an illusion masking infinite difference, it is the closed totality (the limit) that is the very condition of possibility for infinite difference and the production of meaning—the subject is finite, and it is this finitude that causes the infinity of desire.

     Saussure temporarily limited the differential play of signification to the moment of understanding, when the open-ended diachrony of the system was bracketed and a synchronic closure was supposed to be operative.

232. #232

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.144

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "barred room" in Gothic fiction functions as an extimate object—an element that constructs the set (the house) by negating it rather than condensing it—and uses this to distinguish two registers of absence: signified absence (structured within a differential network, yielding sense) versus uncanny presence (pure existence without sense), defining anxiety as the affect aroused by existence stripped of signification.

     Her absence, in other words, is registered as a matter of sense, of signification—not of being as such.

233. #233

     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 produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification. It is only there where discursive practices falter... that sex comes to be.

234. #234

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.82

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Colonies and Colonnades

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Clérambault's obsessive passion for fabric was not idiosyncratic but was conditioned by a historically specific revolution in the concept of "type"—one that, beginning in the early nineteenth century, replaced sensuous/symbolic description of objects (buildings, costumes) with functional/structural classification, a logic that equally subtended both colonial aesthetics and architectural modernism.

     He studied their curve and their sense; he made them speak.

235. #235

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > The secret

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-philosophical pivot: rather than choosing between Wittgenstein's injunction to silence and the evangelical imperative to speak of God, Rollins synthesizes them via the Christian mystical tradition into an "a/theological" stance where the unspeakable is precisely what compels speech, framing this as a rediscovery rather than an innovation.

     they balked at the presumption of those who would seek to colonize the name 'God' with concepts

236. #236

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Dis-courses*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an a/theological "dis-course" — language that perpetually sends us off-course from God — is the only honest mode of religious speech, because revelation structurally contains concealment within it, requiring a fractured, deconstructive discourse that maintains a constitutive gap between human understanding and the divine.

     If we imagine that our words are like arrows, then we can say that those arrows always fall short of the heavenly realm to which we aim them.

237. #237

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *A/theism*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances an "a/theistic" theological position arguing that authentic Christian faith requires the simultaneous affirmation and negation of every concept of God — a structural movement of naming and de-naming that mirrors the Lacanian logic of lack, where no signifier can adequately capture the Real of the divine.

     the terms 'theist' and 'atheist' can be understood as regional concepts that relate only to a specific understanding of God

238. #238

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.140

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation—the elevation of mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing—is structurally grounded in the constitutive lack introduced by the signifier: it is precisely because the Thing resists symbolization that the subject becomes an inexhaustible creature of signification and creative capacity, with lack and the possibility of filling it arising simultaneously.

     the vase is 'in its signifying essence a signifier of nothing other than of signifying as such, or in other words, of no particular signified.'

239. #239

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.95

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegem­onic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.

     the act (usually temporarily) ushers us beyond signification—to a place that demolishes the quilting points that customarily hold together our symbolic universe.

240. #240

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.142

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human subjectivity is constituted by the structural inaccessibility of Das Ding, whose fundamental veiling compels sublimation as an ongoing substitutive encirclement; drawing on Kristeva, it further theorises that symbolic subjectivity is a defence against melancholia, and that depression marks the failure of sublimation—a collapse back into proximity with the Thing and a consequent loss of signifying capacity.

     it is to the extent that we are able to transcend melancholia by taking an interest in signification that we discover 'the royal way through which humanity transcends the grief of being apart'.

241. #241

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.128

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Lacan's Reading of Joyce*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sinthome is not a site of pure destruction but of creative renewal: by identifying with his sinthome, Joyce links the symbolic and the real so as to generate innovative signification, making artistic creativity—rather than subjective destitution—a viable response to the death drive's impossibility.

     Joyce is able to invent rebellious forms of language—forms of language that alter the normal rules of signifi cation—not only because he manages to galvanize the real, but also because he identifi es with his sinthome.

242. #242

     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.

     sex is produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification. It is only there where discursive practices falter—and not at all where they succeed in producing meaning—that sex comes to be.

