Singularity

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (284)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.141

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Don Juan's serial seduction is not about variety but about repetition compulsion aimed at extracting Woman-as-such beyond her symbolic roles — a structural impossibility (since 'Woman doesn't exist') whose failure produces the myth's composite shape and reveals that patriarchal society is itself a reaction-formation to the non-existence of Woman, not its cause.

   the fact that the Principle itself appears as Don Juan, as a concrete individual; that the universal takes the form of the singular.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.232

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Sygne de Coufontaine's 'monstrous' ethical choice—doing one's duty at the price of one's humanity and faith—exemplifies a distinctly modern ethical dimension that begins precisely where conventional duty ends, and that Kantian moral law in its purest form (wanting nothing from the subject) coincides with desire in its pure state, opening a 'hole beyond faith' that is constitutive of modern ethics rather than a deviation from it.

   'What, then, obliges me to make it [this sacrifice]?' Once again Badilon responds, 'Oh, Christian soul; oh, thou Child of God! Thou alone, and thine own free will can'st make it!'

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.240

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Enjoyment - my neighbour

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian commandment to 'love thy neighbour' founders on the problem of jouissance, which Freud evades: the neighbour is structurally the enemy because enjoyment is always 'the Same' (real register) rather than the similar (imaginary) or identity (symbolic), and Sygne's sacrifice dramatizes the crossing from the service of goods into the abyss of desire-as-enjoyment, illustrating Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis through literary and political analysis.

   not only as particular destiny [this is the case of Antigone], as life, but as the very path to which the Word engages us

4. #04

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.98

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Some motifs in Marxist film analysis**

   Theoretical move: Marxist film analysis requires a dialectical articulation of economic/industrial context with formal analysis, insisting that mediation—not context alone—is the indispensable category, because it is in filmic form itself that social contradictions are materialized and ideology exposed from within.

   Analysis of any particular film must tie back to this essential appraisal of filmic potential.

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream's "navel" (its irreducible, unrepresentable core) is homologous to the Lacanian Real, and that aesthetic/creative production (sublimation) is the closest a subject can come to encountering this impossible kernel—while terror, theorized via Lyotard, names the affective-political structure of that encounter with the Real in both psychic and cultural life.

   Contact with that material is necessarily terrifying and simultaneously freeing since it allows the dreamer to see that the acute material of her psyche… is in fact a unique and singular re-creation of this material

6. #06

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.20

   THE R E PR E SSI V E EC ON OMIC APPAR AT US

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century leftist critique of capitalism — from Freudian Marxists (Gross, Reich) through the Frankfurt School to Foucault — is structurally homologous: all versions replace or supplement the Marxist critique of inequality with a critique of repression/constraint, and even Foucault's ostensible break from the repressive hypothesis reproduces its emancipatory logic under different vocabulary, thus failing to constitute a genuinely new epoch of critique.

   An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

7. #07

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.290

   . E XC H AN GIN G LOV E FOR ROM AN C E

   Theoretical move: Romantic love functions as the sine qua non of capitalist ideology because it provides the idealized template through which all commodity evaluation is learned; the chapter's endnotes collectively argue that authentic love (Lacanian or otherwise) is structurally traumatic and resists complementarity, whereas capitalism systematically replaces love with romance—a commodified, montage-compressed, ideologically safe substitute.

   I began to find a distinctive mark on my romantic partner's face repulsive, whereas before I had always viewed it as a sign of her singularity.

8. #08

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.118

   Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transition from Greek polytheism to Abrahamic monotheism marks an intensification of the encounter with das Ding: where pagan myth distributed and mitigated the abyssal real across a plurality of anthropomorphic gods, Yahweh concentrates it into a singular, directly addressing Subject who properly inaugurates the Lacanian big Other.

   Yahweh appears to Abraham in traumatizing singularity. From now on, Yahweh tells Abraham, there will be only one God for you.

9. #09

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.123

   Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > . . . and Offer Him There as a Sacrifice

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that monotheism's (specifically Judaism's) structural break with paganism lies not merely in the rejection of quid-pro-quo sacrifice but in the concentration of the unknown onto a *single* Other — thereby making religious experience the first explicit encounter with the enigmatic desire of the big Other, with das Ding as its constitutive ground.

   The absolutely key point remains, however, that the moment of unknowing in the Jewish relation to God is focused on a single Other.

10. #10

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.179

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

    Theoretical move: The passage extends Boothby's Lacanian framework for the sacred to non-Western religions, arguing that Hinduism's moksha, Buddhism's sunyata, and Nishitani's Zen phenomenology all instantiate the same fundamental structure: an encounter with the unknowable neighbor-Thing, achieved through the sublimation or dissolution of the ego, confirming religion as the master symptom organized around the irreducible opacity of das Ding.

    each instance of being is ultimately singular and unique... 'it is only on a field where the being of all things is a being at one with emptiness that it is possible for all things to gather into one, even while each retains its reality as an absolutely unique being.'

11. #11

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.224

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

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2 of "Rethinking Religion") containing citations to Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Homer, and others; it is not substantively argumentative but does contain a few brief theoretical asides linking das Ding, objet a, and the shofar, and connecting monotheism to trauma and the signifying chain.

    it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma

12. #12

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.133

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that anxiety in the face of the Other's enjoyment is not merely an ethical posture but the very mechanism through which subjects access their own enjoyment, since enjoyment is structurally unavailable directly and must be fantasized through the enjoying Other—making the disturbing fantasy-encounter with the real Other ethically superior to both liberal tolerance (which neutralizes otherness) and fascist persecution (which disavows enjoyment while depending on it).

    the subject acknowledges the singularity of the real other — its mode of enjoying — without confining this singularity to a prescribed identity.

13. #13

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.171

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

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

    What results instead is a series of singularities without a clear rule defining them... women are radically singular, not examples of a class or members of a closed set, but each one an exception.

14. #14

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.325

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 5. Changing the World

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (notes 1–36 for chapter "Changing the World") providing bibliographic references and parenthetical theoretical glosses on ideology, normality, fantasy, jouissance, obsession, hysteria, and the political stakes of psychoanalysis; it is substantive insofar as it deploys several load-bearing concepts in the glosses, but its primary function is citational scaffolding.

    The capacity to lie and to lie in a singular fashion is the sole basis for the subject's singularity. Any humanist insistence on a fundamental dignity accorded to every person represents an attempt to evade recognizing the source of uniqueness in deceit.

15. #15

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.327

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

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

    it is those who insist on beginning with individuality (or particularity) who never arrive at authentic singularity, which only emerges once one thinks the universal.

16. #16

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.114

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

    Theoretical move: Recognition's ethical value is undermined by its constitutive failure: it reduces the subject to a symbolic identity and never reaches the real other (the neighbor); genuine ethics and encounter with the other are grounded not in the sacrifice of enjoyment but in enjoyment itself, since it is the other's singular, untranslatable enjoyment that first constitutes the real other as such.

    recognition can never apprehend the subject in its singularity. Recognition reduces the subject to a symbolic identity… and thus completely misses the subject's uniqueness, what in the subject is irreducible to determinate symbolic coordinates

17. #17

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    this is not a single universal truth, but an absolutely particular truth, unique to each subject

18. #18

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

    <span id="Chapter18.htm_page172"></span>Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

    Theoretical move: Fisher and Foxx develop a theory of hauntology-adjacent aesthetics through the figure of derelict, overgrown urban space and found-object/collage art-making, arguing that low-fidelity, amateur, and accidental forms of cultural production (Ed Wood, super-8, sampling) can prefigure or surpass avant-garde concepts, while also tracing an affective register of eerie calm and 'radiance' that cuts against media acceleration.

    I'm also very interested in the concept of a singularity. An event that only happens once, or once every thousand or million years.

19. #19

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.26

    **II** > *Idem,*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's analytic experience was uniquely inaugural rather than methodological, and uses this to challenge Ego Psychology's domestication of Freud's later theory of the ego—positioning a return to the truth of the subject (via discourse/resistance/unconscious) against the objectifying tendencies of both standard science and post-Freudian technique.

    analysis as a science is always a science of the particular. The coming to fruition of an analysis is always a unique case... with Freud the analytic experience represents uniqueness carried to its limit

20. #20

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **I**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the founding Freudian experience is not the affective reliving of the past but the *reconstruction* (rewriting) of the subject's history through speech, and that subsequent analytic theory went astray by privileging the ego as the sole analytic interlocutor—a move Lacan exposes as contradictory since the ego is itself structured like a symptom.

    Freud's progress, the discoveries he made, lies in the way he considers the singularity of a case.

21. #21

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.237

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Cartesian search for certainty within the dialectic of alienation and separation, arguing that Descartes' method is not a universal epistemology but a singular, desire-driven path—distinguishing it from ancient episteme and scepticism—and that this singularity will serve to articulate the structure of transference.

    He makes it quite clear that what he has given is not...the general means of conducting one's reason correctly...It is his own method...This example, then, is a particular one

22. #22

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Cartesian search for certainty from ancient episteme and scepticism by grounding it in the double function of alienation and separation, arguing that Descartes' method is driven by a *desire* to distinguish true from false in order to act—making it a singular, practical path rather than a universal epistemology, and thereby anticipating the subject's constitution through desire rather than knowledge alone.

    Descartes goes so far as to add that if what was for me, at a particular moment, my way, does not seem right for others, that is their affair

23. #23

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position as "subject supposed to know" is structurally paradoxical—Freudian discovery itself forecloses the possibility of a complete knowledge-subject—and grounds the subject's existence not in a harmonious closure of signifiers but precisely in the *lack* of a signifier, which is further illustrated by contrasting the God-like Newtonian subject of absolute knowledge (who "is nothing" because he lacks nothing) with the subject that only emerges where knowledge is incomplete.

    a certain availability to be provided in the order of the signifier... the signifier as singular

24. #24

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how the fundamental fantasy is anchored in a small set of phonemes (pe, je, li) that simultaneously encode the subject's proper name, the phallus/penis opposition, bisexuality, and the death drive — showing that the subject's singularity and phallic identity are constituted at the intersection of letter, desire, castration, and the irreducible rock of the death drive.

    the rock of the irreducible singularity of the subject

25. #25

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

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

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

    this absolute singularity of the subject as lack, is the reflection of the expression of what cannot be matched from the dual opposition of one sex to the other sex.

26. #26

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage enacts a dual theoretical move: first, Lacan anchors the o-object (objet petit a) as the hidden regulator of intersubjective mirage and the cause of desire in ethics; second, via Conrad Stein's intervention, it deploys condensation and displacement—the primary process as Freud articulates it in the Traumdeutung—to analyse the fantasy-formation "Poord'jeli," raising the problem of whether images can be "translated" into language or stand in a fundamentally different relation to it.

    this chain plays a privileged role qua key to the singularity of the personality, as I might put it, of Philip

27. #27

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.84

    **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream has no universal key except the singular signifying chain peculiar to the subject, and that this chain—privileged over dream-thoughts proper—marks the transition from need to desire, a shift Freud himself maps in chapter seven of the Traumdeutung via condensation and displacement.

    the chain which goes from Lili to corne, represents a privileged chain which gives us a sort of key to the rebus... the only key would be linked to the singularity of the person who had composed this collection of rebuses

28. #28

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position is defined by a "logic of desire" grounded in singularity, lack, and the signifier's structure (representing a subject for another signifier), and that the Subject Supposed to Know is not a classificatory knower of universals but one who guides the analysand to the moment of emergence where an unknown signifier retroactively constitutes the subject — demonstrated clinically through Dora's symptoms.

    something in a third place that was irreducible to their functioning, namely, as the singular

29. #29

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle—contrasted with the ordinary torus and the Euler circle—to demonstrate that the two halves of a predicative proposition (subject-term and predicate-term, e.g. "Socrates" / "is mortal") are topologically non-homogeneous, thereby grounding a structural critique of the classical syllogism and showing that the function of the proper name (nomination) cannot be treated as equivalent to membership in a universal class.

    this Socrates who is at once a soi-disant and an autre disant… is not something that can be treated in a homogeneous fashion with anything whatsoever that may be included under the rubric of all men.

30. #30

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178

    **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.

    It is much more important than the classificatory aspect which opposes the generic nature of the family name to the singularity of the first name. A first name in no way constitutes a singularity.

31. #31

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

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

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

    this imaginary, this absolute singularity of the subject as lack, is the reflection of the expression of what cannot be matched from the dual opposition of one sex to the other sex.

32. #32

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

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

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

    the essential singularity which is indeed the one that would be required of the analyst if he had, irreducibly, fundamentally, to reply to this phantastical domination

33. #33

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    **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.

    George Philip, Jacques, are in a way, the sound image of the subject. They take into account the singularity of the subject, at least within the group Eliany or Lacan but they take it into account above all at the imaginary level

34. #34

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how the fundamental fantasy is encoded in phonemic material — three phonemes (pe, je, li) — that simultaneously condenses the subject's proper name, bisexuality, the death drive, castration, and phallic identity; the analyst's interpretive work moves from the wound/lack at the foot (castration) toward a phallic identification, tracing the irreducible singularity of the desiring subject in its phonemic substrate.

    the rock of the irreducible singularity of the subject

35. #35

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.84

    **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream has no universal key but only a singular signifying chain privileged by the subject's particularity, and that Freud's own Traumdeutung enacts a shift from need to desire — from biological satisfaction to the condensation/displacement logic of the signifier — as the structural condition of sleep and dreaming.

    the singularity which is that of the person of Philip... the only key would be linked to the singularity of the person who had composed this collection of rebuses

36. #36

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Subject Supposed to Know functions as a structural necessity for analytic engagement, yet the very foundations of psychoanalysis—grounded in the lack of a signifier—preclude any closed, totalizing knowledge; the subject is constituted not as the support of a harmonious signifying system but precisely through the gap where a signifier is missing, and this is illustrated through the contrast between Newtonian "absolute knowledge" (where the subject vanishes into God) and the Freudian discovery that grounds subjectivity in lack.

    It is necessary to have this element of oddity, of exception, of paradox, of appearance and disappearance founded as such, which would show us clearly that something is alternating

37. #37

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's position is defined by a logic of desire structured around lack and the singular (not the universal), and that the formula "the signifier represents a subject for another signifier" grounds the analyst's function as Subject Supposed to Know—demonstrated concretely through the symptom-as-signifier in Freud's case of Dora.

    as the singular. Those here who have a sufficient formation to understand this reminder that I am giving of the attempt to homogenise the singular to the universal

38. #38

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the topology of the Klein bottle to demonstrate that identification is structurally non-homogeneous: the circuit of demand, when traced on a Klein bottle rather than a torus, is necessarily reflected and reversed, showing that the two halves of any predicative proposition ("all men" / "are mortal"; "Socrates" / "is mortal") occupy non-equivalent fields — thereby grounding a structural critique of classical syllogistic logic and revealing the irreducible function of the proper name and the speaking subject.

    this Socrates who is at once a soi-disant and an autre disant… others are covered by the name of Socrates, this is not something that can be treated in a homogeneous fashion with anything whatsoever that may be included under the rubric of all men

39. #39

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan frames the closed seminar as a site where psychoanalytic teaching must become the principle of an action rather than mere intellectual sustenance, using the o-object (objet petit a) as cause of desire to ground a new ethics of subjective action; meanwhile Stein's commentary on Leclaire's Poord'jeli analysis deploys Freudian condensation/displacement to probe the relationship between unconscious fantasy, the signifier, and the dream-as-rebus.

    this chain plays a privileged role qua key to the singularity of the personality, as I might put it, of Philip

40. #40

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 14 December 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the question "what links the Écrits?" to argue that the thread running through his work is the critique of the formula "Me, I am me" — the illusion of self-identical ego — and then pivots to introduce the Klein group as a structural (rather than identificatory) framework for approaching the subject, showing that structure, not intuitive ego-identity, is the proper ground for psychoanalytic questions.

