Skepticism

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (58)

1. #01

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.168

   C APITALISM'S UN CON S C IOUS INFINITE

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism structurally enacts the bad infinite while inadvertently producing the true infinite (its own internal limit), and that Marx's error is to theorize communism as the perfect realization of the bad infinite—an elimination of all limits—rather than following Hegel's dialectical logic (Aufhebung) which requires recognizing the limit as internally constituted and necessary, not contingent and external.

   The dialectical move out of stoicism, for Hegel, involves making the unconscious focus on the external world qua obstacle into the basis of a new philosophy—skepticism. The skeptic doesn't retreat from the external world but calls its reality into question.

2. #02

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.265

   **XXI**

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

   we are led, it would appear, to a historical Pyrronism which suspends the truth-value of everything which the human voice can emit, suspends it in the expectation of a future totalisation.

3. #03

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses Descartes's cogito as the paradigm case of the vel of alienation — the forced choice between annihilation of knowledge and scepticism — arguing that Descartes's error is to mistake the 'I think' for a knowledge rather than a point of fading, and that this error is sutured only by positing God as the Subject Supposed to Know who guarantees the field of all suspended knowledge.

   Scepticism is an ethic. Scepticism is a mode of sustaining man in life, which implies a position so difficult, so heroic, that we can no longer even imagine it.

4. #04

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238

   THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

   Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes genuine Pyrrhonian scepticism (as a subjective position of knowing nothing) from the Cartesian move, in order to situate Montaigne not as a sceptic but as the historical embodiment of the aphanisis of the subject — the living moment of the subject's fading — thereby grounding the vel of alienation in a concrete historical context.

   Scepticism does not mean the successive doubting, item by item, of all opinions or of all the pathways that accede to knowledge. It is holding the subjective position that one can know nothing.

5. #05

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.231

   THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS

   Theoretical move: The passage introduces the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as a key Freudian concept at the level of repression, and pivots to articulating alienation through a special logical structure (the "vel") illustrated by the Master/Slave dialectic, where a necessary condition (freedom vs. life) produces the loss of the original requirement — demonstrating how alienation operates as a forced choice.

   Scepticism, certaint) and the subject who is supposed to know

6. #06

   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.

   what distinguishes it from the scepticism that has been one of its terms

7. #07

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231

   THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS

   Theoretical move: The passage pivots on Freud's concept of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as a site of repression, and uses the master/slave dialectic's vel-structure to articulate how alienation operates through a necessary condition that causes the loss of the original requirement — linking Freudian repression to the logic of alienation.

   Scepticism, certaint) and the subject who is supposed to know

8. #08

   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.

   what distinguishes it from the scepticism that has been one of its terms

9. #09

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.238

   THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

   Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes genuine scepticism (the subjective position that nothing can be known) from mere successive doubt, and identifies Montaigne as the historical embodiment not of scepticism proper but of the 'living moment of aphanisis of the subject' — thereby locating the emergence of the subject in the vel of alienation against the backdrop of Cartesian method.

   Scepticism does not mean the successive doubting, item by item, of all opinions... It is holding the subjective position that one can know nothing.

10. #10

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Descartes's passage through doubt to map the structure of alienation: the Cartesian cogito arrives at a point of subjective fading rather than knowledge, and the reintroduction of God as guarantor of the eternal verities installs the 'subject supposed to know' as the structural support for certainty—a move that prefigures the Lacanian vel of alienation and the path of desire.

    Scepticism is an ethic. Scepticism is a mode of sustaining man in life, which implies a position so difficult, so heroic, that we can no longer even imagine it.

11. #11

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.300

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the modern subject by displacing truth onto the big Other (God), thereby inaugurating a science of accumulative knowledge severed from truth; psychoanalysis, precisely because it works at the split (Entzweiung) between "I think" and "I am," is the practice that can finally articulate the radical relationship between truth and knowledge — a relationship structured topologically, as in the Möbius strip.

    What then would Descartes be if we remained with what is imposed in this analysis of his fundamental articulation? Nothing other than a consistent scepticism, a scepticism that would protect itself from what he always opposed, that at least the truth of scepticism is true.

12. #12

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.300

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito installs a constitutive split (Entzweiung) between the subject of sense and the subject of being, and that this division—wherein the subject is what is *lacking* to accumulated scientific knowledge—is precisely what psychoanalysis radicalises: the unconscious is an "I think" that knows without knowing it, and truth returns not through confrontation with knowledge but through the stumbling intervals of discourse, the symptom being its privileged site.

    What then would Descartes be if we remained with what is imposed in this analysis of his fundamental articulation? Nothing other than a consistent scepticism, a scepticism that would protect itself from what he always opposed, that at least the truth of scepticism is true.

13. #13

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.271

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the problem of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (fantasma), Lacan argues that the gap (écart) constitutive of the simulacrum is also constitutive of the subject, and that the Sophist—precisely as the one who lacks a sure reference and operates through this gap—figures the analyst himself, who likewise occupies a place of non-knowledge in relation to the analysand.

    Make of him a sceptic for example who does not dissolve the truth in discourse but suspends it before any discourse. You will see that he might receive exactly the same objections as the Sophist on the part of the Stranger.

14. #14

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan positions the analytic experience as requiring the analyst to occupy a Pyrrhonian/sceptical stance toward truth, introduces the Subject Supposed to Know as the patient's trap for the analyst's epistemological drive, and pivots toward Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject's relationship to infinity, the real, and the impossibility of enjoying truth.

    The fundamental position, then, of a subject imposing on himself an arrest at the threshold of truth... the Pyrrhonian or the Sceptic, Pyrrhon being the leader of one of these philosophical sects

15. #15

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analytic situation — where every demand is necessarily disappointed — to critique masochism as a hasty diagnostic label, introduces the analyst as Subject Supposed to Know whose epistemological drive toward truth is itself caught in the law of disappointed demand, and pivots to Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject who must wager on truth while initially renouncing access to it in a Pyrrhonian suspension.

    What the patient does to us is that he makes us abandon our Pyrrhonian position ... the fundamental position, then, of a subject imposing on himself an arrest at the threshold of truth

16. #16

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight/Möbius strip) provides the structural model for both repetition and alienation, showing how the "additional One" (Un-en-plus) generated by the retroactive return of repetition fractures the Other and the subject alike, and that the act emerges precisely at the point where the passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition intersect on these non-orientable surfaces.

    We should much more rather find our models in what remains so misunderstood and nevertheless so alive in the fragmentary things tradition has bequeathed us in terms of exercises of scepticism, in so far as they are not simply these brilliant jugglings between opposed doctrines, but on the contrary veritable spiritual exercises

17. #17

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight) is the structural ground of both repetition and alienation, and uses this topology to argue that the Other is inherently "fractured" (barred), that the subject's division is ineradicable from truth, and that the Act emerges as the logical consequence of alienation's passage through the topology of repetition.

    we should much more rather find our models in what remains so misunderstood and nevertheless so alive in the fragmentary things tradition has bequeathed us in terms of exercises of scepticism, in so far as they are not simply these brilliant jugglings between opposed doctrines, but on the contrary veritable spiritual exercises

18. #18

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transition from the ancient Master's discourse to modern capitalism/bureaucracy involves a displacement of knowledge (S2) into the dominant position, producing a new tyranny that occludes truth; and that psychoanalytic experience operates by introducing the Hysteric's discourse as a structural condition ("hystericisation") that exposes the non-self-knowing character of unconscious knowledge and the impossibility of sexual rapport.

    this doubting, perhaps, was tackled at a lower level when the Sceptics were involved, I mean those who were so called at the time when they constituted a school

19. #19

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of the unconscious is analogous to mathematical logic (Gödel-type incompleteness), where the "false" (falsus) is causally operative in the production of being through interpretation — and that Freud's unique insight into this topology was sustained by a Jewish hermeneutic tradition (the Midrash) of reading the letter literally, rather than by any natural truth.

    That is why the Stoics could be harassed by the Sceptics, whose critique is only sustained - paradoxically - from the supposition of a true of nature, even if they held it to be inaccessible.

20. #20

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.295

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

    Theoretical move: Lacan traces a historical progression of the father's function across tragedy—killed unknowingly (Oedipus), damned but knowing (Hamlet), humiliated (Claudel's Turelure)—to argue that only with Freud does the question "What is a father?" become properly articulable, revealing the Oedipus complex as the obscure, murderous condensation of a much older theological and mythological problematic.

    it is as a skeptic, as a student of Montaigne, as someone once put it, that Hamlet wonders, 'To be, or not to be'

21. #21

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.17

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as producing not a stable subject but a vanishing subject ("I think and I am not"), whose constitutive vacillation demands a structural guarantor—the Master Signifier as unique, absolutely depersonalised trait (einziger Zug)—which grounds the signifying chain and points toward the Subject Supposed to Know.

    Descartes' doubt, it has been underlined, nor am I the first to do it, is of course a doubt which is very different to sceptical doubt. Compared to Descartes' doubt, sceptical doubt entirely unfolds at the level of the question of the real.

22. #22

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1781

    Theoretical move: Kant's preface establishes that pure reason necessarily generates antinomies and contradictions when it oversteps the limits of experience, and proposes a "tribunal" of critical self-examination—the Critique of Pure Reason itself—as the only legitimate method to determine reason's extent, limits, and validity a priori, against both dogmatism and skepticism.

    the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities.

23. #23

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

    Theoretical move: Kant's Preface to the Second Edition performs a foundational epistemological reversal — the 'Copernican Revolution' — arguing that cognition must be reoriented so that objects conform to our faculties of knowing rather than vice versa, thereby establishing the conditions for a priori synthetic knowledge and setting metaphysics on the sure path of science.

    if we find those who are engaged in metaphysical pursuits, unable to come to an understanding as to the method which they ought to follow... we may then feel quite sure that they are far from having attained to the certainty of scientific progress

24. #24

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Critique of Pure Reason serves reason by replacing dogmatic metaphysics with a critical method that demarcates the limits of speculative reason, thereby protecting morality and religion from both dogmatism and scepticism, while preserving the public's rational convictions on their own proper, non-scholastic grounds.

    in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor yet to scepticism, which makes short work with the whole science of metaphysics

25. #25

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the central problem of pure reason is "How are synthetical judgements a priori possible?"—establishing that mathematics, physics, and metaphysics all rest on such judgements, and that critique (rather than dogmatic or skeptical procedure) is the only path to grounding them securely.

    the dogmatical use of reason without criticism leads to groundless assertions, against which others equally specious can always be set, thus ending unavoidably in scepticism

26. #26

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER II Of the Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding.

    Theoretical move: Kant's transcendental deduction establishes that the pure categories of the understanding are a priori conditions of possible experience—not derived from it—and that their ultimate ground lies in the originally synthetical unity of apperception ("I think"), which is the highest principle of all cognition insofar as it makes any conjunction of the manifold possible.

    the latter gave himself up entirely to scepticism—a natural consequence, after having discovered, as he thought, that the faculty of cognition was not trustworthy.

27. #27

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 21.

    Theoretical move: Kant refutes a "preformation-system" middle-ground account of the categories by showing it collapses into Humean skepticism: if the categories are merely subjective aptitudes rather than a priori principles grounding objective necessity, all cognitive judgements lose their claim to objective validity and knowledge dissolves into illusion. The positive summary then anchors the categories as conditions of the possibility of experience through the synthetic unity of apperception.

    Now this is just what the sceptic wants. For in this case, all our knowledge, depending on the supposed objective validity of our judgement, is nothing but mere illusion

28. #28

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION V. Sceptical Exposition of the Cosmological Problems presented in the four Transcendental Ideas.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that cosmological ideas systematically generate antinomies because they are structurally either "too large" or "too small" for any possible empirical conception of the understanding, and that this structural mismatch exposes the cosmological ideas as groundless fictions untethered from possible experience—a finding that motivates the sceptical/critical method over dogmatic metaphysics.

    This is the great utility of the sceptical mode of treating the questions addressed by pure reason to itself. By this method we easily rid ourselves of the confusions of dogmatism, and establish in its place a temperate criticism

29. #29

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > CHAPTER II. The Antinomy of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant introduces the Antinomy of Pure Reason as a structural counterpart to the Paralogisms: whereas the latter produces a one-sided illusion about the soul/subject, the Antinomy produces a genuine and unavoidable conflict (antithetic) in reason's attempt to grasp the unconditioned unity of objective conditions in phenomena, compelling reason either toward skepticism or dogmatism—neither of which is sound philosophy.

    it is at the same time compelled, either, on the one hand, to abandon itself to a despairing scepticism, or, on the other, to assume a dogmatical confidence

30. #30

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION II. Antithetic of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes the "antithetic of pure reason" as the structural self-contradiction reason falls into when it ventures beyond possible experience, and proposes the "sceptical method" — not scepticism — as the uniquely appropriate procedure for transcendental philosophy, which works by staging the conflict of opposed propositions to expose the illusory nature of their shared object rather than adjudicating between them.

    This method of watching, or rather of originating, a conflict of assertions...may be termed the sceptical method. It is thoroughly distinct from scepticism—the principle of a technical and scientific ignorance, which undermines the foundations of all knowledge

31. #31

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Polemics.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that dogmatism and scepticism are both insufficient stages in the development of reason, and that only the critical method—which examines reason's own powers and determines the necessary (not merely empirical) limits of cognition—can resolve the disputes raised by pure reason and establish secure grounds for a priori synthetic knowledge.

    scepticism is a resting place for reason, in which it may reflect on its dogmatical wanderings and gain some knowledge of the region in which it happens to be... but it cannot be its permanent dwelling-place.

32. #32

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

    Theoretical move: Kant surveys the history of pure reason by mapping its major revolutions along three axes—object (sensualism vs. intellectualism), origin (empiricism vs. rationalism), and method (naturalism vs. dogmatism vs. skepticism)—in order to position the critical path as the sole remaining viable route to satisfying reason's demand for systematic knowledge.

    they have now the choice of following either the dogmatical or the sceptical, while they are bound never to desert the systematic mode of procedure. When I mention… the latter, David Hume

33. #33

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION VII. Critical Solution of the Cosmological Problem.

    Theoretical move: Kant resolves the cosmological antinomy by exposing the transcendental illusion that treats phenomena as things-in-themselves; once this assumption is dropped, the opposed propositions (finite/infinite world) constitute a merely dialectical—not analytical—opposition, both of which can be false, thereby furnishing an indirect proof of transcendental idealism.

    This transcendental dialectic does not favour scepticism, although it presents us with a triumphant demonstration of the advantages of the sceptical method

34. #34

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Polemics.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure reason has no legitimate "polemic" sphere because all speculative assertions transcend possible experience and thus lack any criterion of truth; only the Critique itself, functioning as a supreme tribunal, can adjudicate these disputes by determining the rights and limits of reason—replacing the state-of-nature war of dogmatisms with a legal order of criticism, and positioning scepticism as a transitional provocation rather than a final resting place.

    scepticism is merely a means of awakening reason from its dogmatic dreams and exciting it to a more careful investigation into its own powers and pretensions.

35. #35

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.212

    LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

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

    a despairing skepticism... skepticism's sunny slipside: a confident voluntarism

36. #36

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

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

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

    This conclusion creates a skeptical impasse from which he will have to extricate himself, since one of the basic tenets of his philosophy, which opposes itself to skepticism, is that every problem of reason admits of a solution.

37. #37

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.175

    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.

    suspicious of everything and everyone, including the one woman he ever got close to, unwilling even to state what day of the week it is until he consults his calendar

38. #38

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

    Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

    Theoretical move: Anxiety, understood as a signal of the overproximity of object a rather than of lack, is structurally equivalent to the Gothic vampire figure; the symbolic order defends against the Real through negation, doubt, and repetition rather than interpretation, and psychoanalysis founds itself precisely on the rigorous registration of its own inability to know the Real - a 'belief without belief' that is not skepticism.

    But if in order to preserve itself psychoanalysis has to register its own radical inability to know, does it not consign itself to skepticism?... No, psychoanalysis is not a skepticism.

39. #39

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

    The End of All Things > How to Do Things with Actions: The Moral World

    Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Carl Christian Erhard Schmid's Kantian moral rationalism as a system built on a series of necessary impossibilities: pure rational action is theoretically impossible yet practically necessary, and this tension—mediated by concepts of the categorical imperative, respect, autonomy, and the postulate of God—transforms the natural world into a moral 'splace,' a space of rational-moral causality inscribed within phenomenal reality.

    the antiskeptical claim that there are universally valid principles

40. #40

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.124

    **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

    But if in order to preserve itself psychoanalysis has to register its own radical inability to know, does it not consign itself to skepticism? … No, psychoanalysis is not a skepticism.

41. #41

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.165

    **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.

    the tradition of detectives is that of the armchair rationalist, known less for his perceptiveness than for his skepticism; the detective is one who withdraws from the world of the senses, of which he remains infinitely suspicious

42. #42

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

    **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

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

    reason either clings more closely to its dogmatic assumptions or abandons itself to—and this is the option for which Kant reserved his impassioned put-down—a despairing skepticism

43. #43

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.219

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

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

    This conclusion creates a skeptical impasse from which he will have to extricate himself, since one of the basic tenets of his philosophy, which opposes itself to skepticism, is that every problem of reason admits of a solution.

44. #44

    The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.59

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Indirectly approaching the Word

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to Scripture demands a "radical hermeneutics" that refuses to reduce the Word to propositional content or factual claims, positing instead that the Word is encountered as a life-transforming event that dwells within but exceeds the words — analogous to subjectivity exceeding the flesh — and that genuine faith requires wrestling with, and even betraying, the literal text to reach a deeper truth.

    however interesting the work of the biblical scholars, the theologians, the fundamentalists, or the intellectual skeptics may be, the true depth of the text is not to be discovered by following their exacting methods.

45. #45

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

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter004.html_page_80"></span>God as greatest conceivable being: the philosophical naming of God

    Theoretical move: The passage traces how Descartes' Cogito and his ontological/causal argument for God's existence embed a philosophical naming of God into modern thought, showing that the innate idea of an infinite God cannot be self-generated by a finite mind — a move that inscribes theological naming within Enlightenment rationalism.

    In order to find this starting point he embraced the most all-encompassing skepticism. Yet, far from sinking into this murky world where nothing is known, Descartes found that he could only slide so far

46. #46

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.81

    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.

    Chrysippus was trying to determine a qualitative limit in the progressive or retrogressive operation of a sorites. Carneades could not grasp the point at which the quality actually made its appearance.

47. #47

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.102

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Hegel’s <span id="scholium_12_hegels_parallax.xhtml_IDX-834"></span>Parallax

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing's self-purifying immanence paradoxically inverts into free association and arbitrary decision, and that the unbridgeable gap between Hegel's *Phenomenology* and *Logic* — readable as a Möbius strip or cross-cap — is the Real/impossible at its purest, while the further reversal between dialectical skepticism and stable encyclopedic knowledge constitutes the ultimate "infinite judgment" of philosophy.

    Should we not include in our radical doubt this very opposition, and assert the highest 'infinite judgment' of philosophy: not only is Spirit a bone but radical dialectical skepticism is the stable reporting on an acquired knowledge?

48. #48

    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.

    Confronted with his patient's various resistances—particularly his skepticism toward the efficacy of the treatment

49. #49

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.221

    Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

    Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

    that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive . . . perhaps perhaps.

50. #50

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.250

    Russell Sbriglia > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a scholarly endnotes section providing bibliographic and argumentative scaffolding for a chapter on Melville, the sublime, and the Hegel-Lacan nexus; it is non-substantive in itself but indexes several load-bearing theoretical concepts (the sublime, fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, Appearance/Suprasensible) as they operate across Kant, Hegel, Žižek, and Lacan.

    Cavell sees literary romanticism in general as a response to the 'bargain' struck by Kant in an attempt to 'settle with skepticism (and dogmatism, or fanaticism)'

51. #51

    The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.102

    <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

    Theoretical move: Zupančič identifies two distinct Nietzschean conceptions of truth: one that identifies truth with the Real (as inaccessible, dangerous force requiring dynamical 'dilution'), and another grounded in perspectivity (a structural/topological disjunction where truth is internal to its situation) — arguing that conflating or choosing between them misreads both the passion for the Real at work in each and the specific way nuance functions in each configuration.

    The stance of the skeptical relativist is what Nietzsche identifies as passive nihilism... Nietzsche talks about 'the dear, gentle, lulling opium of skepticism,' and denounces the skeptic as 'a kind of security police.'

52. #52

    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.

    Skeptical truth pretends to exist 'outside life,' and to constitute a point of view on life.

53. #53

    The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.69

    <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that nihilism is not a general category subdivided into active and passive forms, but names precisely the mortifying tension between "willing nothingness" (active nihilism as passion for the Real) and "not willing" (passive nihilism as sedative defense against surplus excitement); these two forms are co-dependent and mutually constitutive, with passive nihilism requiring active nihilism as its inherent Other.

    passive nihilism (discussed here in the form of skepticism) is presented as a 'sedative,' as a defense against the radical and exciting character of active nihilism

54. #54

    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.

    A skeptic might object by saying what Hegel is calling an object 'in itself' is only an object for us (the world is only 'in our head').

55. #55

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.92

    **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.

    Hegel argues it is here that scepticism finds its natural place, for when the understanding is forced to see that its conceptual divisions lead it into incomprehension, it may come to doubt that we can ever arrive at a satisfactory grasp of how things are.

56. #56

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

    Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section mounts a sustained scholarly critique of Žižek's readings of Hegel, Kant, and Fichte in *Less than Nothing*, arguing that Žižek's key moves—positing ontological incompleteness, a Nietzschean stance on power, material contradiction, and a Badiouian 'Act'—are either philosophically unargued, dogmatically metaphysical, or genuinely non-Hegelian.

    The skeptical anxiety that we would thereby be treating being only as it is intelligible 'by our finite lights' is illusory anxiety that Hegel takes himself to have methodically destroyed in the Phenomenology

57. #57

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

    Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > In Need of Dogma?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's "gappy" ontology, unlike Kant's Doctrine of Method or the Pittsburgh School's neo-Hegelian frameworks, lacks a reflective dogmatic foundation (an "article of faith" grounded in subjective certainty), and that this deficiency — while philosophically consistent — renders his dialectical thinking politically and existentially unstable, unable to serve as a ground for hope, action, or mastery.

    Man's pursuit of truth and knowledge cannot be satisfied by Hume's skepticism and with purely empirical knowledge of what experience offers in the coordinates of space and time.

58. #58

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

    Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Caught in Their Butterfly Net

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Zhuang Zi's butterfly dream—as read through Lacan's Seminar XI—to argue that the subject (as doubt, deposition, and questioning) is structurally opposed to the ego/identity, and that ideology functions as the 'butterfly net' of identity-captivity, while critique of ideology works like dream-interpretation: accessing unconscious commitments from within, with no view from nowhere.

    On a first glance, this could seem like a straight forward skeptical paradox: How to know whether the butterfly or the philosopher is real, when they could both be 'dreamt' by the other?