243. #243

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.54

     **Cutting Up** > **Cause: Lacan and Aristotle**

     Theoretical move: Against both Bergson's vitalist temporality and historicist constructions of the subject as language's determinate effect, Copjec argues—via Lacan—that the opacity of the signifier generates an irreducible surplus (objet petit a) that causes the subject ex nihilo: the subject is not the fulfillment of a social demand but the product of language's constitutive duplicity, which produces desire as a striving for an indeterminate, extradiscursive nothing.

     Signification gives rise inevitably to doubt, to the possibility of its own negation; it enables us to think the annihilation, the full-scale destruction of our entire signified reality.

244. #244

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.134

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec uses the spatial logic of the Gothic forbidden room—simultaneously surplus and deficit, inside and outside—to define anxiety as an affect aroused by pure existence without sense: where signification fails to assign position in a differential network, bare "thereness" persists as the uncanny.

     Her absence, in other words, is registered as a matter of sense, of signification—not of being as such.

245. #245

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.207

     **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.

     Butler's position in Gender Trouble fits into the second category of response to the antinomic rule of language; it notes merely that signification is always in process and then concludes from this that there is no stability of sex.

246. #246

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.57

     **Cutting Up** > **Achilles and the Tortoise**

     Theoretical move: Against Derridean deconstruction's commitment to infinite deferral, Copjec argues—via Lacan and Zeno's paradox—that it is precisely a closed totality (a limit) that makes infinite difference possible; the psychoanalytic subject is finite, and it is this finitude that causes the infinity of desire, not the other way around.

     Saussure temporarily limited the differential play of signification to the moment of understanding, when the open-ended diachrony of the system was bracketed and a synchronic closure was supposed to be operative.

247. #247

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.292

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 4. The Master Signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian master signifier (phallus) is grounded in the paradoxical intersection of the imaginary and symbolic constituted by the objet a, and that "phallocentrism" does not underwrite masculine superiority but rather reveals that masculinity is structurally defined by lack and anxiety, such that penis envy is most acutely suffered by those who possess a penis.

     the essential tendency of signification is to enable desire to escape from the captures of the imaginary.

248. #248

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.127

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles

     Theoretical move: Boothby articulates a general theory of metaphor and metonymy by mapping Lacan's structural distinction onto an original framework of "positionality" vs. "dispositional field," arguing that metaphor operates through positional substitution that releases latent dispositional meaning, while metonymy operates through lateral slippage across the dispositional field — and that this dynamic is more fundamental than the image/sign dichotomy itself.

     'the use of language is only susceptible to meaning once it's possible to say His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful, that is to say, once the meaning has ripped the signifier from its lexical connections'

249. #249

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.223

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p216" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 216. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Speaking of the Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that access to *das Ding* is constituted through linguistic competence—specifically "positional articulation"—and that this is the deepest form of Nachträglichkeit: language retroactively restructures human perception itself. Hegel's dialectic of the implicit/explicit (an sich/für sich) and his account of the arbitrary linguistic sign are marshalled to show how naming liberates the Thing from perceptual intuition, anticipating Saussure and preparing the ground for a structuralist resolution.

     It is arbitrary relation between the sound image of the linguistic sign and the thing that it signifies... 'the arbitrary nature of the connection between the sensuous material and a general idea.'

250. #250

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p86" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 86. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>From Image to Sign

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates at the unstable juncture between the Imaginary and the Symbolic: its gestalt must appear perceptually yet immediately self-evacuate, and repression itself can be theorized as a transposition from symbolic to imaginary register—the signifier's body becoming an opaque image rather than a transparent vehicle of meaning.

     linguistic signification is characterized by a special kind of continuously shifting presence and absence... a constant oscillation of appearance and disappearance, a continuous formation and breakdown of perceptual gestalten.

251. #251

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.90

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p86" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 86. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>From Image to Sign

     Theoretical move: By mapping Freud's distinction between focal and diffuse cathexis onto Lacan's Imaginary/Symbolic opposition, Boothby argues that every act of symbolic signification necessarily passes through an imaginary moment—a perceptual gestalt registration—revealing that the Imaginary is not external to but constitutively embedded within the Symbolic.

     every entrance into the system, every specific act of signification, requires some perceptual registration.