    An idiotism is something that is confused too quickly with singularity, it is something natural, simple, and in a word, very often linked to the situation.

41. #41

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 14 December 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "Me, I am me" formula as the unifying thread of the Écrits—from the Mirror Stage to the Subversion of the Subject—to argue that naive ego-identity (moi = moi) is the obstacle to psychoanalytic inquiry, and then pivots to the Klein group as a formal structure that can approach questions of identity and negation from outside the field of intuitive identification.

    An idiotism is something that is confused too quickly with singularity, it is something natural, simple, and in a word, very often linked to the situation.

42. #42

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.114

    Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 April 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the history of mathematics—from the Pythagorean irrationals through Cantor's set theory—to argue that the One cannot be grounded on sameness but only on pure difference and lack: the empty set is the constitutive "door" through which the One first emerges, and this structural priority of lack over identity is what Lacan designates as the matheme.

    the mainspring of set theory stems entirely from the fact that the One of the set, is distinct from the One of the element

43. #43

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.88

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

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

    It was noticed that there were things that existed in the sense that they constituted the limit of what could hold up from the advance of the articulation of discourse.

44. #44

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

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

    what I articulate for you as a relation here of unique existence with respect to the status of the universal; takes on the figure of an exception.

45. #45

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: Recanati uses Cantorian set-theoretic ordinals to formalise the logic of repetition: each ordinal both records and reproduces the gap (hole) it cannot close, so that the limit insists as an absolute, unreachable frontier — a structure Recanati explicitly maps onto the psychoanalytic dynamics of desire, interpretation, and the entrance into analysis.

    There is no all that cannot be eroded, be exploded into the rank of elementary singularity in something that is presented as a larger set, namely, the set of its parts.

46. #46

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.250

    (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a topological demonstration that the One (ring of string enclosing nothing but a hole) grounds both the structure of desire—where the objet petit a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy—and the logic of mathematical language, where removing a single element disperses all the rest simultaneously.

    starting from rings, we are dealing with something that can only be distinguished by being the One... it encloses nothing but a hole.

47. #47

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan develops a logic of substance and predicate in which substance is structurally defined as what is lacking, so that predication is itself the covering-over of lack; this relay-structure—where each predicate provisionally takes the place of substance only to be displaced by the next—is identified as the operation of Being qua discourse, and language is consequently positioned as what represents Being for the word, leaving the gap of impossibility permanently open.

    the zero that appears, because what makes One, precisely in the inscription of zero, is absent because of the fact that what inscribes the One, namely, of the content, of the designated of the One, namely, the zero... by (37) substantification there will be borne the singularity of a difference.

48. #48

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.49

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of Port-Royal's distinction between comprehension (collection of predicates) and extension (set of objects falling under a predicate) to argue that substance is simultaneously what constitutes a set and what is lacking to it — a move that grounds his concept of the subject as that which is lacking in the signifying set, and ties the logical structure of predication to his broader theory of the Real as what escapes discourse yet constitutes it.

    if the abstract predicates of the first subject manages to make a One all the same, it is thanks to the singularity of what emerges in terms of a new substance, of what takes up the relay, namely, the extension of predicate.

49. #49

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.12

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXII by arguing that the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary only acquire a "common measure" — i.e., can be said to be genuinely three — through the Borromean knot, which provides the minimal topological structure (requiring three as its minimum) that holds them together; this displaces Freud's spatial-geometrical (sack) topology in favour of a knot-based topology, and identifies the Imaginary as grounded in the body, the Symbolic in equivocation/writing, and the Real as strictly unthinkable.

    I must obviously cheer myself up by telling myself that this phenomenon is not unique, it is only particular. I mean that it is distinguished from the universal.

50. #50

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

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

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

    Aristotle, who does not want the singular to play a role in his logic... it must be said that Socrates is not a man, because he accepts to die in order that the city may live

51. #51

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.115

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the joke's mechanism reveals the Other as a dual structure: both a real, living subject (whose needs give meaning direction) and a purely symbolic locus — an anonymous, abstract "treasure trove" of signifiers — and that it is precisely this function of the Other, as the empty Grail or form, that the joke invokes and must awaken, thereby showing that the unconscious is the plane on which the joke's surprise arrives.

    What one is addressing when one attacks a subject at the level of the equivocations of signifiers has, as it were, a singularly immortal characteristic.

52. #52

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    **XIV** > **XIX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Goethe's reading of Antigone against Hegel's to argue that the play's conflict is not a clash of symmetrical legal principles but an asymmetry between Creon's desire-driven transgression (wanting to inflict a "second death" beyond his rights) and something else represented by Antigone—a passion yet to be named—while the scandalous justification speech is rehabilitated as the key to defining Antigone's aim.

    I would not have defied the law of the city for a husband or a child… But it concerned my brother ἀδελφός, born of the same father and the same mother… there is no possibility of another brother ever being born.

53. #53

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.287

    **XIV** > **XXI** > **Antigone between two deaths**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Antigone's position is not grounded in divine law or ethical content but in the pure ontological affirmation that language freezes being into an ineffaceable singularity—her brother *is* what he is, independent of any predicates—and that this linguistic 'being' constitutes the radical limit (*Atè*) she embodies, distinguishing her from Creon's mere *hamartia*.

    My brother is what he is, and it's because he is what he is and only he can be what he is, that I move forward toward the fatal limit.

54. #54

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    **II**

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the foundational thesis of Seminar VII: the moral law, structured by the Symbolic, is the agency through which the Real is actualized; and psychoanalytic ethics must be distinguished from all prior ethics (exemplified by Aristotle) by seeking a particular, hidden truth in the subject rather than conformity to a universal order or Sovereign Good.

    This truth that we are seeking in a concrete experience is not that of a superior law. If the truth that we are seeking is a truth that frees, it is a truth that we will look for in a hiding place in our subject. It is a particular truth.

55. #55

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.312

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's trilogy to show how desire is articulated through the figure of the Other incarnated in a woman, and how the void opened by betrayal and parricide generates a jouissance-inflected death-drive structure in which desire, death, and eternity collapse into a single instant — demonstrating that desire is constituted by lack and the impossibility of any lasting object.

    You are [like] no one, and no one is like you. You [stand] alone! And no matter how long you may live, the time will never come when you could have done otherwise than as you did!

56. #56

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the privileged function of the phallus in identification is grounded in the signifier's logic of non-identity (Russell's paradox), and proposes a decisive reversal: in place of Kantian Einheit (synthetic unity as norm), psychoanalytic logic requires Einzigkeit (unary trait as exception/singularity), thereby replacing transcendental logic with a logic of the signifier.

    the reversal of the position around the One means that from the Kantian Einheit, we consider that we pass to Einzigkeit to unicity expressed as such

57. #57

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.51

    II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

    the far more complex sequences, whose richness and singularity alike seem to be strangely eclipsed in a certain orthopedic utilization of analysis

58. #58

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.121

    <span id="page-106-0"></span>A Tragic Fairy Tale of Evolution: Zupancič , ̌ Zapffe, and Other Monsters > Hopeless Monstrosity of Evolution

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that evolution is constitutively monstrous and entropic rather than adaptive and progressive, using Goldschmidt's hopeful monster hypothesis and Gould's punctuated equilibrium to ground a "tragic tale of evolution" in which variation/disruption is primary and selection/ordering is merely a secondary effect — a move that extends Zupančič's and Zapffe's pessimist insights into a post-Darwinian ontology of universal maladaptation.

    The difference between species is a difference not so much in whether they are adapted or maladapted… they are all doomed but each in their own way.

59. #59

    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 systematic unity of nature required by reason rests on three transcendental principles—homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms—which are not empirical hypotheses but regulative ideas of reason that make experience and understanding possible, yet find no fully adequate object in experience itself.

    the logical horizon consists of smaller horizons (subspecies), but not of points (individuals), which possess no extent.

60. #60

    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 Ideas of pure reason (psychological, cosmological, theological) function solely as regulative principles—schemas for systematic unity of experience—and not as constitutive principles that extend cognition to real objects; to mistake them for the latter is the dialectical error of pure reason turning back on itself.

    we ought not to deduce the phenomena, order, and unity of the universe from a supreme intelligence, but merely draw from this idea of a supremely wise cause the rules which must guide reason in its connection of causes and effects.

61. #61

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes the essential difference between philosophical (discursive, via concepts) and mathematical (constructive, via a priori intuition) cognition to argue that transcendental philosophy cannot employ mathematical method: transcendental propositions are synthetic a priori but must proceed through pure concepts alone, without any corresponding a priori intuition, and can only yield rules for the synthesis of empirical intuitions.

    as an intuition, is an individual object; while, as the construction of a conception (a general representation), it must be seen to be universally valid for all the possible intuitions which rank under that conception.

62. #62

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.160

    The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Tefton Totem

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the psychoanalytic subject is objectively indeterminate (not merely vaguely described), and uses the need/demand/desire triad to theorize how democracy itself hystericizes the subject by structuring its relation to an impotent (unvermögender) Other—a relation that sustains demand precisely through the Other's failure to deliver, while American pluralism forecloses the radical difference psychoanalysis defends by clinging to belief in a consistent Other of the Other.

    we require this master to accredit our singularity rather than our commonality... every sign of accreditation cancels the difference to which it is supposed to bear witness.

63. #63

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.199

    Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

    Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.

    The grain is not the index of a particularity with any content, social or otherwise, it is the index of an particular absolute. This means that it marks the voice as belonging to this speaker, uniquely, even though the grain must not be considered 'personal: it expresses nothing' of the speaker.

64. #64

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.171

    The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern democratic subject is constituted not by power's self-guaranteeing omniscience (Foucault) but by a structural lack of knowledge in the Other: because power cannot certify the subject, a surplus of meaning escapes social recognition, and it is precisely this conflict—including the irruption of jouissance—that both constitutes democratic subjectivity and prevents its totalisation.

    it is to the fact that power is disjoined from knowledge, that the force which produces the subject is blind, that the subject owes its precious singularity.

65. #65

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

    The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Actuarial Origins of Detective Fiction

    Theoretical move: By tracing detective fiction's origins to the nineteenth-century "avalanche of numbers" and actuarial statistics, Copjec argues that the genre's narrative contract rests on a mathematical expectation of calculable risk — and then complicates this Foucauldian genealogy by showing how the panoptic-statistical apparatus that "makes up people" simultaneously forecloses the very possibility of transgression it purports to police, thereby exposing a structural paradox at the heart of modern surveillance and the liberal subject.

    How then is crime possible? How is it possible to transgress territories that have no private boundaries, to steal something that belongs to no one?

66. #66

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: This introductory essay argues that Freud's central theoretical contribution is the concept of erotic and political repetition compulsion — the psyche's conservative drive to re-enact infantile fantasies of perfect love and authority — and that love's pathological character is structurally continuous with transference-love, with the superego's temporary usurpation by the beloved marking the mechanism of falling in love.

    Freud insists that neuroses don't individualize us. On the contrary, they rob us of whatever singularity we may possess.

67. #67

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Sins of the Father*

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical service as a site for theorizing the structure of faith as irreducible to comfort or submission, using Žižek's Tamagotchi figure to argue that the God one thinks one understands is a projected idol of one's own creation — thereby situating genuine faith as persisting *despite* (and against) the God one has constructed.

    If this is something that they wish to keep private, they are asked to fold the paper and put an 'X' on the front.

68. #68

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Desire for transformation and transformative\

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious desire is never satisfied by its object (God as hypernonymous/hyperabsent) but is instead *constituted* by that object — making the seeking itself the finding, and transformative desire the very medium of transformation rather than a preliminary stage before it.

    abstract desire for a faceless some-one (who fulfils certain needs) is transformed into a concrete desire for that particular individual (beyond the simple fulfilment of those needs).

69. #69

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The end of apologetics*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that apologetics constitutes a "power discourse" that compels belief through coercive logic or wonder, whereas a genuinely Christlike "powerless discourse" operates as hint rather than command—addressing desire and opening thought rather than foreclosing it—and this distinction maps onto a theological ethics of how language relates to the subject.

    Jesus offers the paradigmatic example of a powerless discourse by saying radically different things to different people, relating in a singular manner to what each individual requires rather than extrapolating upon some universal abstract system.

70. #70

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Background to the service*

    Theoretical move: Rollins argues that the theological weight of the crucifixion is only accessible when it is severed from the immediate comfort of the resurrection—the "closed tomb" as a testing-ground for faith stripped of economic return—thereby reframing the Easter singularity not as a consoling unity but as a site of irreducible decision and gift.

    the Easter story, if it is to be understood at all, is to be understood as an irreducibly complex singularity – to tear one part away from the whole would be to effectively destroy both the parts and the whole.

71. #71

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Being evangelized*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine theological dialogue requires a posture of receptive powerlessness rather than monological self-assertion, reframing Christian mission as a mutual transformation in which the missionary is evangelized by the Other rather than simply transmitting God to the unreached.

    we see this model of treating everyone in a singular way in the life of Jesus

72. #72

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Infinite readings and transfinite readings*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that biblical interpretation is bounded by a "transfinite" rather than infinite range of legitimate readings, and that this hermeneutics must be governed by a "prejudice of love" oriented toward the singular other — a "double hermeneutic" that reads both tradition and the encountered situation, and which may demand the paradoxical abandonment of one's tradition in order to remain faithful to it.

    For this priest, the singularity of the horror required an unprecedented action, one which cut at the heart of his tradition.

73. #73

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

    Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > How to Remain a Rationalist?

    Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freudian psychoanalysis establishes a "materialist rationalism" whose founding gesture—taking parapraxes and other seemingly trivial phenomena seriously—entails a non-exclusive universalism about rational explanation, a new concept of existence that encompasses what "inexists" (the unsaid, the unconscious), and an immaterial materiality ('un-matter') that constitutes the Real underlying psychoanalytic inquiry.

    The question is thus always, Why *this* (*dieses*)? This makes intelligible why already in the very beginning of Freud's introduction of and to psychoanalysis *rationalism and materialism coincide*.

74. #74

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.173

    <span id="unp-ruda-0018.xhtml_p169" class="page"></span><a href="#unp-ruda-0009.xhtml_toc" class="xref">Last Words</a>

    Theoretical move: Ruda argues that the rationalist fatalism derived from Western philosophy (Luther through Freud/Hegel) is necessarily *comic* in structure—"comic fatalism"—because it posits that everything is always already lost, achieving "less than nothing," and that this comic dimension distinguishes it from tragic, existentialist, and nihilist versions of fatalism while constituting the subjective precondition of genuine freedom.

    characters stick to some orientation for contingent reasons—something that thereby becomes their unary trait (say, being a miser)—that, precisely because they stick to it for contingent reasons, demonstrates the contingency of necessity.