252. #252

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's concept of das Ding through Jakobson's linguistics, the passage argues that the phoneme—as a signifier that signifies nothing—provides the structural condition for an open, indeterminate horizon of meaning, thereby grounding the relation between language and the Thing at the level of pure differential structure rather than binary semantic necessity.

     a signifier that signifies nothing, a signifier whose only function is to establish the possibility of signification

253. #253

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.29

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > The Class of 1890: James, Bergson, and Nietzsche > James

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys William James's concept of the "psychical fringe" as a pre-Lacanian theorisation of the contextual, relational, and temporal dimensions of consciousness, arguing that this dispositional, horizon-like structure of thought anticipates a field-theoretical account of language, meaning, and the stream of consciousness that resonates with Lacanian concerns about signification and the sliding of meaning.

     In all cases where the words are understood, the total idea may be and usually is present not only before and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each separate word is uttered.

254. #254

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.238

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson > 3. The phoneme constitutes a unique intersection of positionality and dispositionality.

     Theoretical move: The phoneme is theorized as a paradoxical "positional-dispositional metastasis": its positional registration as a perceptual object is entirely conditioned by the dispositional field of differential meaning it simultaneously constitutes, making it the most elementary cell of the dialectic between positionality and dispositionality that structures language and experience.

     the phoneme functions solely as a marker of difference, its signifying role is limited to indicating its contrast from other phonemes from which it is distinct.

255. #255

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.234

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson > 2. The dynamics of opposition that operate variously on the vocal-physiological level of differential features and on the semantic level of morphemes are stabilized in relation to one another by the fact that the phonemes constitute an ordered system.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phoneme's bundling of differential features generates a "pure readiness-for-meaning" — an indeterminate semantic pressure that is the structural condition of linguistic signification and, crucially, the relation to the Freudian Thing (Das Ding); this readiness-for-meaning is rooted in the felt necessity of binary opposition at the phonological level, passed up into the system of language and freed from any particular coupling.

     the essential condition of all linguistic signification, that is, the generation of an open and indeterminate readiness-for-meaning.

256. #256

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.189

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that sacrifice, read through a Lacanian lens, is not primarily a gift economy (do ut des) but the structural founding act that constitutes the signifier, the lost object, and desire itself (do ut desidero) — making sacrifice the ritual recapitulation of the Oedipus complex's constitutive separation.

     Rising from the ashes of the sacrificial fire… is a phantom double of the slaughtered creature, a kind of virtualization of the sacrificial object… the space of signification itself, the movement of discourse will be continually renewed.

257. #257

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.290

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 3. The Body of Phantasy

     Theoretical move: The objet a is theorized as a "vanishing mediator" that is irreducibly equivocal—simultaneously a locus of pure lack and a virtual impress of imaginary embodiment—and this apparent contradiction is resolved not by choosing one pole but by understanding primal repression as the very mechanism that keeps the object straddling the imaginary and symbolic. The phoneme is identified as the prime structural analogue (and indeed instance) of the objet a, since it similarly conjoins material/bodily positionality with pure differential function.

     It is by virtue of this perfect emptiness that the objet a is able to assume its role as a final cause of signification.

258. #258

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's *objet a* emerges from the intersection of image and word opened by linguistic retroaction (*Nachträglichkeit*), functioning as the remainder of *das Ding* after symbolization—a locus of indeterminacy linked to bodily structures yet beyond all signifying, thereby generalizing Freud's theory of deferred action into a constitutive feature of subjectivity itself.

     the phoneme that makes possible the miracle of linguistic symbolization... the phoneme functions to link a system of oppositions modeled on a logic of embodiment with a domain of meaning that transcends all reference to the body.

259. #259

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.229

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson > 1. Like the Freudian Thing, the phoneme organizes a level of structure that transcends the form of the body-schema.

     Theoretical move: By mapping Jakobson's phoneme as a Hegelian Aufhebung between body-relative differential features and the open semantic field, Boothby argues that the phoneme is structurally homologous to Freud's Das Ding: both mark the threshold where cognition launches beyond the body-schema into an unassimilable remainder, making the phoneme "the gateway to the Thing."

     Examples like these suggest the way in which linguistic signification retains deep structural correspondences with the axes of the body-schema.

260. #260

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.156

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Beyond believe, behave, belong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for inverting the standard Christian order of belief→behavior→belonging into belonging→behavior→belief, grounding this reversal in a radically subjective, unlocalizable 'miracle' of transformation; it draws on a Hebraic model of communal ritual and interpretive wrestling to contend that authoritative, objectified belief actually undermines truth, and recruits Pascal's Wager to show that entering communal practice is the proper site for the miracle of faith rather than doctrinal assent.

     any interpretation of a verse that is given to us by God is not a true interpretation of the verse and must be rejected as such. For the problem resides not in having an interpretation but rather in the place that we give to our interpretation.

261. #261

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.138

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The call comes first

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity has the structure of a "religion without religion," in which the transformative event (the Word of God) takes precedence over propositional belief or the metaphysical question of God's existence — and that the divine call is constitutively inseparable from its heeding, meaning it is heard only in its transformative effect.

     the Word of God is not something that communicates propositional concepts... nothing is said in the saying

262. #262

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter008.html_page_45"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love operates as a structural excess beyond the law — not as an ethical system that calculates duty but as a force that always already surpasses what the law can command — and pairs this with a parable in which aesthetic appearance (beauty) functions as a concealment that neutralises the symbolic content of a prophetic message.

     Her message was a difficult one... But the prophet's cries of condemnation, while celebrated as poetry, were not heard.

263. #263

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.12

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-ethical pivot: by collapsing the distinction between Christ and his corporate body (the Church), it makes the community of believers the site where Christ is either manifested or distorted; then, through a parable, it argues that embodied acts of love and solidarity *are* the translation of the Word—that is, that ethical praxis precedes and exceeds textual transmission as a mode of signification.

     people learn of Christ through those who claim to live out the way of Christ

264. #264

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > DIS-COURSES\

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine religious truth cannot be communicated through detached logical discourse but only through the performative 'dis-course' of the parable, which transforms the subject at the level of action rather than mere cognition—a structure homologous to Lacanian fetishistic disavowal, where the gap between knowing and doing reveals a split between intellectual assent and embodied transformation.

     The message is thus hidden in the very words that express it, only to be found by the one who is wholly changed by it.

265. #265

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a parable and a prefatory commentary to argue that the letter/text (scripture, spectacle, words) can become an obstacle to the living Word or message it is meant to convey, and that authentic engagement requires inhabiting the message rather than merely possessing or reciting it. The parable of "The Payoff" enacts this by staging a reversal in which apparent self-betrayal (confession of hypocrisy) turns out to be a form of fidelity.

     the message that is more important than the spectacle, the story that gave birth to the performance

266. #266

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.209

     Ancient Figures of Speech > The World Persuaded

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in Heidegger's 1925 lectures, an unthematized conceptual distinction between *besprechen* (talking-things-over, genuine Rede) and *bereden* (talking-over-things, inauthentic Gerede) maps onto the difference between authentic communication and sophistic public persuasion — a distinction Heidegger never formally coined but whose logic is legible in his text as "the world persuaded."

     The hearing of discourse is now no longer participation [Teilnahme] in the being of being-with-one-another involved in the matter being talked over [beredeten], for the matter itself now is no longer uncovered in an original way.

267. #267

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.86

     Fuzzy Math > **P**⊋**{{***n*+**1},{Ø}}**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a mathematical re-reading of Kierkegaard's "all and nothing" definition of the public, arguing that the public's structure is best captured as the proper superset P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}: an expansive subset of somebodies-turned-nobodies plus an empty subset whose "nothing" is not additive but subtractive, anticipating Badiou's set-theoretic ontology and showing that the public's apparent excess over its own totality is a formation-into-one-of-zero rather than a genuine whole.

     To þiudijana˛ was not just to interpret others. It meant to connect, engage, associate, and join with them… þiudijana˛ was at once the operation and the result of coming together as a group, a collective, a community.

268. #268

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.214

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Babbling** *Bathos*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Heidegger's communicative spectrum from authentic Rede through Gerede to Geschwätz, arguing that the fall into babbling pseudo-communication produces not mere incomprehensibility but a "sham clarity" (bathos/Trivialität) that dissolves authentic selfhood into the anonymous they-self (das Man-selbst), where standing-apart-from-others (Abständigkeit) paradoxically intensifies dependence on the very others from whom one is estranged.