75. #75

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.44

    1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *The Call of Character*

    Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes two faces of surplus drive-energy (undeadness): one that locks the subject into hegemonic symbolic investitures (the "vampire") and one that ruptures sociality and summons the subject to its singular jouissance (the "daimon/miracle"), arguing that psychoanalytic practice is precisely the site where the latter can be cultivated by attending to the eccentric, unsaid, and idiosyncratic pulse of the signifier.

    There is thus a fine line between the kind of undeadness that fuels our singularity and the kind that impedes its unfolding—that is, between liberating and symptomatic forms of surplus energy.

76. #76

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.182

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Love Object as Refound*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimatory love—paradigmatically courtly love—elevates the love object to the dignity of the Thing precisely by installing it as an interchangeable narcissistic image rather than a singular being; the objet a functions as the "remainder of the real" that condenses the Thing into a refound lost object, explaining why desire solidifies around a particular object with irresistible but unnameable intensity.

    the more seamlessly the love object is conflated with the Thing, the less of its singularity of being is allowed to shine through.

77. #77

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.38

    1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Intimations of Immortality*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real's eruption within the Symbolic constitutes a secular, worldly form of transcendence — not an escape from the world but a deeper immersion in it — that temporarily dissolves sociosymbolic identity and opens access to the subject's singularity precisely through the threat of disintegration, thereby yielding fleeting jouissance and "intimations of immortality."

    they open a sorely needed space for the singularity of being within an otherwise homogenizing symbolic landscape.

78. #78

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.64

    2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's confrontation with its constitutive lack—rather than being a mere heroic sacrifice—is precisely what enables it to reclaim agency over the signifier from the Other, thereby transforming symbolic mortification into a resource for desire, resistance to trauma, and self-directed meaning-production. Psychoanalysis is distinguished from psychology by its orientation toward the signifier as the site where "destiny" can be rewritten.

    devise personally resonant forms of meaning that allows us, to some extent at least, to compensate for our mortification

79. #79

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.50

    2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as fate-defining precisely because it gives the repetition compulsion its content, sutures the subject's lack, fills the gaps of the big Other, and thereby embeds jouissance within normative ideological structures—dissolving fantasy is therefore recast as a rare existential act of rewriting psychic destiny and reclaiming singularity.

    they inhibit the emergence of our singularity, making it difficult for us to access the less regimented echelons of our being

80. #80

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.36

    1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Stain of Infi nity*

    Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized not as an ideal to be pursued but as an inescapable "stain" that infinitizes the finite from within, making any ethics grounded solely on finitude disingenuous; this parasitism of jouissance connects the lamella-like undeadness of the subject to the infinity associated with Das Ding, the death drive, and the sublime.

    this undeadness is also what, as Santner puts it, makes each of us 'something more than just a piece of the world'

81. #81

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.104

    4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Temptation to Give Up*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event is structurally threatened by the Symbolic order's ideological valorization of utilitarian balance, which pathologizes the very excess and imbalance that genuine subjective commitment requires — making betrayal of the event the socially 'healthy' option.

    because the event's importance is accessible only to those who are caught up in it—because it may seem unintelligible or inconceivable to those who are looking at it from the outside

82. #82

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.135

    5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Singularity as a Social Phenomenon*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity is not an asocial eruption of the real but a social phenomenon produced by creatively linking the sinthome (the inexorable real in the subject) with the signifier, such that the rebellious energies of the real become the very engine of symbolic innovation—and this reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion.

    Understanding the relationship between the symbolic and the real in this way also allows us to envision subjective singularity as a social, rather than a completely asocial, phenomenon.

83. #83

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.239

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *4. The Possibility of the Impossible*

    Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes) works through the parallels and tensions between Lacanian singularity and Badiou's truth-event, arguing that both posit a subject of truth as a fissure in the symbolic order defined by its radical break with social situatedness, while also examining the paradoxical relationship between the subject's agency and the contingency of the event via Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner.

    like Lacanian singularity, Badiou's singularity involves the idea of being radically out of joint with respect to one's social environment.

84. #84

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.210

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

    singularity is not merely what founds ethics, but also what comes into being by a faithful adherence to a universal (yet always specific) ethic of truths.

85. #85

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.21

    *Introduction* > *What Sublimation Can Do*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity should be located not only in acts of symbolic rupture (subjective destitution) but also in the creative reformulation of symbolic systems from within, positioning the interface between the Symbolic and the Real — exemplified by sublimation and Joyce's sinthome — as the proper site of both singularity and resistance.

    singularity is less a nameable quality than an inscrutable intensity of being that urges the subject to persist in its unending task of fashioning or reiterating a self that feels viscerally 'real'

86. #86

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.15

    *Introduction* > *The "Perseverance in Being"*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—understood as the "perseverance in being" that resists conceptual/social capture—must be located at the level of the Lacanian real (drive energies), and that the dominant post-Lacanian reading of singularity as "subjective destitution" (radical break with the symbolic) is theoretically insufficient because it universalises alienation and cannot distinguish constitutive from circumstantial forms of it.

    man's singularity emerges from an immediacy of existence—from 'a perseverance in being'—that cannot be grasped by abstractions. It represents 'a gap in the horizon' of conceptual understanding

87. #87

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.118

    5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard alignment of Lacan with revolutionary politics (Žižek's "inassimilable real") is an oversimplification, and that the later Lacan—better captured by Badiou—reconceptualizes the real as nameable and reweavable into the symbolic, thereby opening space for incremental as well as revolutionary political and ethical action grounded in subjective singularity.

    the heart of how we envision subjective singularity, namely the relationship between the symbolic and the real.

88. #88

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.73

    3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Sinthome as a Site of Singularity*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late shift from symptom to sinthome marks a theoretical transition from the subject of lack (structured by desire and the symbolic order) to a subject of singularity grounded in jouissance—where identification with the sinthome, as an irreducible kernel of real that resists symbolization, becomes the terminal aim of analysis.

    singularity emerges at the very place where meaning is refused—where social identity and intelligibility disintegrate.

89. #89

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.207

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Critique of Multiculturalism*

    Theoretical move: Post-Lacanian ethics, drawing on the Real dimension of the other, mounts a structural critique of multiculturalism: far from respecting genuine difference, multiculturalism tolerates only a domesticated version of the other, thereby serving the logic of global capitalism and repeating a colonial imperative to assimilate.

    multiculturalism falls apart the moment we fail to identify with the other as face

90. #90

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.237

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *3. The Ethics of the Act*

    Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical architecture of the chapter by elaborating the sinthome as the singular limit of analysis beyond interpretation, articulating the act as an annihilating break with fantasy and the future, and positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction to act in conformity with desire rather than serve the 'service of goods'.

    the sinthome is 'an uncoupled One, outside of any sequence; it answers to no integration, no context, no history, no full or anticipated meaning'

91. #91

    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.

    it is only as singular creatures that we can attain 'real' satisfaction—that we can develop an identity that is not entirely subsumed to the rules of social conventionality.

92. #92

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.228

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy* > *The* Ressentiment *of the Powerful*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anti-victim universalism of Badiou and Žižek conceals a ressentiment of the powerful—a reversal of Nietzschean ressentiment by which dominant subjects begrudge the jouissance of suffering attributed to marginalized others—and that their universalism is incomplete because it arbitrarily excludes racial, sexual, and postcolonial subjects while admitting the proletariat.

    my own analysis of subjective singularity takes me in the same direction... the issue, instead, is that their universalism does not even begin to meet the requirements of a genuinely universalist universalism

93. #93

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.189

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Narcissism as an Ethical Failure*

    Theoretical move: Narcissistic desire constitutes an ethical failure precisely because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, which Lacanian ethics requires one to confront as the Real dimension of the other — including its traumatic jouissance — rather than reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness.

    it is caught up in the same tight nexus of turbulence and singularity with which I also struggle

94. #94

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.67

    2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Analyst as Daimon*

    Theoretical move: Analysis functions as an "interpellation beyond ideological interpellation" by repositioning the analyst as the enigmatic cause of desire, replacing fantasmatic fixations with a transferential relation that reorganizes the analysand's existential orientation and opens new possibilities of singularity.

    analysis gradually converts the congealed 'too muchness' of the subject's drive energies . . . into forms of meaning that no longer communicate submission, but rather express something about its singularity of being

95. #95

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.161

    7. *The Ethics of Sublimation*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the act constitute two distinct but complementary ethical orientations within Lacanian ethics—both are modes of fidelity to the Thing—thus correcting the tendency to privilege the act as the sole or supreme form of Lacanian ethical praxis, and reframing "not ceding on one's desire" as a matter of keeping desire alive rather than pursuing destructive jouissance to its limit.

    Lacanian ethics asks us to revere the utter singularity of our relationship to the Thing even when it would be easier to capitulate to the desire of the Other

96. #96

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.209

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > Santner, in turn, glosses Badiou's analysis in this way:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that multiculturalism, far from being emancipatory, functions as an arm of capital by converting identity difference into market segmentation, and proposes—via Badiou—that a universalist ethics grounded in the "Same" rather than the recognition of alterity is the genuine post-Lacanian political alternative.

    "Singularity," instead of summoning the subject beyond its sociosymbolic investments, traps it in an identity category (woman, black, Asian, Arab, gay, etc.) that makes it all the more exploitable.

97. #97

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.167

    7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Banalization of the World*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that both the "passion for the Real" (which strips symbolic formations of value) and poststructuralist nihilism (which denies any transcendent real) are mirror-image failures that produce the same "banalization of the world" under the dictatorship of the reality principle—and that the ethics of sublimation requires holding the sublime within signification rather than beyond it.

    they communicate the kind of absolute dedication that Badiou's event also calls for, thereby feeding our sublimatory efforts to turn the world into a less insipid place

98. #98

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.126

    5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *The Inconsistency of the Signifi er*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's binary opposition between a "dead" symbolic order and a vital real misses the implication of his own insight—that the real's disruption of the symbolic is precisely what makes the signifier creative and polyvalent, so that counterhegemonic resignification can occur from within the symbolic rather than requiring an exit from it.

    this 'undeadness' is what, in a certain sense, underlies the persistence of singularity, ensuring that the subject is always something more than just a piece of the world.

99. #99

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.47

    1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *Carving a Space for Utopian Aspirations*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—rooted in the Real—must be held in productive tension with the Symbolic rather than used to justify a wholesale break from it; genuine transcendence weaves strands of the Real into social existence without fetishizing an "otherworldly beyond," thereby keeping the Symbolic from stagnating while resisting psychic capture.

    it is only as singular creatures that we are fully awake. I have tried to illustrate that the art of living a singular life demands our capacity to interact with the more disconcerting aspects of our being.

100. #100

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.83

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Antigone's Act of Defi ance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical status of a Lacanian act depends not merely on its self-destructiveness or transgressive form but on the subject position of its agent (the disempowered) and its orientation toward the Thing/lack; it uses Antigone to demonstrate that genuine singularity, the refusal to cede on one's desire, is what distinguishes the ethical act from its simulacrum.

     the flipside of her self-destructiveness is a paradoxical kind of freedom—a singularity of being that does not let anyone else dictate the course of her desire.

101. #101

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.114

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Lures of Power*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's two "lures of power"—reifying the void and absolutizing truth—are countered by the structural incompleteness of naming, and that this incompleteness aligns Badiou with Lacan's insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the Real and its symbolization, while also positioning sublimation ethics as a superior framework for both personal and social transformation.

     the more we manage to respond in the affirmative, the easier it is for us to cultivate the singularity of our being.

102. #102

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.254

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Conclusion: The Other as Face*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical apparatus of the chapter's argument about the neighbor/Other, drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Badiou to negotiate the tension between singularity, universality, and the traumatic jouissance of the Other as the ethical crux of love and politics.

     one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities

103. #103

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.150

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *"Deviant" Satisfactions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and symptom formation share a common structural root—both are responses to excess jouissance circling the Thing—but are distinguished by their relationship to the signifier; sublimation mobilizes the signifier to produce singular creativity, while the symptom marks the signifier's failure to contain the drives. Sublimation is thus theorized as the privileged site of singularity's social inscription, capable of revising the repertoire of satisfactions even against normative interpellation.

     sublimation functions as a crucial resource for the augmentation of our character... inserting precious deposits of singularity into the texture of our social existence.

104. #104

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.71

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Possibility for New Possibilities*

     Theoretical move: Lacanian analysis is theorized as a process that dismantles fantasy-generated fixity—the unconscious reproduction of the Other's desire as one's own—and converts symptomatic repetition into a more fluid, singular capacity for desire, where the goal is not happiness but the tolerance of anxiety and the opening of new existential possibilities.

     we lack singularity, passion, and intersubjective grace

105. #105

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.27

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny*

     Theoretical move: The repetition compulsion is theorized as a structural binding mechanism that converts the unmanageable pressure of jouissance into the more stable organization of desire and symptomatic fixation, making it simultaneously a trap and a protective shield that grounds subjective continuity and singularity.

     To fully understand this connection between trauma and singularity, it is useful to start with the repetition compulsion as an articulation of unconscious desire.

106. #106

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.168

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Crisis of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "crisis of sublimation" — the weakening of the sublimatory force to produce distance from the reality principle — collapses the gap between ideology and reality, making the status quo appear natural and inevitable; genuine ethics, by contrast, consists in preserving access to the infinite/the Thing against this foreclosure.

     forbidding any new ideals, values, and systems of representation from entering the world

107. #107

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.80

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Will to Begin Again*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the act holds an irreducible tension: while the act is a suicidal, non-teleological encounter with the death drive that annihilates the subject as social agent, it simultaneously harbours a transformative potential — a "will to begin again" — that can reconstitute subjectivity and even catalyse social change, a dimension often eclipsed in post-Lacanian readings.

     inasmuch as the act arises from the subject's nonnegotiable fidelity to an internal obligation, it entails its own idiosyncratic 'reasonableness': Its 'value' or 'correctness' cannot be determined by reference to an external standard.

108. #108

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

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Introduction*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section providing scholarly references and clarifications; it contains minimal independent theoretical argumentation, though it briefly links Santner's concept of a "non-symbolizable surplus" (via Barthes's punctum) to the singularity of the subject, and flags that the stakes of singularity vary across subject positions.

     I am linking Santner's statement to the singular self because the purpose of his discussion of Barthes is to draw a parallel between the punctum and what is most distinctive about the subject.

109. #109

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.26

     1. *The Singularity of Being*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that trauma and its unconscious repetition—rather than deliberate self-cultivation—constitute the singular ground of subjectivity, thereby reorienting psychoanalysis away from Aristotelian character-formation and Cartesian rational certainty toward a subject defined by what remains involuntarily unknown and repeated.

     nothing distinguishes one subject from another more decisively than the particularity of its approach to suffering. Trauma, as it were, resides at the root of the subject's distinctive and more or less inimitable character—what I have in this book chosen to call 'the singularity of being.'

110. #110

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.54

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *Validity in Excess of Meaning*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other's desire functions through a "validity in excess of meaning" — a surplus that exceeds rational comprehension — which binds subjects to institutions not through explicit juridical demands but through visceral, unconscious citation of authority, generating anxiety that curves the subject's everyday space and drives the desperate Che vuoi? toward an Other that is itself incapable of accounting for its own desire.

     the drives as a locus of singularity (and thus of character) are always proto-social—that singularity both does and does not escape the imprint of the Other.