     Unlike communication, which allows interlocutors to pass through what is said in their discourse (das Gesagte) in order to arrive at that about which their discourse speaks (das Worüber)

269. #269

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.50

     Barbers and Philosophers > **Wagging Tongues** > **Windbags, Windsucks, and Hegelian Gert Westphalers**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel's "absolute method" as a form of sophistic windbagging: rather than delivering on its promised philosophical rigour, the method distracts through erudite historical spectacle, and its transmission via "Hegelian Gert Westphalers" perpetuates deception across generations, turning philosophy into idle talk (*Snakketøi*).

     there is a phrase that, simply uttered, pierces the soul with awesome solemnity… it passes, as the poet says, from Munde zu Munde [mouth to mouth], but in every mouth it is equally weighty in substance.

270. #270

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.286

     A Play of Props > **From** *Tuché* **to** *Automaton*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's Irma dream stages a movement from tuché (the traumatic-real encounter) through a fort-da guessing game (metonymic escape via empty speech and symbolic abstraction) to automaton (the insistent return of signs governed by the pleasure principle), such that the symbolic structure of trimethylamine's chemical formula completes the repressive desublimation of the traumatic real — revealing the dream's "secret reality" as the quest for signification as such, not the recovery of traumatic truth.

     Behind Freud's search for trimethylamine and its chemical formula in a pseudo-scientific guessing game is 'the quest for signification as such'

271. #271

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.77

     Fuzzy Math > **Dialectical Fraud** > **Primitive Accumulation**

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Kierkegaard's *Two Ages*, the passage argues that the "dialectical fraud" of modernity operates through a false social arithmetic—a sorites paradox—whereby mere quantitative accumulation (of opinions, chatter, money, signatures) is ideologically mistaken for qualitative transformation, producing individual weakness, decisive incapacity, and the dissolution of meaningful subjectivity into endless talk.

     the meaning of modern life becomes completely undecidable and, for this reason, wholly subject to the era's endless talk

272. #272

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.171

     Ancient Figures of Speech

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's 1924 Marburg lectures on Aristotle ground everyday language use ontologically in *logos* as the constitutive mode of Dasein's being-with-others, such that communication is inherently interpretive and therefore structurally open to misinterpretation — a move that sets up *Gerede* as an ontological phenomenon rather than a mere social failing.

     to communicate something to someone is always, to some extent, to interpret it for them… logos not only reveals 'the mastery of interpretedness' in the being-there of humankind, but also indicates 'the possibility of error'

273. #273

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.119

     Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity** > **Christian Wagers**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of "preacher-prattle" (Præstesnak) is reconstructed as a logical argument against the paralogistic substitution of probabilistic reasoning (sandsynlighed) for eternal truth (sandhed): the numerical rhetoric of Christendom — counting converts, clerics, and centuries — enacts a sorites fallacy that dissolves the central paradox of Christianity into a hypothesis open to empirical corroboration, thereby undermining rather than defending faith.

     preacher-prattle about the overt, visible, and thus presumably salient features of religious life insinuates itself into the quiet, inward, and intensely personal pursuit of Christian truth

274. #274

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.224

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Fearless Flight**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Heidegger's communicative-existential continuum between average everydayness and authentic existence, then pivots to show how *alltägliche Rede* and the mood of anxiety open circuitous, non-linear routes to authentic existence by disclosing the world's groundlessness rather than by deliberate philosophical traversal.

     The utter insignificance [völlige Unbedeutsamkeit] which makes itself known in the 'nothing and nowhere,' does not signify that the world is absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world are of so little importance in themselves that on the basis of this insignificance of what is within-the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that still obtrudes itself.

275. #275

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.207

     Ancient Figures of Speech > The World Persuaded

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's analysis of everyday discourse (Rede) establishes a communicative trajectory from rhetorical persuasion through dialectical speaking-through (Durchsprechen) to authentic philosophical speech, and that the structural non-coincidence between "the said" and "the about-which" explains how Rede degenerates into idle talk (Gerede) and sophistic deception when the about-which slips away while the said remains in circulation.

     The discourse is of course uprooted [*entwurzelt*] in the absence of right understanding, but it still retains an understandability.

276. #276

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.196

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Modes of Concealment**

     Theoretical move: Heidegger constructs a hierarchy of spoken discourse in which *Gerede* (idle talk) operates as a double mode of concealment — first displacing natural consciousness and then solidifying common opinion into uncritically repeated truisms — thereby posing the question of whether the human being's incapacity for original appropriation is ontological or merely circumstantial.

     In this peculiar confusion, all propositions are repeated [nachgesprochen] and thereby understood. The propositions acquire a special existence; we take direction from them, they become correct, so-called truths, without the original function of the aletheuein being carried out.

277. #277

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.305

     A Play of Props > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The conclusion argues that where Tarde instrumentalized everyday talk as a means to collective opinion-formation, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan instead revealed its individuating potential: chatter, idle talk, and empty speech function as techniques of self-cultivation through which subjects lose and refind themselves in mass society, a capacity now amplified by networked individualism.

     whose questionable significance has become, like the grandfather clock, 'abstractly normal.'

278. #278

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.228

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Fearless Flight** > **"It Was Really Nothing"**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's *alltägliche Rede* ("everyday discourse") occupies a theoretical space irreducible to idle talk (*Gerede*): in the anxious utterance "it was really nothing," the speaker inadvertently gives authentic expression to the nothingness of being-towards-death, so that everyday discourse simultaneously covers over and discloses the anxiety it attempts to flee — a deterritorialized mode of speech that bridges average everydayness and authentic existence.

     what it was, indeed, does get reached ontically by such a way of talking

279. #279

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.334

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Towards a <span id="scholium_35_towards_a_quantum_platonism.xhtml_IDX-1843"></span>Quantum Platonism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for a "Quantum Platonism" in which the Idea (eidos) is not an abstract universal but the virtual field of variations that subtends reality—itself always a partial, collapsed version of an impossible whole—and that this structure, visible in Kieslowski's eidetic film variations, Freud's reconstructed fantasy, Benjamin's translation theory, and Picasso's cubist distortion, is homologous to the Lacanian futur antérieur of the Unconscious and to Hegel's Understanding as the power of separation.

     the translation must rather, lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the way of signifying [Art des Meinens] of the original, to make both recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language

280. #280

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.127

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

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts the Hegelian move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, arguing that the subject's constitutive failure to symbolize itself, the Other's opacity to itself, and sexuality's irreducible excess all converge on the same structure: reality is non-all, and the obstacle to knowledge IS the thing-in-itself. The enigma OF the other must become the enigma IN the other, grounding universality not in shared content but in shared failure.

     there is signification precisely because there is an excessive, non-signifiable, erotic fascination and attachment: the condition of possibility of signification is its condition of impossibility.

281. #281

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.277

     **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 uses Rovelli's quantum gravity framework—where spacetime is not a fundamental container but emerges from quantum fields, and time is an effect of statistical ignorance—to argue that a truly 'complete description' of reality must incorporate higher-level orders (meaning, language, form) as positive conditions rather than mere illusions, invoking Hegel's notion of totality against a reductionist ontology.

     Think just about language: in order to get the meaning of spoken words, we have to ignore their microscopic reality (of sound vibrations, etc.).

282. #282

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **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 passage argues that the name-as-quilting-point and objet a are structurally intertwined but distinct: the Master-Signifier sutures signifier and signified by "falling into" the signified, while objet a is what gives the Master-Signifier its auratic surplus, emerging not as what castration eliminates but as the positive form of the lack castration opens up — a rebuttal to any nominalist/Ockhamist reduction of this fictive-yet-necessary supplement.

     What united a multitude of features-properties into a single object is ultimately its name. This is why every name is ultimately tautological: a 'rose' designates an object with a series of properties, but what holds all these properties together… is ultimately the name itself.

283. #283

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.131

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > *6. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with* Me and Identificatio n with the Object

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and theoretical elaborations for a chapter on *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me*, with substantive theoretical content concentrated in notes 4, 6, 13, 17, and 25 on identity, fantasy, the phallus as signifier, and castration.

     they actually acquire their signification through their interaction with other signifiers—through a system of difference. The fantasy of the signified allows us to treat concepts and things as independent of the entire system that constitutes them.

284. #284

     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.

     the film suggests the unimportance of the signifiers themselves relative to what they cannot capture—the absence of the impossible object.