111. #111

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.149

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity*

     Theoretical move: Repetition is reframed not as a violation of the pleasure principle but as its virulent expression and, more provocatively, as the very vehicle of sublimation and creativity: the drive's constitutive failure to reach its object (the Thing) generates the "radical diversity" that makes creative variation possible, so that repetition and sublimation are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed.

     even when we repeat, we never repeat in precisely the same way; no matter how symptomatic our repetitions, we never live out our pain in exactly the same manner, but continuously invent new ways to sting ourselves.

112. #112

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.270

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index listing key concepts, names, and page references from a book on Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument but maps the conceptual terrain of the work.

     singularity, 1 chaos and, 35 drives and, 2 fantasy inhibiting, 38 immediacy of existance and, 3 the inhuman and, 21 as intensity of being, 9

113. #113

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.76

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Act of Subjective Destitution*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Edelman's queer-theoretical appropriation of the Lacanian act of subjective destitution and sinthome, arguing that his alignment of queer subjectivity with pure negativity and the death drive forecloses transformative political action; against Edelman, the author proposes that the future is not a suturing of lack but the condition for its ongoing, open-ended translation into new signification.

     identifies with its sinthome as a manifestation of singularity that has absolutely no interest in the Other

114. #114

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.122

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *From "Divine" Violence . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's valorization of "divine violence" by arguing that it collapses the necessary tension between transgressing and affirming normative limits, and risks "forcing the encounter with the Real" — a move that forecloses the context-specific political work of symbolization in favor of an absolute ethical act.

     how we choose to move forward should be context specific, that there may be situations where it is much more productive to uphold normative limits than to blow them to pieces

115. #115

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.157

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Professor D's Shoes*

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of sublimation establishes that the Real/Thing is only accessible *through* mundane objects and representations—not despite them—such that jouissance is attained via the semblances of the world rather than by aiming directly at the Thing; this vindicates the continuation of desire over any transcendent or death-driven "beyond," and refutes the nihilism that results from rigidly separating the Thing from worldly things.

     Professor D's shoes, in short, were a site where 'the universality belonging to the shoes of an academic was intimately joined to whatever it was that was absolutely specific to Professor D'

116. #116

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

     the impenetrable otherness of the other demands that I recognize that the other is not necessarily any more transparent to itself than it is to me

117. #117

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.162

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Debt of Desire*

     Theoretical move: The ethics of sublimation is grounded in a "debt of desire" to the signifier that constitutes subjectivity, and its ethical force lies in maintaining an open-ended, mobile orientation toward the lost Thing — resisting the symptomatic congealing of the repetition compulsion into narcissistic fixation — so that the variability of the object is welcomed rather than suppressed.

     our endeavors to redeem it situate us in a singular sublimatory track, singular constellation of desire, through which we strive to reincarnate the lost Thing

118. #118

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.133

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Joyce as a Singular Individual*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is not merely the repressed underside of the signifier but foundational to its innovative capacity, such that the signifier and the real mutually transform each other — a reciprocal dynamic that grounds the subject's active invention of meaning and enables singular individuality (exemplified by Joyce) through the sinthome's integration into the symbolic.

     we can assert our singularity not only by exchanging the symbolic for the real, but also by bringing the real into the symbolic.

119. #119

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.145

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Cézanne's Apples*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation works not by imitating objects but by allowing the dignity of Das Ding to resonate within tangible, even banal objects; the very bar from the Thing that constitutes symbolic existence is what makes manageable, partial jouissance possible through substitute objects.

     if we feel strongly about some objects while others leave us cold—it is because these objects communicate more of the Thing's aura than others.

120. #120

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.198

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Value of Idealization*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love requires holding the beloved's banal and sublime aspects in productive tension simultaneously, and that sublimation in love can be a truth-bearing gesture—one that reveals latent dimensions of the other's being—rather than a mere narcissistic distortion, provided we do not collapse the gap between the beloved and the Thing.

     the more we learn to interpret the code of our desire the better we are able to engage in the kinds of idealizations that expand rather than diminish the beloved's being

121. #121

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.267

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is an index from a book chapter, listing topics, concepts, and proper names with page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical passage—no argument is advanced—but it maps the conceptual terrain of the book, including Lacanian concepts such as jouissance, sinthome, objet a, the real, sublimation, and singularity.

     singularity / irregularity and, 35 / linguistic innovation and, 8 / the real and, 21 / versus personality, 21

122. #122

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.88

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Service of Goods*

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian act constitutes a genuine ethics precisely by rupturing the "service of goods" — the Other's disciplinary demand to subordinate desire to utility and social adaptation — and, when jouissance defeats the signifier, opens the possibility of revolutionary politics beyond mere repetition or incremental reform.

     Badiou and Zupančič here employ the term 'subject'... in much the same way as I have been using the term 'character,' namely as a site of an uncompromising singularity of being. Ethical betrayal, in this context, equals social compliance.

123. #123

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.103

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *Fidelity to the Event*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event requires the subject to sustain a retroactive truth-process through the "unknown," tolerating disorientation and working through it toward "ethical consistency"; this fidelity is theorized as an uncoupling of the drive from its normatively determined destiny, opening genuinely new existential possibilities.

     how can I continue to link what is familiar about my world with the singular event of being engulfed by the unfamiliar?

124. #124

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.130

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Epiphanies That Transmit the Real*

     Theoretical move: Joyce's writing is theorized as a privileged site where the Real irrupts into the Symbolic not to destroy but to radicalize language: by remaining at the level of metonymic residue rather than metaphor, Joyce's epiphanies transmit scraps of the Real and enact an eroticization of language that brushes against the sinthome without collapsing into psychosis.

     Joyce's signifiers are unique precisely to the degree that they breathe to the rhythm of the real.

125. #125

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.172

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Other vs. the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals a productive distinction between two levels of the Other—the tyrannical demands of authority figures versus the symbolic order as a generative structure of meaning-production—and that the very alienation imposed by the signifier is the condition of possibility for creativity, love, and singularity, rather than an irremediable wound to be mourned.

     the process of singularizing our discourse is inherently open ended. This is why our inability to bring our sublimatory impulse to a satisfactory conclusion is not a cause for grief but what lends human life much of its dynamism.

126. #126

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.59

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The (Uneven) Tragedy of Human Life*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian alienation must be stratified into two distinct registers—foundational/existential and contingent/historical—exposing how socially produced inequalities compound the universal trauma of symbolic inscription, so that "destiny" is not uniformly demoralizing but differentially so depending on one's positioning within networks of power.

     the specific parameters of that identity are molded by the unique arrangement of the signifiers we encounter.

127. #127

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.165

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Beyond the Reality Principle*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation constitutes an ethics grounded in fidelity to das Ding rather than the reality principle: by admitting traces of the real into the symbolic, sublimation punctures the seamlessness of social reality and opens a space for the reinvention of values beyond the hegemonic 'common good', a move Badiou's truth-event is shown to parallel.

     The object that comes the closest (or remains the most loyal) to the Thing is, ethically speaking, more important than one that is merely useful

128. #128

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.212

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Third of Justice*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Lacanian ethics (via Žižek) corrects the Levinasian privileging of the face-to-face encounter by resurrecting the impersonal "Third" as the proper seat of justice, establishing a structural incompatibility between love (which singularizes a privileged One) and justice (which must remain blind to the particular face), grounding ethics in universality rather than in the affective pull of the other's face.

     singularizes her to such an extent as to make any easy identification impossible

129. #129

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.14

     *Introduction*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian subjectivity involves a tripartite negotiation of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers, and proposes "singularity" as a concept specifically aligned with the real — a non-symbolizable surplus of being that exceeds all social categories and persists beyond the subject's symbolic and imaginary supports, distinguished from both subjectivity (symbolic) and personality (imaginary).

     singularity with the real... It opens to layers of being that exceed all social categories and classifications.

130. #130

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.175

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Upside of Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety and singularity are structurally linked through the surplus energies of the Real, and that sublimation functions as Lacan's more rigorous answer to Heidegger's existential authenticity: it binds anxiety by welcoming jouissance without being engulfed by it, making anxiety a precondition of creativity rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

     our lapses of composure are merely the obverse of our singularity.

131. #131

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.220

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Victim vs. the Immortal*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the universalist rhetoric of Badiou and Žižek fails on its own terms: by privileging a disembodied "immortal subject" over the material realities of social victimization, it covertly re-instates a hierarchy of humanness that blames the victimized for their condition, thereby enacting the very hegemonic power it purports to oppose.

     it is simply not true that… there 'are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself'

132. #132

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.34

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The "Undeadness" of the Drives*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity is constitutively aligned with the excess jouissance of the drives and the death drive, such that what makes a subject irreplaceable is not a positive personality attribute but a non-relational "undeadness" — a dense core that resists symbolic and imaginary assimilation and links the subject to the deadly yet indestructible pulsation of the drives.

     Lacanian singularity cannot be equated with what we typically refer to as a given individual's 'personality.' If we choose to envision singularity as a function of the real, we must admit that it is more likely to transmit sudden flashes of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy

133. #133

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.245

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

     Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

     the sinthome, which is what is singular about every individual

134. #134

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.138

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *The Language of Resistance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singular language is irreducibly tied to trauma and the real, but that experimental writing (like Joyce's) can harness the destructiveness of the death drive productively—transmuting trauma through a complex intertwining of acting out and working through—thereby granting the subject a measure of agency over inherited cultural signifiers rather than full subjection to the dominant symbolic.

     when singularity erupts within the social, it inevitably contains a spark of this defiance. Experimental writing such as Joyce's—the kind of writing that is animated by the energies of the real—is a linguistic marker of this spark.

135. #135

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.61

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The "Truth" of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Against reductive readings that cast Lacan as a defender of hegemonic law, this passage argues that Lacanian analysis aims not at social adaptation but at releasing the singularity of the subject's desire from beneath the Other's oppressive signifiers—and that refusing to cede on one's desire constitutes both the clinical goal and a form of political resistance.

     its task is to release the singularity of our being from underneath the Other's oppressive signifiers

136. #136

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.120

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Transformative vs. Revolutionary Politics*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's valorization of the suicidal act and the jouissance of the Real as the only escape from a wholly corrupt Symbolic is theoretically incoherent and politically self-defeating, and that a viable politics requires interrogating the interplay of the Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary rather than evacuating the Symbolic altogether.

     self-consistency is, on some level, always a fantasmatic defense against the surge of singularity

137. #137

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.193

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Other as Irreplaceable*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love at its most fundamental attaches not to the symbolic qualities or historical identity of the beloved but to the irreplaceable singularity inaugurated by the encounter with language itself — a dimension that exceeds and resists the structuring of the symbolic order, illustrated through Lacan's reading of Antigone's love for Polyneces.

     the captivating, visceral force of the other's singularity. As Barthes explains, 'I love the other, not according to his (accountable) qualities, but according to his existence.'

138. #138

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.154

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *Symbolic Ideals and Values*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that symbolic quilting points, when chosen critically, serve a constructive function by anchoring desire in collective meaning without arresting its movement—thus enabling sublimation rather than narcissistic closure—and that the ego ideal (symbolic) is theoretically superior to the ideal ego (imaginary) precisely because it opens onto collective structures rather than foreclosing personal limitation.

     concluding that there is nothing worth venerating in our culture would only lead us back to the idea that the only way to assert our singularity is to relinquish all of our symbolic supports

139. #139

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.98

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Subject of Truth*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's truth-event — arising from the void (the Lacanian real) of a situation — transforms an ordinary "some-one" into a singular, universal subject of truth (an "immortal"), and maps this structure onto Lacanian concepts of the act, the real, jouissance, and singularity to theorize how the impossible encounter with the real generates unprecedented subjective and ethical possibilities.

     it enables the 'some-one' to attain the complex status of a 'universal singular,' of a subject who is at once 'singular' (in the sense of being unique and inimitable) and 'universal' (in the sense of being traversed by a truth that is applicable to everyone without exception)

140. #140

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.132

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Enjoyment-in-Meaning*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late concept of the sinthome, via *jouis-sens*, reframes the signifier not as a passive instrument of ideological interpellation but as a vehicle of jouissance-laden, polyvalent meaning-production — thereby challenging readings that treat the real only as a site of subjective destitution and showing that language and jouissance are not mutually exclusive.

     the particular way in which you enjoy meaning: your sinthome

141. #141

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.232

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *1. The Singularity of Being*

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster consolidates the theoretical architecture of the chapter by specifying the structural relations among das Ding, desire, repetition compulsion, jouissance, the death drive, sublimation, the sublime, and the symbolic order—while positioning Badiou, Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner as allied but differentiated interlocutors within a Lacanian frame.

     To the degree that we place the 'truth' of our singularity in awe-inspiring experiences that sidestep everyday triteness, we accept without complaint what is unfair or tyrannical about this triteness.

142. #142

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.219

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Whose Multiculturalism?*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's and Žižek's universalist critiques of identity politics and multiculturalism are themselves enactments of institutionalized marginalization, enabled by a Foucauldian power/knowledge system that suppresses entire fields of inquiry, and that sophisticated multiculturalism—building coalitions across differences—may be the closest approximation to genuine universalism.

     both thinkers fabricate a 'definition' of multiculturalism out of the concept's most corrupted versions without any regard for the fact that most 'multiculturalist' critics are acutely aware of these very corruptions

143. #143

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.262

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 262–263) listing concepts, proper names, and page references; it is non-substantive as continuous theoretical argument but indexes key Lacanian concepts deployed throughout the work.

     chaos, singularity and, 35

144. #144

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.185

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Problems of Narcissistic Desire*

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically diagnoses three structural failures of narcissistic desire—chronic unavailability, extreme idealization, and aggression toward the object—by showing that each follows from the lover's attempt to find in the beloved a replica of das Ding, which no actual object can sustain, thereby condemning desire to repetition, deferral, and ultimately mutilation of the other.

     only a particular woman will do, and this woman is only acceptable as long as she does not divert from the ideal.

145. #145

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.173

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Balancing the Symbolic and the Real*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a productive ethics of sublimation requires maintaining a precarious equilibrium between the Symbolic and the Real: too little Real yields existential blandness and betrays desire's singularity, while too much Real overwhelms the subject with jouissance; sublimation is the privileged mode of negotiating this tension, and its residue persists to reshape collective symbolic reality.

     If the process of fashioning a singular place within the world results in a distinctive subjective 'style,' this style always expresses something about the manner in which the symbolic and real, however tenuously, come together and amalgamate.

146. #146

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.222

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.

     the fact that we cannot ever entirely comprehend the other does not mean that we cannot comprehend something about the other, that we remain completely exiled from the experience or private meaning of the other

147. #147

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.251

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *7. The Ethics of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as an encounter with the Real that exceeds the reality principle, creating space for "impossible" objects; meanwhile, the contemporary sublimatory crisis is diagnosed as the collapse of even the symbolic debt that previously motivated subjects, since the Other now openly acknowledges its own lack of ultimate guarantee (the Other of the Other is absent).

     The narrative authority of the 'I' must give way to the perspective and temporality of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story

148. #148

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.31

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *Desire, Drive, Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and the drive are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed: both aim at das Ding as their shared (non)object, but the drive is closer to the bodily real while desire is twice-removed via the signifier. Crucially, even the drive is already quasi-social, shaped by the signifiers of the Other, so the desire/drive distinction is one of relative proximity to the Thing—not nature versus culture.

     each subject's drive energies are channeled into a latticework of conduits that reflects the coordinates of its cultural setting

149. #149

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.147

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Sublimation and the Pleasure Principle*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as the instrument by which the death drive's push toward the Thing is deflected into desire regulated by the pleasure principle: by inserting the signifier between subject and Thing and redirecting drive toward objet a, sublimation makes satisfaction possible while preserving the subject from the annihilating proximity of jouissance, thereby constituting the structural "destiny" of the subject's psychic life.

     it fixes our fate by providing a difficult-to-alter map that separates desires that seem viable to us from those that do not

150. #150

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.199

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     our attempts to negotiate and renegotiate a singular identity may demand the continuous arbitration of those we love, for if we are never the only makers of our identity, we are also never the sole agents of its capacity for regeneration.

151. #151

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.188

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Overproximity of the Object*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sublime love-object's overproximity to the Thing triggers anxiety and a defensive resort to fantasy: fantasy's function is to tame the Real dimension of the other by rendering it safely familiar, but in doing so it risks obliterating the very singularity that makes the other desirable.

     the subject runs the risk of smothering the very singularity that makes the other interesting in the first place.

152. #152

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.107

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Event vs. the Simulacrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's ethic of fidelity to the truth-event is both a radicalization of Lacanian ethics (transposing "do not cede on your desire" into a persevering devotion to the event) and a point of divergence from Žižek's Lacanian critique, which holds that naming the event inevitably re-sutures its disruptiveness back into the symbolic order, whereas for Badiou naming is the very mechanism by which the impossible becomes possible.

     Staying faithful to the event—and living up to the call of singularity that the event represents—hence takes courage and dedication.

153. #153

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.177

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Lacan with Dr. Phil*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity, though risking conflation with self-help authenticity, is distinguished by existential bewilderment rather than self-possession; and that the opacity of the subject (its being riven by the unconscious/drive/repetition) does not license ethical abdication but instead demands a heightened, self-reflexive accountability toward others that goes beyond Butler's ethics of forgiveness.

     the singular self is what is not a part of any whole, what escapes all social categories and classifications

154. #154

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.96

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Badiou's theory of truth-events onto Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Badiou reconceptualises the Lacanian act and ethics of psychoanalysis by making the social/collective transformation that is only a byproduct in Lacan constitutively necessary to the event itself, thereby shifting the subject's fidelity to rupture from a 'private' experience to a premise of collective change.

     an unexpected occasion for something previously unimaginable to shatter the established order of things

155. #155

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.41

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that transcendent experiences function as a counter-interpellation that breaks the hypnotic hold of sociosymbolic investments, thereby releasing congealed drive energies and opening access to subjective singularity — situating this claim at the intersection of Lacanian Real, Santner's theology-inflected post-Lacanian theory, and Althusserian interpellation.

     a determination to maintain enclaves of singularity that are not fully co-opted by the social order

156. #156

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.215

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *But Still . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Badiou's and Žižek's neo-Marxist universalism by arguing that their attempt to situate universality within event-specific "voids" fails to escape hegemonic power differentials, since the naming of the void itself remains a site of contested authority that systematically excludes feminist, anti-racist, and queer struggles.

     universality is invariably 'situated' in the sense that the ethic of truths arises in response to the always context-specific void of a particular set of circumstances.

157. #157

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.192

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Call and Response of Love*

     Theoretical move: Love is theorized as a privileged form of sublimation in which the love object functions as the sublime object *par excellence*—the site where Das Ding is most forcefully evoked—and the call-and-response structure of love is shown to release singularity beyond ideological interpellation, making love simultaneously a truth-event, a locus of freedom, and the container of jouissance.

     the call of love... stirs the singularity of our being by suspending our usual sociosymbolic investments; it bypasses what is generic about us by targeting the most distinctive (or 'real') corners of our character

158. #158

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.204

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Other as "Evil"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly Lacanian ethics requires risking one's symbolic and imaginary supports to endure the other's singular, potentially "evil" jouissance — a demand that goes beyond inter-subjective empathy or moral prudence, and that finds partial (but insufficient) precedent in Levinas's notion of the face as absolute singularity.

     the face houses some of the subject's 'perseverance of being'—of what in the subject escapes conceptual capture because it eludes all social categories and classifications. This is exactly why it renders the subject 'a being identical to itself.'

159. #159

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.181

     8. *The Sublimity of Love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that romantic love is the paradigmatic site where the lost Thing exerts its greatest force: the beloved object functions as a sublime morsel of the real that promises unmediated jouissance, and the idiosyncratic "language of desire" born from primordial loss can either imprison the subject in narcissistic repetition or open onto genuine love and interpersonal generosity depending on whether the subject holds desire alive or forecloses it.

     He is receptive to the resurfacing in the present and future of what has been—not as an exercise in narcissistic solipsism, but rather as the extension in ever new directions of his capacity to care.

160. #160

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.166

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Actuarial Origins of Detective Fiction**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that detective fiction's narrative contract—its belief in the solvability of crime—is historically grounded in the rise of actuarial statistics and the "avalanche of numbers," which constituted both modern surveillance bureaucracies and new categories of subjectivity; it then critiques both Foucauldian and new-historicist readings by showing that statistical categories do not merely describe but constitutively produce the subjects they enumerate.

     after the avalanche of numbers, there were no longer simply people who attempted suicide and others who did not. Instead there were those who attempted suicide by poison, subdivided by types of poison…

161. #161

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.161

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy is constituted not by power belonging to an anonymous "anyone" (Foucault's self-guaranteeing law) but by a structural lack in the Other—no guarantees, no ultimate markers of certainty—and that this very lack produces the subject's singularity and surplus of meaning, while the enjoyment that emerges from erased certainty is precisely what sustains democratic conflict against totalitarian closure.

     the subject owes its precious singularity. For, if there is a lack of knowledge in the Other, then there is necessarily a surplus of meaning in the subject

162. #162

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.72

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Colonies and Colonnades**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Clérambault's obsession with drapery was not idiosyncratic but historically conditioned by a structural revolution in the concept of "type" (from sensuous/symbolic characterization to functional/constructive definition) that linked colonial ethnography, Beaux-Arts architecture, and functionalist modernism through the shared framework of utility as the essential parameter of classification.

     Clérambault 'was the first to consider the flowing folds of clothes as the signature of a race, a tribe.'

163. #163

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.149

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Teflon Totem**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that American democracy structurally hystericizes the subject by generating a demand for an *unvermögender* (impotent/incapable) Other whose very failure to deliver accreditation preserves the subject's singularity; this diagnosis is grounded in the tripartite distinction of need/demand/desire and the logic of love (giving what one does not have), and culminates in a critique of the American suppression of the Real excess within the law itself.

     every sign of accreditation cancels the difference to which it is supposed to bear witness, for it is precisely by bearing witness, by making difference communicable to another, that any sign automatically universalizes what it represents and thereby abolishes its singularity.

164. #164

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.59

     **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.

     Does the absolute singularity of signature as event ever occur? Yes, of course, every day.

165. #165

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.188

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec contests standard film noir criticism's equation of the voice-over's "grain" with epistemological failure or masculine malaise, arguing instead that the voice-over marks a radical heterogeneity between speech and image driven by the primacy of jouissance (drive) over desire—a structural excess that refuses reduction to either commentary or social particularity, and which Barthes's "grain of the voice" captures more precisely than Bonitzer's "body of the voice."

     The grain is not the index of a particularity with any content, social or otherwise, it is the index of an particular absolute. This means that it marks the voice as belonging to this speaker, uniquely, even though the grain must not be considered 'personal: it expresses nothing' of the speaker.

166. #166

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.215

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

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

     the peculiarity, or singularity, of the phallic signifier is due precisely to the fact that it ruins the possibility of any simple affirmation or negation.

167. #167

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets**

     Theoretical move: Copjec's introduction argues that Foucault's post-1968 historicism—his reduction of society to immanent relations of power—undermines his own most productive insight (the desubstantialized 'plebness' as an existence without predicate), and that Lacanian theory preserves what Foucault's genealogical turn abandons: a surplus existence that exceeds the positivity of the social.

     Foucault is concerned not with the 'little people' that macrohistories overlooked, but with the microworkings of small-scale systems of power relations that produce these people.

168. #168

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.285

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the limits of knowledge in love and grief are not deficiencies but constitutive dimensions of intimate bonds, and that psychoanalysis teaches not perfect transparency but a tolerant, even productive relation to irreducible unknowing — in others and in oneself.

     Bowing to such unknowns is a matter of truly making room for them, for the irreplaceable one-off they really are.

169. #169

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.134

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The end of religion as its beginning

     Theoretical move: Christianity's internal self-critique is constitutive of authentic faith: the passage argues that true fidelity to Christianity requires betraying its institutional/systematic form, such that Christianity is structurally "ir/religious" — a religion that negates itself as religion, making the authentic believer a "non-Christian in the Christian sense."

     the authentic believer can be described as a non-Christian in the Christian sense of the term.

170. #170

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.169

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > A system against systems

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christianity functions as an "anti-system" — a system that systematically undermines every system of power by seeking out the excluded — and that this structural logic requires questioning the place of power itself rather than merely replacing its occupants, constituting a religion without religion whose expression is irreducible to ideological universalism.

     the one sheep who is not in the pen, the one coin not in the purse, those who have not been invited to the party, the nobodies, the nothings.

171. #171

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.152

     <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 argues that genuine forgiveness is unconditional and precedes repentance rather than following it, deploying a theological-deconstructive reading of the Prodigal Son parable to distinguish an "impossible" gift-logic from the economic/conditional logic that normally masquerades as forgiveness.

     Tucked away in a tiny corner of heaven, away from all the grand mansions and streets of gold, there is a cramped little stable... that is where I live, and you would be welcome to live there with me.

172. #172

     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="chapter020.html_page_114"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, via parable and Biblical exegesis, that genuine fidelity to a teaching requires its betrayal or transgression — pure identification with the Master's words is itself the deepest form of betrayal — and that divine power operates by always siding with the excluded and marginalized, even at the cost of its own defeat.

     it was not that Jesus had a deep love for tax collectors or Samaritans over other careers and ethnic groups. Rather, what was important was the place that the tax collector and the Samaritan held in society.

173. #173

     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="chapter019.html_page_107"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely universal atheism — one that rejects all possible concepts of God in advance — is not opposed to but is rather the most rigorous expression of the Judeo-Christian apophatic tradition, because God, as that which utterly transcends all conceptual capture, demands the rejection of every idolatrous objectification; the second parable then dramatizes this logic by showing that alignment with "God" cannot be instrumentalized by any power, since God's involvement structurally sides with the oppressed.

     it does not matter which side God is on. When God is involved, the oppressed always win.

174. #174

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.68

     Fuzzy Math > **Mean Values**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's social critique of modernity's "leveling" identifies a shift from qualitative inwardness to a quantitative, arithmetic social logic—chatter is theorized as the communicative mechanism by which individuals are reduced to fractions, aggregated into the abstract "gallery-public," and subjected to statistical denomination, anticipating Heidegger's and Lacan's later restatements of this structure.

     To be an individual in previous eras was to be a distinct person, and sometimes even to become a person of great distinction; to be an individual in the present age, however, is to be 'a fraction in something utterly trivial'

175. #175

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.78

     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.

     not the mathematical process of addition, whereby local singularities (quantities) are combined into more general orders of significance (sums)

176. #176

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.157

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **The Crisis of Learning** > **Ruinant Factical Life**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Heidegger's early 1922 formulation of 'ruinant factical life' as constituted by inauthentic communicative practices (Gerede, Geschreibe, Geschwätz), arguing that these practices — by arresting 'resolute understanding' and abolishing historical temporality — are simultaneously the obstacle to and condition of possibility for genuine scientific inquiry, and that this analysis prefigures the existential analytic of Being and Time.

     the ontologico-existential distinction between the proper originary experience of each unique lifetime and the restless public experience of average everyday life

177. #177

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.124

     Fuzzy Math > **Babble Dabble**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's critique of 'dabbling' (*Fuskerie*) and 'preacher-prattle' (*Præstesnak*) constructs a structural homology between probabilistic reasoning, esthetic distraction, and the dissolution of genuine religious inwardness—showing how idle talk migrates from pulpit to pew, converting would-be believers into spectators of a theatrical performance and producing collective spiritual confusion (*Kludderie*).

     faithful Christians, in singular states of religious inwardness, can come to terms with themselves before God

178. #178

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.83

     Fuzzy Math > **Dialectical Fraud** > **The Problem with Hereditary Sin**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of sorites reasoning—the quantitative accumulation that purports to generate qualitative change—grounds his opposition to Hegelian dialectics and modern 'leveling' discourse, arguing that genuine qualitative change can only occur through a sudden leap, not through gradual numerical progression; any claim to the contrary dissolves into myth and small talk.

     The first sin constitutes the nature of the quality: the first sin is the sin.

179. #179

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.112

     Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's analysis of Adler to theorize "bustling loquacity" as a structural condition in which the subject's failure of inward self-mastery drives a compulsive outward chattering, whereby public opinion and repetition are recruited as substitutes for genuine subjective certitude — thereby exposing the "fuzzy math" of democratic public culture as a mechanism that dissolves singular decision into quantitative accumulation.

     public opinion sanctioned to the *n*th degree what, otherwise in the strictest, in the most isolating sense pertains to a particular individual, who with regard to this must unconditionally and exclusively seek certitude within himself

180. #180

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.158

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **A Specter in Disguise**

     Theoretical move: By tracing Heidegger's 1923 hermeneutics of facticity lectures, the passage argues that *Gerede* (idle talk) is the constitutive medium of *das Man*'s anonymous, ruinant publicness — a phantasmatic specter that masks *Dasein*'s anxiety before itself — and that this structure is exemplified in the totalizing academic discourse of disciplinary philosophy and history, which mistake their own idle consensus for genuine inquiry.

     What is crucial is that the today be lifted up into the starting point of analysis in such a manner that a characteristic of being already becomes visible in it

181. #181

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.165

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **More Impulses from Kier ke gaard** > **Holding Out and Holding Back**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophical concepts of resolute silence, idle talk (*Gerede*), and *Jeweiligkeit* did not originate as abstract philosophical categories but emerged from concrete careerist circumstances, revealing how the opposition between authentic reticence and inauthentic chatter was first a practical, biographical response before becoming a principled existential-phenomenological distinction.

     the particularity or individuality of their 'be-ing there,' (2) their 'be-ing there' or 'whiling (there)' at the particular time, and (3) their 'be-ing there' or 'tarrying (there)' for a while

182. #182

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.306

     A Play of Props > **Exercises in Virtualization**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary networked individualism inverts the classical crowd-theory assumption that mass assembly erodes individual interiority, and that mobile communication technologies so thoroughly interpenetrate assembled crowds and absent publics that their structural distinction collapses into what the author calls "virtualization."

     'The most marvelous phenomenon is precisely this obliteration of the singular personality in a single, immense personality,' the Italian criminal anthropologist Scipio Sighele mused in 1903.