285. #285

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.79

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer** > Incest as the Fantasmatic Solution

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Fire Walk with Me's apparent formal incoherence resolves once its two parts are read as contrasting worlds of desire and fantasy: the fantasy world exposes the structural (not supernatural) conditions of social violence, identifies fantasy-as-such with incest as the fantasmatic mode of accessing the prohibited object, and demonstrates how the signifier 'garmonbozia' models fantasy's function of filling the gap in the signified — all organized around the figure of BOB as embodiment of the phallus that 'can play its role only when veiled.'

     he occupies a position outside the system of signification and its rules.

286. #286

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.112

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Diane's Wish Fulfillment

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's structural function is to cover over the constitutive dissatisfaction of desire by reorganizing obstacles, repositioning objects, and delivering the objet petit a in a "pure form" free of pathological taint — a theoretical move McGowan demonstrates through a systematic reading of the two parts of *Mulholland Drive* as desire-world versus fantasy-world.

     The objet petit a is the remainder that the process of signification leaves behind, and as such, it always escapes the province of the signifier (and the name).

287. #287

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.78

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer** > The Hostility of Deer Meadow

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the first part of *Fire Walk with Me* constructs a "world of desire" structured around the absent object-cause (Teresa Banks), where subjects experience alienation in the signifier without the relief of fantasy, and where enjoyment takes the paradoxical form of senseless signification for its own sake—only resolvable when the film shifts to the fantasmatic world of Twin Peaks.

     The senseless enjoyment of signification itself extends beyond Gordon Cole to other characters in the first part of the film.

288. #288

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.60

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Fantasmatic Fathers

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternal figures (both ideal and nightmarish) function as fantasy constructions that domesticate the traumatic, unsignifiable desire of the feminine object, and that the homosocial bond between Jeffrey and Frank is structured as a retreat from this trauma—Frank's symbolic authority providing psychic relief precisely because Dorothy's desire for nothing threatens to dissolve fantasy structure altogether.

     He names this desire and thus works to eliminate its resistance to signification.

289. #289

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.40

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **The Unconscious Assembles**

     Theoretical move: The unconscious operates as a formal, non-semantic ciphering system: it is structured not by meaning but by letter-assemblages functioning like set-theoretical inscriptions, so that psychoanalytic interpretation aims not at unveiling meaning but at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning in order to locate the determinants of the subject's behavior.

     Lacan proposes that unconscious processes have little if anything whatsoever to do with meaning. We can, it seems, completely ignore the whole issue of meaning, that is, the whole of what Lacan calls the signified or signification

290. #290

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.89

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-87-0"></span>**Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity**

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that the three constitutive moments of subjectivity (alienation, separation, traversal of fantasy) are structurally identical to three substitutional metaphors, and that the subject itself has two faces—as precipitate (sedimented signification) and as breach/precipitation (the creative spark between signifiers)—such that metaphorization and subjectification are strictly co-extensive, with analysis requiring the forging of new metaphors to reconfigure the symptom.

     One of my principal theses in this book is that the psychoanalytic subject essentially has two faces: the subject as precipitate and the subject as breach.

291. #291

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.232

     29 > **1. Fantasy and Showing Too Much**

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage is non-substantive in itself, but note 9 makes a theoretically load-bearing move: it recruits Hegel's critique of Kant to argue that the 'beyond' of understanding is always already internal to understanding, and note 3 articulates how ideology perpetuates itself by obscuring its points of emptiness.

     Obtuse meaning, a new practice—rare and asserted against a prevailing one, that of the signification—inevitably appears as a luxury, an expenditure without exchange.

292. #292

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.247

     29 > **19. The Ordinary Cinema of Ron Howard**

     Theoretical move: Through a set of endnotes comparing Howard, Welles, Marx, and *Fight Club* vs. *A Beautiful Mind*, the passage argues that the ideological work of "ordinary cinema" lies in its conversion of impossible antagonisms into resolvable problems, and that the materialization of the impossible object can either complete or block signification depending on how it is deployed.

     it has the effect of providing meaning within the filmic world and completing the signifying structure that the film establishes. After the impossible is accomplished, the filmic world makes sense.