183. #183

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.231

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part I: The Concrete Universal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a collection of endnotes that do bibliographic and conceptual ancillary work: it anchors the chapter's argument about comedy and the universal/particular relation by citing Hegel on the comic emptying of the Beautiful and the Good, by glossing the Borat example as a short circuit between the generic and the individual, and by cross-referencing Žižek, Dolar, and Santner on sublimation, the object-voice, and creaturely life.

     it functions as a short circuit between the generic and the individual. *Borat* is also a good example of the fact that comic characters are not simply represented by (different) actors

184. #184

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.66

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" (which closes off the human within its limits), Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" by demonstrating that human finitude is always already a *failed* finitude—a finitude with a structural hole—whose Lacanian name is objet petit a, and whose topology is best rendered by the Möbius strip: immanence that generates an other side without ever crossing to it.

     there is also a possible 'objectification' (or singularization) of the (endless) internal contradiction, which one could relate, among other things, to comedy

185. #185

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.128

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Zupančič pushes Bergson's formula of comedy (the mechanical encrusted on the living) toward a more radical claim: the mechanical element is not one of two pre-given poles but names the very *relationship* between any two poles, and comic imitation reveals that automatism/repetition is where singularity, not its absence, resides — thereby inverting the corrective-social reading of laughter.

     A good imitator always imitates precisely our singularity, the uniqueness of our tics and gestures... He imitates our very difference, specificity, individuality; he imitates our inimitability, and makes it a matter of repetition

186. #186

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

     part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy achieves a qualitative shift beyond tragedy by dissolving the gap of representation: where tragedy holds essence (the universal) apart from the actual self via the mask, comedy collapses that distance so that the individual self itself becomes the negative power through which universal powers vanish—making the comic character not the physical remainder of symbolic representation, but essence itself in its physical actuality.

     the universal that 'through the invincible elasticity of its unity effaces the atomistic singleness of the doer and his constructions, preserves itself in its purity and dissolves everything individual in its fluid nature'

187. #187

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.166

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: Zupančič maps Deleuze's three-fold temporal structure of repetition (mechanical/comic, metamorphic/tragic, and unconditional/eternal-return) against Lacan's framework, arguing that Deleuze's attempt to ground selectivity and difference in a purely asubjective force (the eternal return) ultimately reinstates an absolute law that undermines the very subjective edge his political-philosophical predicates require.

     There is hope for the repetition of the Moment (in its uniqueness, singularity, exceptionality), and this hope belongs to the third of the Kierkegaardian circles of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

188. #188

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.188

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan > Return to Comedy

     Theoretical move: Comedy is distinguished from tragedy not by opposing it but by being structurally prior: where tragedy sublimates the real impasse of the symbolic structure into a singular subjective destiny (repetition in disguise), comedy repeats that impasse mechanically and on the outside, treating Master-Signifiers as objects of experimental play rather than as anchors of heroic identity—thereby enacting the subject's constitutive occurrence rather than representing its unfolding destiny.

     repetition will fail to repeat the singularity of what it is repeating, it will repeat only the empty gestures.

189. #189

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.72

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Comedy's structural logic consists in the "impossible articulation" of two mutually exclusive realities within one frame—not simply exposing the Real of what happened, but staging the structural Real whose suppression constitutes ordinary reality's coherence; this is distinguished from irony by comedy's capacity to produce a "concrete universal" (singular universality) that includes the infinite within the finite, and is further illuminated by the Freudian/Lacanian split between ego and id as the engine of comic incongruity.

     This is a splendid example of the 'singular universality' which includes the infinite in the finite.

190. #190

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.21

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that "the comical" is a specific, singular mode within comedy irreducible to jokes, irony, or humor, and that philosophy and comedy share a structural affinity in their shared refusal of immediate utility — making the philosophization of comedy itself a comic-philosophical act rather than a merely instrumental enterprise.

     the accent is above all on the specificity of the comical as a singular form of 'funniness' at work in comedies that can be distinguished from some other forms

191. #191

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

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freudian thought centres on erotic and political repetition compulsion rooted in the infantile loss of a fantasised primal plenitude, and that love is structurally pathological insofar as it reactivates infantile fantasies, displaces the superego, and re-enacts a drive toward an unattainable object — a diagnosis that can only be met with irony rather than cure.

     They rob us of whatever singularity we may possess. Therapy, then, becomes an encounter with the distinct possibility that whoever you are, whatever you've achieved, you've become no more than a cliché

192. #192

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

     *Unexpected Reunions*

     Theoretical move: The introduction positions the book's approach to Marx as deliberately partial, non-encyclopedic, and philosophically engaged rather than scientifically systematic, using the literary figure of the "unexpected reunion" (Bloch/Hebel) to frame the project as recovering a repressed universal dimension in Marx rather than burying or canonizing him.

     Our approach is not only partial; it is also decidedly non-encyclopedic. Rather, in each of our respective readings we engage in an attempt to produce something unexpected (in and/or from Marx)

193. #193

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.33

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Diagram Traversed by Antagonism**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the identity of an object resides not in an inner core but in its "diagram" — the virtual structure of non-actualized potentials — and crucially refines this by distinguishing accidental non-actualizations from essentially impossible ones (the impossible-real), applying this logic to politics to show that capitalism's particular malfunctions are structurally necessary rather than accidental symptoms to be reformed away.

     we can define a revolution as a transcendental change where this singularity's virtual background is transformed and what was impossible becomes possible

194. #194

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

     *Unexpected Reunions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx today requires a philosophical act of "profanation" — de-sacralizing a canonized "Saint Marx" — in order to restore the singular, historically-situated revolutionary edge of Marxist thought against its ideological domestication through omission, distortion, and assimilation.

     The truth of Marx's name can only be restored if it becomes effective as a truth of this specific concrete and singularly historical situation, and not simply as a transhistorical dogmatic canonical corpus

195. #195

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

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

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

     the obvious candidate for this next stage is, of course, the promise of so-called singularity, a new form of trans-individual consciousness (or mind) that is expected to emerge from the further digitalization of our minds in combination with biogenetics

196. #196

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.213

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Hegelian Repetition

     Theoretical move: By mapping Hegel's theory of repetition onto the Möbius strip, Žižek argues that repetition does not merely confirm contingency but dialectically sublates it into necessity, and that this movement only achieves its full force when it reaches "concrete universality"—where the universal appears as one of its own species, exemplified by the rabble as the repressed universal of bourgeois society—thereby marking Hegel's decisive step beyond Kantian transcendentalism.

     concrete universality is precisely a universality which includes itself among its species, in the guise of a singular moment lacking particular content

197. #197

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.357

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [How to Do Words with Things](#contents.xhtml_ahd23)

     Theoretical move: The subject is not merely related to a traumatic gap or rip in reality but IS that gap—a self-reflective reversal that reframes symbolic castration as the violent ontological opening that makes language's distance from reality possible; this crack of negativity then drives a critique of assemblage theory's virtual diagram, which must be amended to include essentially non-realized possibilities that are the impossible-real of any structure.

     This gap of negativity compels us to think in a new way the triad of universality–particularity–singularity.

198. #198

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.289

     **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 quantum physics (wave-function collapse, decoherence, virtual particles) to argue that ignorance is not merely epistemic but has a positive ontological status inscribed in reality itself, which in turn redefines the big Other/God as necessarily non-omniscient and "retarded" (always registering too late), and connects this to a Hegelian dialectic in which the indivisible One of a thing is identical with a void of Nothing at its core.

     his notion of the singular as the return of the universal in the particular

199. #199

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.317

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Suture and <span id="scholium_33_suture_and_hegemony.xhtml_IDX-867"></span><span id="scholium_33_suture_and_hegemony.xhtml_IDX-2268"></span>Hegemony

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Laclau's concept of the hegemonic empty signifier conceals a double logic of exception — the particular element that colors universality AND the element that holds the place of what is excluded — and that the antagonism between these two exceptions is the minimal form of social antagonism, grounding class struggle as an internal cut within universality rather than a conflict between two particulars.

     human species as such, in contrast to its particular groups, exists in the guise of proletariat, of those who have no specific place within the social body

200. #200

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.104

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The “Death of Truth”

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the liberal diagnosis of a "death of truth" misidentifies the problem: what has died is not truth per se but a hegemonic "big Lie" that provided ideological stability; the only genuine path to universal truth runs through a partial, engaged standpoint committed to emancipation, not through pseudo-objective liberal neutrality.

     subjective interests do not stand outside social totality, they are themselves moments of social totality, formed by active (or passive) participants in social processes.

201. #201

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.75

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ahd5)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's advance beyond Kant, Fichte, and Schelling on the question of intellectual intuition consists not in asserting the actuality of the *intellectus archetypus* but in rejecting it as an illusory projection—the very ideal of an immediate unity of concept and reality is shown to be self-undermining, and self-awareness is constitutively grounded in finitude and failure rather than infinite creative intuition.

     similar to today's idea of posthuman singularity in the brain sciences. (Singularity may appear to be an unexpected realization, the latest form, of Hegel's Weltgeist, a world-spirit acquiring positive existence, but the ideologists of singularity ignore the costs of the passage from human to posthuman: the disappearance of self-awareness, which is rooted in finitude and failure.)

202. #202

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.124

     **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.

     As a subject, I am unique—a unique singularity—and, simultaneously, universal, equal to all others in my very abstract uniqueness.

203. #203

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.348

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [Madness, Sex, War](#contents.xhtml_ahd22)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that abstract negativity is irreducible and constitutive rather than merely a moment to be sublated: war, madness, and the "Night of the World" all demonstrate that no organic social or conceptual reconciliation can contain the force of abstraction, and true Hegelian reconciliation is reconciliation *with* this irreducible excess of negativity itself. This revaluation of the Imaginary (as dismembering power) and of Understanding (as the absolute power of tearing apart) supports a non-synthetic, persistently negative reading of both Hegel and Lacan.

     the 'infinite right' of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power.

204. #204

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.248

     **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 > [Cross-Capping Class Struggle](#contents.xhtml_ahd16)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that class struggle is not a conflict between objectively determinable social groups but a constitutive antagonism—a diagonal cut across the entire social body—that functions as the point of subjectivization suturing the "objective" social field itself; this is demonstrated through Marx's unfinished analysis in Capital Vol. III and the Stalinist "subkulak" deadlock, showing that the One (Master-Signifier) introduces self-division rather than totalization, and that class struggle operates as a failed but necessary pseudo-totalization when full dialectical analysis breaks down.

     the procedure of dieresis is not endless: it reaches its end when a division is no longer a division into two species, but a division into a species and an excremental leftover, a formless stand-in for nothing, a 'part of no-part.'

205. #205

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.94

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Buddha, Kant, <span id="scholium_11_buddha_kant_husserl.xhtml_IDX-235"></span>Husserl

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Husserl's phenomenological epoché—far from being a merely abstract logical operation—constitutes a shattering existential experience analogous to Buddhist selflessness, and that this shared 'bracketing' of the empirical subject produces three historically distinct outcomes (Buddhist void, German Idealist ego-divine unity, Husserlian pure ego), demanding that eternity itself be historicized rather than simply reducing figures of eternity to historical phenomena—a move that exposes a blind spot in Heidegger's epochal thinking.

     Each version of what appears as the same experience is grounded in a specific historical constellation, and it is not enough to say that what is historically specific is the form of the same 'eternal' experience

206. #206

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.148

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

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

     a vision unexpectedly endorsed even by Quentin Meillassoux. But is Hegel's account of the succession of minerals, plants, animals, and human spirit not the supreme case of such progressive evolution?

207. #207

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.250

     **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 > [Cross-Capping Class Struggle](#contents.xhtml_ahd16)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that class struggle (and social antagonism generally) must be understood through a "redoubled" logic of suture, where the quilting point splits into an excess at the top and a "part of no-part" at the bottom (the rabble/proletariat as singular universality); this move is then extended to psychoanalytic symptom-theory by inverting the usual relation: not only is the symptom a symptom of normality, but normality is itself a symptomal compromise-formation covering a constitutive antagonism.

     they perfectly exemplify the category of singular universality (a singular which directly gives body to a universality, by-passing the mediation through the particular)

208. #208

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.393

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that freedom and universal truth are accessible only through the irreducible position of enunciation (the subject's horizon), not by abstracting from subjectivity toward an objective view; and that the Protestant subject, as barred/empty subject ($), embodies this by being sacrifice itself rather than offering sacrifice in exchange—collapsing the logic of exchange into an identity of giving and getting.

     the fate of the entire universe is decided in our singular (and, from the global cosmic standpoint, marginal and insignificant) struggle.

209. #209

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.345

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [Madness, Sex, War](#contents.xhtml_ahd22)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "abstract negativity" (madness, sexuality, war) is not an accidental excess to be sublated but a constitutive, immanent remainder that persists at the heart of every ethical and ontological edifice; the Möbius-strip topology of this persistence means that the barbaric core sustaining civilization cannot be simply overcome by expanding rational order, and Hegel's own failure to follow through on this insight (in sexuality and in his conservative politics) reveals the limit of any synthesis from Substance to Subject.

     this entire process is rooted in an external point of extreme singular density (the Ego as the ultimate self-contraction)

210. #210

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.330

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

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

     an Event is something that cannot be reduced to or accounted for in the terms of Being, of the complex structure of reality, it is an entity sui generis.

211. #211

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

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

     singularity [here](#corollary_1_intellectual_intuition_and_intellectus_arche.xhtml_IDX-2101), [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-2102)

212. #212

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.192

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive — demonstrated through the Wolf Man's somatic symptom — escapes both correlationism and speculative realism by positing a strange materiality that "enjoys without thinking," locating the Freudian body as the inscription of drive upon organism, and positioning sexuality as the ontological lapse that anchors jouissance irreducibly in materiality without reducing it to mere physicality.

     the Freudian body therefore is not a reflection of the subject of knowledge, but a refraction of the singularity of the subject which takes its place within the gap in knowledge

213. #213

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.43

     Mladen Dolar > Hegel's Materialism

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Hegel's critique of substantiality constitutes a latent materialism: by demonstrating that matter is itself a product of thought (an abstraction, a *Gedankending*), Hegel does not dismiss matter but dissolves the very framework of substantiality—'substance is subject'—thereby opening the only path to a materialism worthy of its name, one that finds its psychoanalytic heir in the *objet petit a* as the subject's inscription into the Real rather than a correlate of consciousness.

     One sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells a multiplicity, a chaos of singularities; it takes a great feat of thought to say 'all this is matter.'

214. #214

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.159

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: By reading Lacan and Deleuze together, the passage argues that the death drive is not a principle of destruction but the site of originary affirmation, and that repetition is not a response to a pre-existing traumatic original but the very mechanism that produces its own excess — with a constitutive split at its heart that parallels the Lacanian distinction between the void around which drives circulate and their partial figures.

     This is the 'unifying negativity' which is always the 'same' only in so far as it is absolutely singular, alone (un seul).

215. #215

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.170

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze diverge precisely where they are closest—on repetition—because for Lacan emancipation is not achieved by the centrifugal force of difference/repetition itself (Deleuze), but requires the production of a new signifier (S1) from within the analytic discourse, a signifier that names the foundational "hole" and thereby shifts the subject's relation to the signifying order.

     difference is the only and the original being, yet at the same time it (still) needs to be realized, that is to say, repeated and thus separated from all the metaphysical and dialectical encumbrance.

216. #216

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.21

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: The subject is not a substance but a nonsubstantial, purely relational entity—the very wound/cut in the Real it attempts to heal—and any materialism or realism that posits a "democracy of objects" without accounting for this void at the core of subjectivity already relies on an unexamined transcendental constitution of reality; only a dialectical materialism that takes the subject as nothing but its own relationality and division can avoid this obfuscation.

     the point of absolute singularity (of the 'I' excluding all substantial content) in which universality comes to itself

217. #217

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.64

     Borna Radnik

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's logic of the concept is simultaneously ontologically and thought-constitutive, distinguishing his absolute idealism from Kantian transcendental idealism and Fichtean subjective idealism by showing that conceptual determination is not merely a subjective act but is immanent to reality itself, culminating in the absolute Idea as the unity of subject and substance.

     the 'I,' in its self-referring negativity, is '*singularity, absolute determinateness* that stands opposed to anything other and excludes it—*individual personality*.'

218. #218

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.186

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned not as an escape from correlationism but as its radical subversion: by replacing the Kantian unity of apperception with the imaginary misrecognition of the ego and grounding the subject in the unconscious rather than consciousness, Lacan exposes desire, fantasy, and jouissance as what secretly drive both Kantian rationality and moral law—demonstrating that castration (the traumatic encounter with the signifier) is the specifically human mark, irreducible to new materialism's ontologies of actual entities.

     every instance of unconscious fantasy is singular, so that no human being is exactly alike and all of us are recalcitrant to the homogenizing discourses of anthropocentrism or biological determinism

219. #219

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.194

     Who Cares? > The Human Object > The Master and the Pervert

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned as the necessary ethical corrective to new materialism's symptomatic attachment to the jouissance it ostensibly critiques: rather than speculating beyond consciousness, psychoanalysis works from within to expose the human's non-coincidence with itself, grounding a genuine ethics of singularity against both correlationism and its critics.

     a steadfast commitment to the discovery of the always singular way in which the human, each instance of the human, is not coincident with itself

220. #220

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.166

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: Zupančič contrasts Deleuze's ontology of difference-as-repetition (three temporal modes, eternal return as selective force) with an implied Lacanian counter-position, arguing that Deleuze's asubjective account of repetition ultimately installs an absolute law that undermines the very predicates (excess, difference, nomadism) it claims to champion — thereby setting up the conceptual stakes for a Lacanian re-articulation of repetition central to comedy.

     There is hope for the repetition of the Moment (in its uniqueness, singularity, exceptionality), and this hope belongs to the third of the Kierkegaardian circles.

221. #221

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.128

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Žižančič argues that Bergson's formula of the comic (the mechanical encrusted on the living) is both too broad and philosophically pre-loaded with an aprioristic dualism; the truly radical move is to locate the "mechanical" not as one of two independent poles but as the very *relationship* between any two poles, and further, that comic imitation reveals automatism as the site of singularity rather than its absence.

     A good imitator always imitates precisely our singularity, the uniqueness of our tics and gestures, and of their combination. He imitates our very difference, specificity, individuality; he imitates our inimitability

222. #222

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

     part i

     Theoretical move: The passage traces a dialectical movement from epic to tragedy to comedy in Hegel's Phenomenology, arguing that comedy does not merely expose the failure of representation but dissolves representation altogether by making the individual self coincide with essence—the universal is no longer separated from the actual self by the mask, but appears as the physical itself.

     the universal that 'through the invincible elasticity of its unity effaces the atomistic singleness of the doer and his constructions, preserves itself in its purity and dissolves everything individual in its fluid nature'

223. #223

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.188

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan > Return to Comedy

     Theoretical move: Comedy is distinguished from tragedy not as its repetition but as a structurally prior form of repetition: where tragedy sublimates the Real impasse into a singular subjective destiny (repetition in disguise), comedy enacts a "mechanical," textual repetition of Master-Signifiers that externalizes the Real as an object, reactivating the very ground of subjectivity in the present rather than representing it through an unfolding destiny.

     repetition will fail to repeat the singularity of what it is repeating, it will repeat only the empty gestures.

224. #224

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.21

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage stakes a terminological and philosophical claim: the "comical" is a singular, specific mode distinct from jokes, irony, and humor, and philosophy and comedy share a structural homology in their shared refusal to serve immediate purpose — a refusal that is itself productive rather than merely useless.

     the accent is above all on the specificity of the comical as a singular form of 'funniness' at work in comedies that can be distinguished from some other forms

225. #225

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.72

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Comedy's deepest operation is not the exposure of a hidden "real" behind appearances but the impossible joint articulation of two mutually exclusive realities within a single frame—a "concrete universal" that includes the infinite within the finite, distinct from irony's mere pointing to the gap between universal statement and particular enunciation. This structure is further illuminated by the Lacanian split between Ego and Id/jouissance, where satisfaction follows its own autonomous logic indifferent to the subject.

     This is a splendid example of the 'singular universality' which includes the infinite in the finite

226. #226

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.81

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kierkegaard's apparent anti-Hegelianism conceals a disavowed proximity to Hegel: both thinkers share a commitment to reopening the past's contingency rather than closing it into necessity, and the genuine Hegelian dialectical move is not to view the present as already-accomplished finality but to restore potentiality to actuality—a gesture that aligns with Kierkegaard's ethico-existential insistence on contingent singular decision over cognitive-objective thought.

     while in the ethico-existential approach, it is my actual singular existence that matters... 'The real subject is not the cognitive subject, since in knowing he moves in the sphere of the possible; the real subject is the ethically existing subject.'

227. #227

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.101

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a Greimasian structural analysis of the analyst's position relative to Christ, Teacher, and Scientist, arguing that both Christ and the analyst *are* rather than merely *perform* their function — one through ontological being, the other through transference. This is extended into a broader Schellingian/Hegelian thesis that Evil is the actualization of a Ground that should remain potential, illustrated through the *Star Wars* saga's failure to dramatize how excessive attachment to Good generates Evil.

     Christ was not a Christian—he was Christ himself in his absolute singularity.

228. #228

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.109

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Comedy of Incarnation" discloses the deepest logic of Hegelian dialectics: the parallax gap between God and man (Universal and Singular) is not sublated but transposed inward, so that Christ's direct coincidence of divinity and miserable humanity enacts the Hegelian move from abstract to concrete universality, where appearance emerges from the gap within the Real itself rather than from a hidden essence behind it.

     comedy is the full assertion of universality, the immediate coincidence of universality with the character's/actor's singularity

229. #229

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.386

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the parallax concept as both a structural and political category—defining revolutionary utopia as the abolition of the parallax gap, and mobilizing Hegelian dialectics (U-P-I contradiction, singularity, Absolute as Subject-Object) alongside Badiouian materialist dialectics to articulate the logic of truth, drive, and universality against liberal "democratic materialism."

     the singularity which directly—without mediation—stands for the Universal?

230. #230

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.88

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's account of the fall from innocence to sin must be supplemented by a Schellingian-Lacanian correction: Prohibition does not disturb primordial repose but resolves a prior, more terrifying deadlock created by primordial self-contraction (sinthome), yielding a three-stage sequence of anxieties that grounds a properly materialist theory of subjectivity and ethical engagement.

     which, in Kierkegaard, acquires the features of the singularity of the first-person I, the insurmountable presupposition of all thinking and acting.

231. #231

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.13

     introduction

     Theoretical move: Žižek introduces "parallax" as the master concept for an irreducible gap within the One itself, arguing that this gap—manifested across quantum physics, neurobiology, ontological difference, the Lacanian Real, desire/drive, and the unconscious—displaces the New Age polarity of opposites and structures a tripartite (philosophical/scientific/political) materialist ontology, while simultaneously grounding the constitutive "homelessness" of philosophy and the paradox of universal singularity against Hegelian mediation.

     Karatani refers here to Deleuze's notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad individuality-particularity-generality

232. #232

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.271

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

     Theoretical move: The passage proposes a new axis of class struggle between slum-dwellers (a dispossessed counter-class) and the "symbolic class" (uprooted cognitive-cultural workers who mistake their particularity for universality), raising the question of whether an emancipatory coalition between slum collectives and the progressive fraction of the symbolic class can serve as the political seed of the future.

     What we should be looking for are the signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the seeds of the future.

233. #233

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.289

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Stalinism and Nazism represent structurally distinct ideological formations: Stalinism, rooted in Enlightenment universalism, subjects subjects to a reflexive, self-monumentalizing logic (prisoners building monuments to themselves), while Nazism inscribes guilt into biological being, making annihilation the only "solution." The passage uses Nietzsche's racial-mixing formula and a beer-advertisement fantasy to show how overidentification with incompatible fantasmatic elements can traverse the fantasy that sustains ideological domination.

     This revolutionary is thus in effect a 'universal singular,' an individual whose fate stands for the fate of all.

234. #234

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.201

     **Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that historical narratives inevitably serve a fantasmatic function—justifying present ideological structures—but that certain filmmakers (notably Resnais) deploy the cinema of fantasy to allow an encounter with the impossible historical object precisely by marking the failure of the look, thereby transforming history from a validation of the present into an interrogation of it.

     Shoah aims to respect the historical object in its singularity. The historical object figures as the fundamental absence in Lanzmann's films

235. #235

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Nietzsche's figure of "great midday" theorizes the event as a pure split—an *Augenblick* that is neither a teleological end nor a new morning but the middle-point where "one becomes two," thereby breaking with both linear temporality and the realism/nominalism alternative through what she calls a "figure of the two."

     Its singularity resides in the fact that it is not a point of view, but the point of the gaze.

236. #236

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "event Nietzsche" constitutes a philosophical act analogous to Malevich's avant-garde artistic act: both locate the inner, inherent limit of their respective discourses and activate it as a site of creation, producing an implosion rather than a mere expansion—a vacuum of silence from which the event emerges.

     Another singularity shared by Nietzsche and Malevich is related to their use of the term 'life,' which should be distinguished from all types of vitalistic obscurantism.

237. #237

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.103

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič develops Nietzsche's perspectivism as a theory of immanent truth—distinguished from skeptical meta-truth—by tracing the structural asymmetry between seeing and looking (via Berkeley and Condillac) to argue that the constitution of the subject requires the irreversible loss of a portion of itself to the world of objects, anticipating a Lacanian account of the subject's constitutive lack.

     can one conceive of truth as a singular perspective within a given situation? Is there a perspective that belongs to no subject?

238. #238

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.73

     **The Real** > **Signifier**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier's entry into the subject inaugurates a structural loss that transforms need into desire mediated by absence, constitutes the subject as split from any satisfying object, and — shifting registers — establishes that singularity emerges not from particular identity but through universality's violence on particularity, while speculative identity names the subject's recognition of itself in radical otherness.

     What is singular about me is not a unique combination of gender, ethnic, religious, and national particular identities. It is instead how I relate to these identities.

239. #239

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.90

     **Universal**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Universal is constitutively defined through negation—as a 'not-This' that emerges from the self-negation of the particular—and that this negative structure is both alienating and emancipatory for the subject, while also tracing Hegel's three-stage dialectical movement (Understanding → Dialectics → Speculative Reason) as the logical development through which such universality is grasped.

     When we think of universality in terms of absence rather than presence, it ceases to appear as an overarching whole...and becomes the basis for the subject's singularity. I attain my singularity through my embrace of universal freedom and equality.

240. #240

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Chapters

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     Their inability to deal with internal contradictions produces ever new singularities and ever new enemies of these singularities. Singularities approximate the other via a caricature.

241. #241

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.278

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Salvaging Our Dignity

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek, the passage argues that the objet petit a—by arresting the infinite sliding of the signifier and fixing the subject to its fundamental fantasy—is an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity and individuality, positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire faithful to das Ding rather than to the master's morality or the Other's desire.

     It makes of us something other than subjects of speech, turning us into something unique, inestimable, and irreplaceable in the final analysis, which is the true point at which we can designate what I have called the dignity of the subject.

242. #242

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)^{<a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary political crisis—exemplified by the war in Ukraine—is best understood not through Baudrillardian simulacra but through the psychoanalytic lens of "generalized foreclosure": a collapse of the big Other that produces an excess of certainty ("too much reality"), dissolves the social bond, and generates the very wars and communicative breakdowns that define our era.

     The problem in the era of singularities is not that the war in Ukraine 'did not take place'

243. #243

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Universally Antagonistic

     Theoretical move: Žižek's political project is grounded in a reconceptualization of universality as constitutive antagonism rather than totalizing wholeness: particulars, identities, and social structures emerge from and are sustained by a universal antagonism that can never be resolved, making emancipation consist not in overcoming antagonism but in insisting on it—a position figured topologically through the Möbius strip and the objet a as the excremental singular point that embodies the universal.

     This singular point is an excremental point, a point foreign to the objective world introduced into it... The singular excremental point is the universal.

244. #244

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.314

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against reducing the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Western cancel culture to psychotic foreclosure or clashing paranoiac singularities, instead mapping both phenomena onto Lacan's University Discourse and formulas of sexuation, while insisting that symbolic communication (the inverted message) and fetishistic disavowal—not psychosis—are the operative mechanisms.

     The war in Ukraine is thus, I think, not a clash of psychotic singularities each of which just projects onto the other its own foreclosed content

245. #245

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.305

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)^{<a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: Rousselle argues that the contemporary era is defined by "generalized foreclosure" — a structural condition in which the Lacanian foreclosure of castration/lack has become universal, rendering civil war and political uprising impossible, dissolving the symbolic space of truth, and producing a politics of "known knowns" driven by singular modes of jouissance rather than shared symbolic worlds.

     They cannot see outside of themselves, even, especially, when they claim to be doing so. For the singularity, there is no world.

246. #246

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's thesis of "generalized foreclosure" by showing that symbolic castration and the Name-of-the-Father remain operative at local levels of social exchange, while tracking a contemporary structural shift from symbolic Law to superego at multiple levels (family, international relations, nation-state); he further argues that Rousselle's position is self-defeating because it forecloses the transformative role of knowledge itself.

     we are not all singularities, islands of jouissance, with no shared symbolic pact sustaining us

247. #247

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.308

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's (and Miller's) thesis of "generalized foreclosure" characterizing the current political era, contending that the symbolic order remains operative—as evidenced by political censorship that still works through metaphoric substitution (absence standing in for prohibited content)—and that the Iraq WMD and Ukraine "bio-labs" narratives function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins rather than psychotic foreclosures.

     In a time of total war—an era that I elsewhere refer to as 'the era of singularities'—civil war and political revolutions are impossible.

248. #248

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.189

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     Singularity comes about through history (through history as 'non-all,' in Žižek's terms), and to forget this is to mistake history for destiny, to reify being and renounce the possibilities of becoming.

249. #249

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's position on the refugee crisis is best understood not as Eurocentric conditional hospitality but as a resistance to the "double blackmail" of pure heterophilia vs. pure heterophobia, and that Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics of alterity actually converges with Derrida's own deconstruction of pure alterity as ideological fantasy—though Žižek misses this convergence by lumping Derrida with Levinas.

     Unconditional hospitality posits the exposure to the other as a relation of pure singularity—tout autre est tout autre, 'every other is wholly other'

250. #250

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.273

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > The Dignity of the Thing

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's insistence on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and worldly objects, the passage argues that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing—is not mere idealization but a genuine "realization" of the real within reality, and that "not giving way on desire" means choosing the singularity of one's jouissance/sinthome rather than automatically switching to the register of the drive.

     whenever we do not give way on our desire, we choose the singularity of our jouissance, our sinthome, over collective definitions of desirability

251. #251

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > A Case for Sublimation

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's reading that desire is merely a compromise formation and a retreat from the drive, the passage argues that sublimation constitutes the "shared space" where desire can appropriate jouissance through the objet a — not in its mortifying/uncanny dimension but in its sublime dimension — thereby opening a more affirmative Lacanian ethics grounded in desire rather than the destructive act.

     given that there is no universal formula for desire, each of us invents our 'private' formula, which then gives our desire an automatic valence

252. #252

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Israeli refuseniks' refusal to treat Palestinians as racialized others constitutes a genuine ethical act that de-racializes Palestinians (transforming them from homines sacri into neighbors), exposes the lack in the Symbolic order of Zionism, and embodies a universalist "part of no-part" position that decompletes Zionist ideology—against both liberal humanist inclusion and nationalist organicism.

     it is to underscore and attend to their historical racialization, their state of precarity, or, in other words, the symbolic order's contingent distribution of vulnerability and unfamiliarity

253. #253

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.191

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Racializing the Palestinian Other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Levinas's ethics of the face substantializes the Other in a way that, when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, ideologically neutralizes concrete racialized suffering; Žižek's counter-move is to insist that true emancipatory ethics must pass through "objective violence" and structural analysis, suspending the dyadic face-to-face encounter in favor of attending to the other's others.

     what makes Israel's case unique today is that this violence is ongoing and contested, and thus its memory is still very much alive

254. #254

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > Shoot the Hostage

     Theoretical move: Žižek identifies the political act with self-directed violence (subtraction from one's own symbolic investments) rather than violence against the Other, arguing that this structure repeats the originary self-inflicted violence of the death drive through which subjectivity itself first emerges — making violence against oneself the irreducible condition of both subjectivity and emancipatory politics.

     what is illustrative about Žižek's political position is just how different his analysis of this play is than Badiou's… Even amid the collectivist act, Žižek's concern is with how subjectivity asserts itself through subtraction.

255. #255

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.202

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: By threading Derrida's concept of autoimmunity through Žižek's critique of the refugee crisis, the passage argues that genuine political engagement requires acknowledging the constitutive non-coincidence of the self (autoimmunity), which simultaneously grounds the impossibility of pure identity/community and enables the global class solidarity that must replace both liberal humanitarianism and right-wing nativism.

     acknowledging the radical alterity of the neighbor, the refugee's singular form of jouissance

256. #256

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.20

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **WORKERS OF THE WORLD**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipation requires abandoning investment in particular identity and embracing universality, drawing on Marx, Beauvoir, and Fanon to demonstrate that particular identity functions as an ideological trap that sustains capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism—while universality, as a constitutive absence rather than a possessable content, is inherently on the side of freedom and produces singularity through alienation from particularity.

     Emancipation has its basis in universality and forges singularity through this universality.

257. #257

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **COLORBLIND OR JUST BLIND**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia are genuinely universalist—not identity-political—and that their universality is revealed through what is constitutively absent; capitalism is identified as the structural barrier that obscures this universality by forcing subjects into bare particularity, making the critique of capitalism indispensable to any genuine universalist project.

     Even though Black Lives Matter doesn't address, say, the violence that those trapped in the French suburbs endure or the suffering of children mining cobalt in the Congo... there is nonetheless a coherence between all these struggles

258. #258

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.151

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **PLEASE RECOGNIZE ME**

     Theoretical move: Identity politics is theoretically indicted as a site of ideological interpellation: identity is neither essence nor free choice but the result of a "forced choice" between subjectivity and symbolic identity, whose appeal is sustained not by ideological deception alone but by the jouissance derived from exclusion—making any truly universal inclusion structurally impossible.

     We take the particular identity that we have as a stand-in for our singularity... the more we obfuscate the singularity of our subjectivity.

259. #259

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.160

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **WE DO THE CONCENTRATING**

     Theoretical move: By taking Nazism as the paradigm of identity politics rather than of universalism, McGowan argues that identitarian projects are structurally self-defeating: they require the very other they aim to eliminate in order to constitute their own identity, so that success is always simultaneously failure.

     there cannot be two chosen peoples, both Germans and Jews.

260. #260

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.39

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **FIGHTING PARTICULARITY IN PORT-AU-PRINCE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan uses the Haitian Revolution as a historical demonstration that universality is not particular to any site of discovery but is genuinely universal — and that the political opposition between Right and Left maps onto the opposition between particularity and universality, which is simultaneously epistemological and political.

     the Left worries that immigrants aren't enjoying universal equality or that black individuals aren't free to live without fear of a police shooting... The particular intervention occurs on behalf of a universal value that the specific particular is being denied.

261. #261

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.109

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **THE SILENT TURN AWAY FROM STALIN**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Stalinism's crimes stem not from an excess of universality but from a *misconception* of universality—the belief that total belonging is a realizable goal—and that the Left's silent retreat from universalism toward particularism after Stalin, rather than theorizing his error, is itself a theoretical and political catastrophe.

     The kulaks became the enemy that the revolution must eliminate in order to realize total belonging.

262. #262

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.33

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **CONSTRUCTION OF THE UNIVERSAL**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the dominant image of politics as tribal warfare between competing particulars is itself a conservative ideological frame, and that genuine emancipatory (Left) politics must take universality—not particularity—as its starting point, since political struggle is fundamentally between universality and particularity rather than between opposed particular camps.

     By conceiving of the struggle in a way that leaves universality out of the picture, one accepts the basic conservative premise of politics that says that the starting point for politics is the isolated individual.

263. #263

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.104

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **NAZI IDEOLOGY**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that dominant interpretations of Nazism (Adorno, Agamben, Arendt, Foucault) misidentify it as a universalizing or biopolitical evil, when in fact Nazism is a reactionary particularist project aimed at destroying the universal—specifically targeting Jews not as bare life but as representatives of universality and the singularity it produces.

     Nazism aims at eliminating what it sees as the singularity that comes from the Jewish relationship to universality, at destroying the Jewish investment in the universal that serves as the constitutive threat for Nazi identity.

264. #264

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.49

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **ADDING UP TO ALL**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality cannot be reached by aggregating particulars, because any totality of inclusion structurally requires a constitutive exclusion; genuine universality must therefore be posited as an absent starting point (following Plato over Aristotle), not constructed by additive belonging.

     If I belong to a race other than those listed, I don't belong to the universal group constituted by the Census except as an exception.

265. #265

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.84

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **THE FRENCH INCLUSION**

     Theoretical move: Authentic universality is grounded in a shared, constitutive non-belonging that can never be fully realized; the French Revolution's Terror arose when this universality was betrayed by the drive toward total inclusion and universal belonging, which inevitably produces despotism and demands an enemy, thereby destroying universality itself.

     It is only by recognizing the universal as our shared failure to belong to our community—what the Haitian slaves have in common with the Jacobins in France—that we can engage in politics.

266. #266

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.185

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **COLORBLIND OR JUST BLIND**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is not the additive sum of all particulars but rather what all particulars lack, and that Black Lives Matter exemplifies genuine universalism by fighting at the site of inequality rather than advocating colorblind inclusion — whereas "All Lives Matter" represents a retreat into particularism disguised as universality.

     Unlike All Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter articulates universality by focusing our attention on those who don't belong—the black lives that the police treat with disregard.

267. #267

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.199

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **UNREPRESENTATIVE REPRESENTATION**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the politics of recognition and diversity is irreducibly particularist and must be abandoned rather than reinterpreted as latent universalism, because it substitutes representation for structural equality and occludes the fundamental divide between subject and identity that makes genuine emancipation possible.

     Diversity derives not from my individual singularity as a subject—if this were diversity, then the call for more diversity would be nonsensical—but from the group or groups that I belong to.

268. #268

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.181

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **THE JORDAN RULES**

     Theoretical move: McGowan inverts the standard charge of "identity politics": what conservatives and liberals denounce as particularist identity politics is often covert universalism, while the critics' own appeals to unity and hierarchy are themselves the true form of particularist identity politics — establishing that the real political axis is universal vs. particular, not identity vs. non-identity.

     those championing the universal can seem focused on questions of identity

269. #269

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.23

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **PARTICULAR ENTITIES**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century turn from universality to particular identity is both a political catastrophe and a philosophical opportunity: by redefining the universal not as a shared possession but as a shared absence, he reclaims universality as the only genuine basis for emancipation and exposes identity politics as an ideological product of capitalism's evacuation of particular content.

     When we think of universality in terms of absence rather than presence, it ceases to appear as an overarching whole that leaves no room for particular difference and becomes the basis for the subject's singularity.

270. #270

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.46

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **ACTING LIKE WE KNOW**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is constitutively the lack within every particular—not a positive substance but the very insubstantiality that makes the particular's self-sufficiency impossible—and that any epistemology beginning with the particular (whether conservative or liberal) necessarily produces a politics that provides ideological support for capitalist relations, whereas genuine leftist emancipation requires grounding in universality as absence/lack.

     If particular objects were self-contained and isolated, it would be impossible to affect them in any way. There would be genuine particularity—isolated monads.

271. #271

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.56

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > <span id="chapter1.xhtml_pg_54" aria-label="54" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE LURE OF THE PARTICULAR**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the left's epistemological retreat to particularism—most visible in Laclau and Butler—is politically self-defeating, because universality is not derived from the accumulation of particulars but is constitutive of particularity itself; only a universal that is prior to and lacking in each particular can ground emancipatory collective politics.

     In each case, the emancipation of some holds within it universal emancipation.

272. #272

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.138

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > <span id="chapter4.xhtml_pg_137" aria-label="137" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE EMPTY SUBJECT**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism's privileging of the general equivalent structurally empties out subject identity, reducing every particular to an interchangeable commodity form; this systemic annihilation of identity is not a contingent feature but the core logic of capitalism, which simultaneously liberates subjects from traditional mythic identity while rendering any chosen identity alien, contingent, and worthless.

     Identity doesn't give me a sense of unique belonging to a group, nor does it attest to my singularity as an individual. It becomes almost as insignificant as a commodity that I acquire.

273. #273

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.14

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **KANT’S STRANGE BEDFELLOW**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kantian universality—specifically the universality of the moral law—is the condition of possibility for genuine freedom and singularity, because it alienates subjects from their particular (heteronomous) identities and thereby enables them to relate to those identities from a distance rather than being trapped within them.

     Its uprooting universality allows her to become singular... Our singularity is neither our universality nor our particular identity. It is how we relate to our particular identity.

274. #274

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.10

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **EMANCIPATION THROUGH INTERRUPTION**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that authentic universality is constitutively absent from the social field—it appears as a gap or lack in socially authorized perception—and that this very absence is what makes it emancipatory, distinguishing it from particular identities which are products of ideology rather than resources against it.

     Particulars are distinct individual formal positions, and identity is the content that fills these particular forms.

275. #275

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.73

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **SPEAKING ABSENCES**

     Theoretical move: The universal is not a positive totality but the constitutive failure of inclusion: it appears only as an absence, through those who do not belong, and any attempt to positivize it (whether as present achievement or deferred promise) betrays it by collapsing it into a particular. McGowan deploys Fanon and Marx to show that genuine universal struggle is indexed to this structural absence rather than to the goal of complete belonging.

     When individuals fail to register within the field of symbolic recognition, their absence aligns them with universality.

276. #276

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

     We are all conceived as (more or less precious) singularities, 'elementary particles,' trying to make our voices heard in a complex, non-totalizable social network.

277. #277

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

     Contradictions that Matter > Hm…

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the apparent opposition between equivocity (Cassin) and formalization/univocity (Badiou) in Lacan is false: equivocity is not the opposite of formalization but its very condition, since the "right word" in analytic interpretation functions like a formula by targeting the singular impasse/contradiction that the symptom "solves," rather than by conveying a determinate meaning.

     it evokes and uses this multiplicity in order to efficiently pin down and transmit a singular point (or impasse); and to transmit it in a most economical way

278. #278

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.139

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's position is stronger than Badiou's: whereas for Badiou the impossibility of the Event is a consequence of the law of ontological discourse, for Lacan being itself is inseparable from its constitutive gap/impossibility (the "minus-one"), so that the wandering excess is not the Real of being but its symptom—a distinction that grounds a non-romantic, formalizing ethics of the Real and a specific theory of the subject as the name of the gap in discourse.

     the 'ultra one,' which is crucial in this construction, and implies the conceptual distinction of an Event from its site 'by the interposition of itself between the void and itself'… how Lacan characterizes the new 'new signifier' in its singularity—the 'one alone'

279. #279

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.14

     What Is Sex? > <span id="page-9-0"></span>Introduction

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation demonstrates that satisfaction in non-sexual activity is identical to—not a substitute for—sexual satisfaction, which forces a properly philosophical and ontological re-examination of what sex *is*; sex is reframed not as a content but as a structural contradiction immanent to reality itself, making it the privileged "position" from which psychoanalysis theorizes the real.

     the objectivity is linked here to the very capacity of being 'partial' or 'partisan'… one cannot see everything from everywhere

280. #280

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.123

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze share a common theoretical move: rejecting the pleasure principle as primary and affirming the primacy of the death drive, which they reconceptualise not as a tendency toward destruction but as the transcendental/ontological condition of repetition itself—a faceless negativity or "crack" that is irreducible to either life or death, and which constitutes rather than follows from the surplus excess and repression it generates.

     this negativity can be conceived, in psychoanalysis, as a 'unifying' singularity: the supposedly originally free and chaotic, fragmented (empirical) multiplicity of the drives is already a result of some 'unifying' negativity

281. #281

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.135

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's thesis that repetition itself selects/expels difference through centrifugal force, Zupančič-via-Lacan argues that only the production of a new signifier (S1) — generated from the subject's enjoyment-in-talking within analytic discourse — can effect a genuine separation at the heart of the drive's repetition, thereby triggering a new subjectivation that repression alone cannot accomplish.

     the new kind of One (S1), in its singularity, is very closely related to this foundational 'hole.'

282. #282

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.102

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that jouissance/the drive is neither simply animal instinct nor the marker of human exception, but rather the point at which nature's own inherent impossibility gets articulated as such — making the human being not an exception to the animal but the 'question mark' to the very consistency of the Animal, and by extension the point at which the incomplete ontological constitution of reality becomes visible.

     what differentiates us from animals is the singling out of the negativity that we may well have in common. This is what makes all the difference. And this singling out occurs with the signifier and its logic.

283. #283

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.47

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the psychoanalytic insistence on sex as an ontological inquiry (rather than a moral or identity question) is what gives sexual difference its political explosiveness, and that the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender" performs a neutralization by removing sex's irreducible Real dimension — leaving psychoanalysis in a paradoxical position of being coextensive with the desexualization of reality while remaining absolutely uncompromising about the sexual as irreducible Real, not substance.

     Sexual difference is a singular kind of difference, because it starts out not as difference between different identities, but as an ontological impossibility

284. #284

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against realist materialisms (including object-oriented ontology) that dissolve the subject into one object among many, Zupančič argues that the Lacanian subject is the objective embodiment of reality's own internal contradiction/antagonism—and that this is precisely what makes psychoanalysis a genuinely materialist theory: materialism is thinking that advances as thinking of contradictions.

     repetition itself is a 'centrifugal force' that expels all that which, of the difference, gets 'reified' into something… it expels all that comes under the categories of analogy, similarity, identity.