293. #293

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.16

     **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Emergence of Lacanian Film Theory**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that early Lacanian film theory erred not by over-relying on psychoanalytic concepts but by deviating from them—specifically by reducing the Lacanian gaze to an imaginary function of spectatorial mastery derived from the mirror stage, while neglecting the symbolic and real orders; the proper response is a return to Lacan's own concepts, especially the Real gaze, as the basis for a genuine renewal of psychoanalytic film theory.

     The Lacanian real is the indication of the incompleteness of the symbolic order. It is the point at which signification breaks down, a gap in the social structure.

294. #294

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that truth-as-perspective (in Nietzsche) and analytic discourse (in Lacan) share a structurally homologous status: both are constituted not by a new stable position but by the irreducible gap or decentering produced in the *shift* between perspectives/discourses, figured as a "Two" of pure disjunction rather than either the One or the multiple.

     The signified finds its center wherever you take it. And, unless things change radically, it is not analytic discourse which is so difficult to sustain in its decentering.

295. #295

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.81

     **Surplus-***jouissance*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary chunk that defines and illustrates multiple Lacanian and related theoretical concepts — Surplus-jouissance, Surplus Repression, Structuralism, Symbolic Castration, Symbolic Identity, Symbolic Order, and Symptom — each entry doing distinct theoretical work: homologizing Marx's surplus-labour with Lacan's surplus-jouissance via the entropic Real; distinguishing the Symbolic from the Imaginary and Real orders; and articulating the symptom's double function as both repressive and gratificatory.

     its relative position within the overall system of signification and through its difference from all the other signs in that system.

296. #296

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.41

     **Interpellation**

     Theoretical move: This passage works through a cluster of interrelated concepts—Interpellation, Lack, Lamella, Law of the Father, and Les Non-Dupes Errent—to argue that subjectivity is constituted by a structural loss (lack) that is simultaneously the condition for desire, jouissance, and signification, and that any attempt to eliminate this lack (as in utopian projects) is self-defeating because satisfaction is always mediated through loss.

     To exist within signification is to accept loss as constitutive, a situation that psychoanalysis calls lack. Signification retroactively creates a lost object that was lost with the entrance into signification.

297. #297

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.63

     **Pleasure Principle**

     Theoretical move: This passage works as a keyword glossary, deploying several core Freudian and Lacanian concepts—Pleasure Principle, Preconscious, Psychoanalysis, Psychosis, and Point de capiton—each illustrated by a canonical quotation, with the quilting-point entry making the strongest theoretical move: the retroactive logic of narrative closure masks the radical contingency of any signifying chain.

     the experience of a linear 'organic' flow of events is an illusion (albeit a necessary one) that masks the fact that it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole.

298. #298

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.89

     **Transference** > **Unconscious**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.

     We can, it seems, completely ignore the whole issue of meaning, that is, the whole of what Lacan calls the signified or signification, in discussing the unconscious.

299. #299

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.37

     **Fantasy** > **Identity**

     Theoretical move: The passage develops a cluster of arguments around Identity, Ideology, and Identification: Identity is always externally determined and thus structurally unfree (Kant/McGowan); Ideology is not false consciousness but the social reality that conceals its own antagonistic kernel (Žižek/Lacan); and excess within narrative is internal to signification rather than external to it, making ideological subversion possible only from within the structure it exceeds.

     the obtuse meaning is not a barrier to signification but the signification of a barrier. Even as the excess resists signification, it does so within a world of signification

300. #300

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **ACTING LIKE WE KNOW**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the fundamental political split between Left and Right maps onto an epistemological split between universality-first and particularity-first approaches to knowledge, reading Plato as a proto-leftist because he identifies universality with constitutive absence and Aristotle as a proto-conservative because he instantiates the universal in the particular, thereby eliminating its political radicality.

     There is a fundamental bond that provides the basis for commitment to the collective deriving from the very structure of signification itself. Signification is a universalizing structure that does not rely on exclusions.

301. #301

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.70

     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.

     from what radiant center the signifier reflects its light into the darkness of incomplete significations

302. #302

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that neoliberal 'market Stalinism' is not a deviation from capitalism but its essential logic: the proliferation of bureaucratic audit culture and PR-production instantiates a structural compulsion to substitute representations of performance for actual achievement, and this system is held together by the Lacanian big Other as the collective fiction that must be maintained in its constitutive ignorance for social reality to function.

     work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself.