Canonical general 245 occurrences

Structuralism

ELI5

Structuralism is the idea that things mean what they do not because of what they are in themselves but because of how they differ from other things in a system—like how the word "cat" means something because it's not "bat" or "mat." Lacan borrowed this idea to understand the unconscious as a kind of hidden language, but he also argued that this system always has a crack or hole in it that produces the subject.

Definition

Structuralism, as deployed across this corpus, names a dual theoretical object: (1) the mid-twentieth-century intellectual movement — associated above all with Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, and Althusser — that sought to explain human social and cultural phenomena through the analysis of self-regulating systems of differential relations rather than through individual acts, intentions, or historical development; and (2) Lacan's own methodological appropriation of this movement, which he simultaneously adopts, transforms, and ultimately marks as insufficient.

In the first register, structuralism's "basic premise" is that "all social activity constitutes a language insofar as it involves sign systems with their own intrinsic rules and grammar" (theory-keywords, p. 80). Its founding gesture — inherited from Saussure's distinction between langue and parole — is to privilege the synchronic system over its individual utterances, to locate meaning in differential relations rather than in positive terms, and to treat the human subject as an effect or placeholder of positional functions within that system. Lévi-Strauss becomes the exemplary figure: his analysis of kinship, myth, and totemism demonstrates that "it is at the level of matrimonial alliance, as opposed to natural generation ... that the fundamental exchanges take place" (Seminar XI, p. 165), and that the "elementary structures of kinship" constitute the human symbolic order as such.

Lacan's relation to structuralism is irreducibly ambivalent. He explicitly claims Saussurean-structuralist linguistics as the methodological ground of his "return to Freud" — the unconscious is structured like a language; analysts must master the "core components of the Saussurian structuralist apparatus" — while simultaneously distancing himself from the term as a public label. He insists that structure, for him, "is to be taken in the sense of what is most real, the real itself" (Seminar XVI, p. 19), not as a fashionable methodology. More decisively, Lacan introduces three moves that break with classical structuralism: (i) he refuses to reduce the subject to a mere position in the combinatory, insisting instead that the subject is the effect of a constitutive lack in the Other; (ii) he exceeds the synchronic totality of structure by introducing the Real as what the symbolic cannot absorb; and (iii) he critiques Lévi-Straussian structuralism for leaving "the function of the subject ... in suspense" (Seminar XIV, p. 239) and for reducing symbolic difference to homology rather than to the effacement of the trace.

Evolution

In Lacan's early seminars (return-to-freud period, roughly Seminars I–III), structuralism functions as an enabling methodological framework adopted largely without critical reserve. Lacan appropriates Saussure's two-network model (signifier/signified, synchrony/diachrony), Jakobson's binary phonology and the metaphor/metonymy axis, and Lévi-Strauss's kinship analysis to argue that the unconscious "speaks and functions" at the level of the signifier — that is, that Freud's condensation and displacement are simply special cases of metaphor and metonymy. In Seminar II, Lévi-Strauss's lecture on kinship is invoked as the structural-anthropological confirmation that the symbolic order of exchange "precedes" biological individuation (Seminar II, p. 314), and the essay "The Instance of the Letter" (1957) represents the high-water mark of this structuralist affiliation.

By the middle seminars (structuralist-ethics and object-a periods, Seminars VII–XI), the relation is more complex. Lacan continues to deploy the structuralist apparatus but marks its limits explicitly. In Seminar VII, he acknowledges that Lévi-Strauss "no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law" but fails to account for the mother/son prohibition — the gap Lacan fills with das Ding. In Seminar XI (1964), he asks pointedly whether the "functioning of La Pensée sauvage ... is one unconscious, but is it enough to accommodate the unconscious as such?" (Seminar XI, p. 28). He also positions structuralism (alongside hermeneutics) as a shared target of Ricoeur's critique, defending his structural reading against phenomenological absorption. Crucially, in this period Lacan begins to insist that "it is at the level of desire that we will be able to find the answer" to questions structuralism poses but cannot resolve (Seminar XI, p. 175).

In the later object-a seminars and beyond (Seminars XII–XX), structuralism is predominantly handled ambivalently as an external label. In Seminar XIII (1966), Lacan calls for a "cleansing operation" to specify what structuralism means for us, distinguishing his technical usage from the term's popular diffusion (Seminar XIII, p. 146). In Seminar XIV (1967), he explicitly distances himself from "structuralisms" in the plural: "What is common to what are being called lately the 'structuralisms'? It is to make the function of the subject depend on signifying articulation" — and he insists this is only the "preface," not the substance, of his teaching (Seminar XIV, p. 239). In Seminar XVI (1968), he accepts the structuralist label as a designation for "seriousness" but categorically rejects any equation with a philosophy or worldview (Seminar XVI, p. 3). By Seminar XX, he distinguishes his project from structuralism precisely through the concept of lalangue, which escapes any semiology (Seminar XX, p. 110).

Secondary authors in the corpus systematize these moves in diverse ways. Fink (The Lacanian Subject) argues that Lacan's departure from structuralism occurs along the axis of causation: structuralists "attempt to explain everything in terms of ... a more or less mathematically determinate combinatory" while Lacan insists on "that which interrupts the smooth functioning of this automatism" as irreducible (Lacanian Subject, p. 51). Copjec (Read My Desire) reads Lacan as anti-structuralist in the specific sense that "his diagrams are offered to the audience as antistructuralist" because they expose what cannot be mapped on any surface (October Books, p. 21). Boothby situates psychoanalysis "at the intersection between two great currents of contemporary theory, phenomenology and structuralism" (Freud as Philosopher, p. 286). Zupančič (What Is Sex?) argues that Lacan's move against structuralism consists in showing that pure differentiality presupposes a constitutive non-relation — a "surplus" — that structuralism cannot itself account for (What Is Sex?, p. 71).

Key formulations

Ethics of the Real: Kant and LacanAlenka Zupančič · 2000 (p.42)

if structuralism ultimately identifies the subject with structure (the Other), Lacan intervenes, at this point, in a very Kantian manner: he introduces the subject as a correlative to the lack in the Other

This is the most economical formula for Lacan's asymmetrical relation to structuralism: he accepts its de-psychologisation of the subject while rejecting its identification of subject with structure, producing the split subject as a Kantian-style remainder.

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1966 (p.239)

What is common to what are being called lately the 'structuralisms'? It is to make the function of the subject depend on signifying articulation.

Lacan's own late-seminar definition of the structural field he is both part of and exceeds: the subject's dependence on signifying articulation is necessary but insufficient; the body and sexual difficulty must be added.

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1967 (p.137)

To take the language-effect as object is indeed, in effect, what can be considered as the common factor in structuralism.

Provides Lacan's functional definition of structuralism as a research tendency united by its object — the language-effect — and explicitly positions his own discourse within this tendency while simultaneously noting its philosophical domestication.

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and JouissanceBruce Fink · 1995 (p.51)

Lacan parts ways with structuralism here, as structuralists attempt to explain everything in terms of the first level, that is, in terms of a more or less mathematically determinate combinatory which plays itself out without any reference whatsoever to subjects or objects.

Fink's most explicit formulation of the point of departure: the irreducibility of causation (objet a) is what distinguishes Lacanian theory from structuralism properly understood.

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1969 (p.166)

Structure is a word by which there is indicated the coming into play of the effect of language, starting from the fact that it a petitio principii to make of it an individual or collective function

Lacan's most ontologically radical re-definition of structure: it is not a representational function of a subject but the autonomous effect of language already operative in reality, making it a category of the Real rather than of the Symbolic alone.

Cited examples

Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment (bell/salivation) (other)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.114). Lacan sarcastically designates Pavlov as a 'structuralist avant la lettre': the experiment installs a symbolic stimulus (the bell) in place of a real object (food), demonstrating the primacy of the signifier over biological need. It illustrates the structural thesis — that conditioning already operates at the level of signifying substitution — while also exposing behaviourism's misrecognition of this fact.

Lévi-Strauss's village drawings (from Structural Anthropology — two groups of villagers draw their village differently, one in concentric circles, one divided in two) (case_study)

Cited by Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (p.151). Žižek invokes Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology to illustrate how the 'same' social object is experienced differently by different subject-positions, revealing an underlying antagonism that no single perspective can symbolize. The example grounds Žižek's structuralist-inflected theory of ideology as the cover for an unsymbolizable Real.

Eisenstein's montage theory (relational meaning through juxtaposition of film elements) (film)

Cited by Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.78). Kornbluh presents Eisenstein's montage as the precursor to structuralist theories of language: meaning arises not from individual elements but from their differential relations within a system. This establishes the historical and theoretical lineage running from Marxist film theory through structuralism to Lacanian film theory.

Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' (from Syntactic Structures) (literature)

Cited by Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.2). Lacan uses Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence to engage the structuralist project of formalising syntactic linkages, asking whether any signifier can be immediately contiguous to any other. The sentence is grammatical but apparently meaningless, which allows Lacan to distinguish grammatical structure from the function of sense and to position his own inquiry beyond structuralist formalisation.

Lévi-Strauss's analysis of matrimonial alliance (Elementary Structures of Kinship) showing that fundamental social exchanges occur at the level of the signifier rather than biological descent (social_theory)

Cited by Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.165). Lacan credits structuralism — specifically Lévi-Strauss — with demonstrating that it is at the level of symbolic exchange, not biological generation, that the fundamental combinatory governing social functioning is inscribed. This supports the argument that the unconscious is structured like a language by showing that even the most basic social institution (kinship) operates through a signifying combinatory.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether Lacan's structural approach should be understood as a genuine variant of structuralism or as its fundamental overcoming.

Fink (The Lacanian Subject, p. 55): Even when structuralism was 'alive and well,' Lacan defended both structure and the subject simultaneously, maintaining a rigorous structural framework that never collapses into poststructuralist dissolution of the subject — placing him within the structuralist tradition, albeit in a 'Gödelian' variant that insists on incompleteness. — cite: the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink p. 55
Copjec (Read My Desire, p. 21): Lacan's diagrams are explicitly 'antistructuralist,' offered as a critique of the structuralist project of mapping society on a flat surface; his move to the Real is precisely what separates him from the structural tradition that treats the symbolic as sufficient. — cite: october-books-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-october p. 21

This tension reflects a genuine fork in the secondary literature: whether Lacan's theory is best understood as a radicalized internal development of structuralism or as its post-structuralist critique.

Whether structuralism adequately captures the logic of the unconscious or whether the Freudian unconscious necessarily exceeds any structural account.

Lacan in Seminar XI (p. 165, via Lévi-Strauss): 'It is modern structuralism that has brought this out best, by showing that it is at the level of matrimonial alliance ... that the fundamental exchanges take place' — endorsing structuralism as the framework that best illuminates how sexual reality operates at the symbolic level. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p. 165
Lacan in Seminar XI (p. 28): 'The functioning of La Pensée sauvage ... is one unconscious, but is it enough to accommodate the unconscious as such? And if it is able to do so, does it accommodate the Freudian unconscious?' — explicitly marking the limit of Lévi-Straussian structural anthropology as insufficient to account for desire as an object. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p. 28

Within Lacan's own Seminar XI, these two positions co-exist in productive tension: structuralism is both the best available tool and constitutively inadequate to the specifically Freudian dimension.

Whether Lacan should be identified with structuralism as a public intellectual position or whether he must be sharply distinguished from it.

Hook et al. (Reading Lacan's Écrits, p. 69): 'Lacan powerfully contextualized the key concepts of psychoanalysis within his own take on a structuralist approach to language' — presenting structuralism as Lacan's positive methodological identity, distinguishing him from positivist and medical approaches. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t p. 69
Lacan in Seminar XIV (p. 26): 'including that of structuralism, which for the moment benefiting from a certain fashion, is not the least to inspire my suspicion' — explicitly naming structuralism as a label he finds suspect, treating it as an external nomination rather than a self-chosen affiliation. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-14-1 p. 26

This is the tension between the reception of Lacan (who is read as a structuralist) and Lacan's own self-positioning (who resists the label), and it generates persistent ambiguity in the secondary literature.

Across frameworks

vs Object Oriented Ontology

Lacanian: For Lacan, structure is not a neutral matrix of objects with withdrawn essences but the effect of language-as-Real: it is constituted by a lack, a missing signifier, that makes the whole field non-totalisable. The subject is the void produced by this lack, not an object among objects. Structure is inseparable from the signifier, and the signifier is inseparable from loss (the subject's fading under representation).

Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Graham Harman, etc.) insists on the withdrawal of objects from all relations, including linguistic ones: no access to the 'real object' is available through language, sign, or structure. OOO celebrates a flat ontology in which signs, structures, and concepts are simply more objects among objects, each equally withdrawn from full disclosure.

Fault line: OOO treats structural/linguistic relations as merely one type of object-relation among many, all equally failing to access real withdrawal. Lacanian theory insists that the symbolic relation is ontologically privileged and that the Real is not withdrawn essence but the impossibility constitutive of the signifying field itself — not hidden behind objects but internal to their articulation.

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: Lacanian structuralism brackets the question of reification and commodity fetishism in order to focus on the formal operations of the signifier. For Lacan, ideology is not primarily a distortion of an underlying rational totality but a libidinal investment in the symptom; the subject does not misrecognise true social relations so much as enjoy the very gap between the Real and its symbolic representation.

Frankfurt School: The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) is suspicious of structuralism as a form of identity thinking: reducing social relations to formal combinatories risks replicating the administered logic of capitalist rationalisation. Adorno's 'negative dialectics' insists on the non-identity of concept and object against all attempts at systematic closure, including structuralist ones.

Fault line: Frankfurt Critical Theory sees structural formalism as potentially complicit with the reifying rationality of late capitalism, whereas Lacanian theory insists that the constitutive lack in structure is precisely what resists reification — the Real is not the administered totality but its immanent failure.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: Lacan's structural approach is explicitly designed to displace the humanist subject of self-actualisation: the subject is not the origin of meaning but its effect, not a self-present unity but a divided function produced by the signifier. 'Authentic' selfhood in the humanistic sense is precisely what the structural and psychoanalytic perspectives diagnose as imaginary capture (the ego's misrecognition of itself as autonomous centre).

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic self-actualisation psychology (Maslow, Rogers) treats the person as a pre-given source of potential whose authentic development requires conditions of unconditional positive regard and freedom from external determination. Structure and language are understood instrumentally as means of expression, not as constitutive conditions of subjectivity.

Fault line: The humanistic tradition posits a pre-given, authentic self that structure merely expresses or constrains; Lacanian structuralism insists there is no subject prior to the structural cut of language — the subject is the scar left by the signifier's insertion into the living being, not the living being itself.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (234)

#01

Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.42

The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is not located beyond causal determination but emerges precisely within it, at the point where the causal chain fails to close on itself—a "crack in the Other"—and that this structure mirrors Lacan's move of introducing the subject as correlative to the lack in the Other, making guilt (not moral conscience) the paradoxical mode of the subject's participation in freedom.

if structuralism ultimately identifies the subject with structure (the Other), Lacan intervenes, at this point, in a very Kantian manner: he introduces the subject as a correlative to the lack in the Other
#02

Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.54

The Subject of Freedom > What subject? > Notes

Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section listing scholarly references; the only substantive theoretical gesture is note 11's contrast between the structuralist/Althusserian interpellated subject and the psychoanalytic subject as the remainder or failure of interpellation.

the difference between the subject of structuralism (in this case Althusser's subject) and the subject of psychoanalysis
#03

Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.78

**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The capitalist phantasmagoria**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marxist film theory is grounded in a structural homology between the capitalist logic of appearance/essence contradiction and the cinematic apparatus itself, and traces this argument through Eisenstein's montage theory and Benjamin's aura theory as two foundational attempts to wield cinema as a dialectical-critical instrument.

Montage theory anticipates later structuralist theories of language and literature, which locate meaning in the relation among elements in a system, rather than intrinsically in the discrete elements themselves.
#04

Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.92

**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The biggest non-Marxism is the biggest theory: Auteurism then and now**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that auteurism represents the constitutively non-Marxist strand of film theory that displaced the medium's social power onto individual genius, and traces how even politically inflected auteurism (Cahiers du Cinema's Althusserian symptomatic reading) failed to take hold, ceding ground to a cultural-studies/media-studies hybrid that further individualized and de-collectivized film theory.

It began to articulate film form with ideology and film criticism with the critique of ideology.
#05

The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

**(F) THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS—REALITY**

Theoretical move: This passage is a collection of editorial footnotes and translator's notes to Freud's *The Interpretation of Dreams*, providing contextual commentary on terminology, translation choices, and theoretical disputes (e.g., Freud vs. Jung); it is largely non-substantive for Lacanian theory, though footnote 9 explicitly links Freud's attention to word-presentations at the syllable level to Lacan and structuralism.

Throughout the text Freud lays considerable stress on word-presentations, down to the syllable level. This practice forms the basis of later revisionist psychoanalytic theories, structuralist and linguistic in orientation, and associated with Jacques Lacan and his disciples.
#06

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.21

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

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.

Lacan then provides examples of three different notions of language he rules to be invalid and irrelevant with respect to the strict scientific-qua-linguistic conceptualization of language in Saussurian structuralism.
#07

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.22

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

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

analysts 'should,' although they often do not, readily appreciate and embrace the core components of the Saussurian structuralist apparatus.
#08

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.52

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

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian analytic practice turns on distinguishing the Imaginary (ego-centred empty speech) from the Symbolic (unconscious full speech), and that the compulsive repetition of neurotic symptoms is explained through a Hegelian–Kojèvian logic of unrecognised desire, whereby the analyst's appropriate recognition of transferential demands can finally dissolve symptomatic repetition.

The structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, as the epitomization of mid-twentieth-century structuralism, then promptly resurfaces (359, 5).
#09

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

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The training of analysts to come

Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is argued to be a return to the structures of language operative in the unconscious, which grounds a critique of medicalized, dogmatic analytic training and calls for a perpetually self-renewing pedagogy open to the structuralized human sciences and mathematics — with the Real (as the impossible-yet-condition-of-possibility) underwriting both the necessity and the limits of analytic practice.

structuralism's aggressive program of formalizing in mathematical manners the foundations of the human sciences
#10

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.69

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > A sign of alarm

Theoretical move: This passage contextualizes Lacan's 1957 essay "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching" within the institutional conflicts of French psychoanalysis, arguing that Lacan's theoretical insistence on humanistic, structuralist, and intersubjective foundations for analytic training was simultaneously a militant political intervention against the positivist-medical orthodoxy represented by the IPA and Nacht.

Lacan powerfully contextualized the key concepts of psychoanalysis within his own take on a structuralist approach to language
#11

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.114

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Portrait of the unconscious as a young dog

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the primacy of the signifier — demonstrated through Pavlov's conditioning experiment, Saussurean linguistics, and Augustinian semiotics — is the foundational principle of psychoanalytic practice, such that the unconscious, structured like a language, enslaves the subject through signifying chains, and clinical cure proceeds by uncovering the subject's relation to key signifiers rather than eliminating symptoms.

Lacan sarcastically designates Pavlov as a structuralist avant la lettre
#12

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

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The number two is odd

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic dimension irreducibly introduces a third term into the analyst-analysand dyad, making "two" structurally odd (*impair*), and uses this mathematical-structuralist move to critique ego psychology's reduction of drive to instinct, to align psychoanalysis with conjectural sciences, and to expose how the IPA's group dynamics reproduce the imaginary mechanisms of identification Freud himself theorized.

Lacan at this point is taking a structuralist stance, and argues that psychoanalysis is not aligned with exact, natural, 'positive' sciences
#13

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.131

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

Theoretical move: This contextual introduction argues that "The Instance of the Letter" must be read as a multi-front intervention — into structural linguistics, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel via Kojève), the politics of psychoanalytic institutions, and the art of rhetoric — in order to grasp the full theoretical stakes of Lacan's reinvention of the Freudian unconscious through the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, and the letter.

The essay concerns psychoanalysis in relation to the 'science' of structural linguistics which was rapidly gaining popularity in France.
#14

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

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

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

Lacan's critique of structural linguistics—discussed at length below—partly relies on the importance of the effects and practices of language that are inexplicable by structure alone.
#15

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.255

[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > Context

Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes Lacan's "Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presentation" as a theoretical summation spanning Seminars I–VII, framing the Lacan/Lagache debate as a contest between structuralism and existential-phenomenological orientations, with the key difference lying in how structure, personality development, and the direction of the cure are conceived.

a theoretical constellation from which Lacan thinks that structuralism was trying to break; a break which contained a lesson psychoanalysis should learn from.
#16

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.256

[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > I. Structure and the subject

Theoretical move: Lacan's commentary on Lagache's paper argues that structure must be understood in strictly formal, linguistic-mathematical terms (not naturalistic or organismic ones), such that signifying structure is not an abstract beyond but actively functions in the real—shaping organisms, producing the barred subject, and establishing the priority of the Other's discourse over any putative being-in-itself of the child.

Lacan begins his reply by noting the widespread use of the concept of structure in the human sciences.
#17

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

[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (letters R–S) from the book "Reading Lacan's Écrits," listing terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

structuralism [21], [52], [62], [255], [258]
#18

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.138

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

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

This idea of the letter complicates the Saussurean explanation of signification, which is Lacan's overall purpose in this section.
#19

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.13

E M B R A C I N G THE VOID

Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Lacanian shift from thematic to structural analysis—reframing the Oedipus complex in terms of language and symbolic castration rather than literal familial drama—provides the conceptual foundation for a distinctly Lacanian theory of religion, in which the sacred is grounded not in divine presence but in the subject's primordial relation to a constitutive Void (the unconscious).

Lacan's crucial move is a shift from a thematic to a structural analysis.
#20

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.27

Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship > Lacanian Heresy

Theoretical move: By introducing the three Lacanian registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) through a rereading of the Rat Man case, the passage argues that the RSI triad constitutes a comprehensive rewriting of psychoanalytic theory: the Imaginary grounds ego-formation and alienation, the Symbolic structures the unconscious through signifying excess, and the Real names the traumatic, impossible kernel that ordinary reality functions to ward off.

Drawing on the legacy of structuralist linguistics, especially on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, Lacan launches a radical reinterpretation of Freud's essential discovery under the rallying cry that 'the unconscious is structured like a language.'
#21

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.65

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

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates a double function with respect to das Ding: it defensively separates the subject from the Thing (through the big Other, law, grammar, the paternal metaphor) while simultaneously, through its constitutive excess over the signified and its horizon of semantic indeterminacy, reopening pathways toward the Thing — making the signifier both the wall against and the route back to the abyssal Real.

The breakthrough of Saussurean linguistics was precisely to reject the tempting illusion of any simple binarism of word and object. Saussure insisted instead on a conception of the sign that located meaning less in simple correspondence to things than in the diacritical relation of every sign to the network of other signs.
#22

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.130

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

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

The paradox discovered by Saussure is that the signifier is capable of representing an absent object or situation only because it is situated in a sprawling network of differences with other signifiers
#23

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***L*** > **language**

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

Lacan takes up Saussure's theory that language is a structure composed of differential elements... Langage becomes, for Lacan, the single paradigm of all structures.
#24

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Structure**

Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

This application of structural analysis to anthropology launched the structuralist movement by showing how the Saussurean concept of structure could be applied to an object of enquiry other than language. Lacan was heavily influenced by all three of these thinkers, and in this sense he can be seen as part of the structuralist movement.
#25

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***T*** > **time**

Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of time constitutes a double break with linear temporality: logical time replaces chronometric time with a dialectical intersubjective structure (tripartite: instant of seeing / time for understanding / moment of concluding), while retroaction and anticipation replace linear developmental sequences with a non-linear psychic temporality in which present, past and future mutually condition one another.

Lacan's increasing stress, beginning in the 1950s, on synchronic or timeless STRUCTURES rather than on developmental 'stages'
#26

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***A*** > **algebra**

Theoretical move: Lacan's algebraic formalisation of psychoanalysis is theoretically motivated by three interlinked aims: scientific legitimacy, integral transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, and the prevention of imaginary (intuitive) understanding in favour of symbolic manipulation — the mathemes and associated symbols thus function as epistemic and pedagogical devices, not mere notation.

Just as Claude Lévi-Strauss uses quasi-mathematical formulae in an attempt to set anthropology on a more scientific footing, Lacan attempts to do the same for psychoanalysis.
#27

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***L*** > **linguistics**

Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with linguistics is neither a straightforward application nor a faithful borrowing: he selectively imports Saussurean and Jakobsonian concepts (signifier, metaphor/metonymy, enunciation/statement) and deliberately modifies them for psychoanalytic ends—coining 'linguistérie' to mark this irreducible difference between linguistics and psychoanalysis.

Lévi-Strauss who, in the 1940s, had begun to apply the methods of structural linguistics to non-linguistic cultural data (myth, kinship relations, etc.), thus giving birth to 'structural anthropology'
#28

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **signifying chain**

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

Lacan thus combines in one concept the two types of relationship ('syntagmatic' and 'associative') which Saussure argued existed between signs, though for Lacan, the relationship is between signifiers, not signs.
#29

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Science**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving and ambivalent relationship to science, arguing that his model of psychoanalysis oscillates between claiming scientific status (via mathematical formalisation, the isolation of objet petit a as its object) and disavowing it (as a "delusion" awaiting science), while insisting throughout that psychoanalysis operates the "subject of science" and must align with structural linguistics rather than natural sciences.

the arrival on the scene of structural linguistics redressed the imbalance by providing an equally exact paradigm for the conjectural sciences
#30

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Symbolic**

Theoretical move: The passage defines the Symbolic as the central order in Lacan's tripartite schema, arguing that it constitutes the essentially linguistic, law-governed, and totalising dimension of human subjectivity—irreducible to biology, structuring the Imaginary, and encompassing the Unconscious, the Other, the Death Drive, and Lack—while distinguishing it sharply from Freud's 'symbolism' as fixed bi-univocal meaning.

Lacan makes it clear that his concept of the symbolic order owes much to the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss
#31

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***A*** > **art**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's engagement with art is not literary criticism or psychobiography but a methodological demonstration: works of art serve as models for how the analyst should read the analysand's discourse as a text, foregrounding the signifier over the signified, and as illustrative metaphors for psychoanalytic concepts — making psychoanalysis irreducibly a clinical practice rather than a general hermeneutic metadiscourse.

Lacan is not merely aligning himself with the structuralist movement… but is rather illustrating the way in which the analyst should proceed when listening to and interpreting the discourse of the analysand.
#32

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Signifier**

Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's transformation of the Saussurean signifier: by asserting the primacy and autonomy of the signifier over the signified, grounding it in differential structure, and defining it as "that which represents a subject for another signifier," Lacan reconstitutes language as the field of the Other and the unconscious as an effect of the signifier's operation on the subject.

the notion of structure and that of signifier appear inseparable
#33

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.133

**X**

Theoretical move: Lacan extends the inverted bouquet/vase optical schema by introducing a plane mirror to model the reflexive (narcissistic) relation to the other, distinguishing two narcissisms and showing how the ego-ideal (Ichideal) as the captivating image of the other structures the imaginary order of reality and libidinal being—against pseudo-evolutionary stage theories inherited from Ferenczi.

In taking up this structural point of view, we are directly following Freud, because that is where he ended up. The final development of his theory distanced itself from analogical evolutionary adventures.
#34

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.47

BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

Theoretical move: By tracing Hamlet's two modes of identification—with the specular image i(a) and with the lost object a—Lacan distinguishes the imaginary register from a remainder that escapes specularization, using the cross-cap topology to show that minus-phi (the phallus as lack) and objet petit a share a status irreducible to the specular image, thereby framing anxiety as the privileged passageway between cosmism and the object of desire.

Everything that Claude Levi-Strauss says about the function of magic and the function of myth has its value, on the condition that we know that it's a matter of the relationship with this object that holds the status of the object of desire.
#35

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.28

BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic teaching cannot rest on mere cataloguing or analogical methods, but must operate through a "function of the key" — the signifying function — grounded in the unary trait as the primordial signifier that precedes the subject and justifies any ideal of straightforwardness in teaching.

through their notation in a structural relationship, they are the means by which I'm trying to keep up the level necessary for an understanding that will not be misleading
#36

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.42

BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the hiatus between the mirror stage (specular/imaginary) and the signifier (symbolic) is not a temporal discontinuity in his teaching but a structural articulation, where the specular image is always-already dependent on ratification by the big Other; he further stages this through a three-phase cosmology (world → stage → world-laden-by-stage) to distinguish Lévi-Straussian analytic reason from psychoanalytic reason grounded in the primacy of the signifier over any homogeneous materialism.

the play of structure, the play of the combinatory that is so powerfully articulated in Claude Levi-Strauss's disquisition, would merely join up with the structure of the brain itself
#37

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.34

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

Theoretical move: Lacan frames the four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) as requiring a limit-approach analogous to infinitesimal calculus, then grounds the claim that "the unconscious is structured like a language" in Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, arguing that a presubjective, combinatory symbolic order organizes human relations prior to any subject formation.

I will illustrate it by something that is materialized, at what is certainly a scientific level, by the field that is explored, structured, elaborated by Claude [Lévi-Strauss]
#38

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.168

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Freudian concept of libido as the effective presence of desire (not a generalized psychical energy) from the Jungian neutralization of libido into archetype and psychical energy, and then critiques hermeneutics (Ricoeur) for appropriating the dimension of the unconscious as rupture/lack while subordinating it to a philosophy of historical signs and meaning.

it objects to structuralism, as it appears in the works of Levi-Strauss
#39

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Theoretical move: Lacan defends the reference to Freud's desire and the hysteric's desire as structural rather than psychological, arguing that desire must be positioned as an object rather than as a ground of original subjectivity — a move shared by both Socrates and Freud that defines the properly Freudian unconscious.

the functioning of 'Primitive Thinking' (la Pensée sauvage), which places at the basis of the statutes of society, is one unconscious, but is it enough to accommodate the unconscious as such?
#40

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.175

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that modern science establishes a deliberate "relation of non-relation" with the unconscious combinatory, and that the question of this disconnection must be pursued at the level of desire — specifically, the desire that subtends scientific discourse itself — as a condition for reflecting on the scientificity of psychoanalysis.

At a time when the combinatory is coupled to the capture of sexuality, set theory cannot emerge.
#41

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the reality of the unconscious is irreducibly sexual, and grounds this claim by showing that sexual division introduces the link between sex and death (individual mortality in service of species survival), while modern structuralism reveals that the fundamental level of this reality is not biological but symbolic—the level of the signifier, matrimonial alliance, and combinatory exchange.

It is modern structuralism that has brought this out best, by showing that it is at the level of matrimonial alliance, as opposed to natural generation... that the fundamental exchanges take place
#42

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

Theoretical move: Lacan uses animal conditioning experiments (cross-modal frequency equivalence) to probe the boundary between perceptual structure and the signifier, arguing that pure numerical frequency in Pavlovian signals raises the question of the realism of number without yet attaining the full status of the signifier—a limit that only the counting experimenter crosses.

It is not yet a question, perhaps, of something to which we might give the full status of signifier, except for those of us who are counting the frequencies.
#43

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

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

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

primitive science has taken root in a mode of thinking which, playing on a combinatory, on such oppositions as those of Yin and Yang, water and fire, hot and cold, make them lead the dance
#44

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.230

THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Theoretical move: Lacan affirms Miller's formulation "Lacan against Hegel" as closer to the truth than Green's reading of Lacan as "son of Hegel," insisting that the alienation of a subject constituted in an exterior field is radically distinct from Hegelian self-consciousness alienation — though he refuses to frame this as a philosophical debate.

he came up to me, shook my paw, at least morally, and said, The death of structuralism, you are the son of Hegel.
#45

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both Freud's desire and the hysteric's desire are structural rather than psychological references: Freud's desire is an "original desire" that governs the transmission of psychoanalysis, and like Socrates' desire, it situates desire not as a property of a founding subjectivity but in the position of an object — thereby distinguishing the strictly Freudian unconscious from structuralist accounts (Lévi-Strauss's 'Primitive Thinking').

the functioning of 'Primitive Thinking' (la Pensée sauvage), which places at the basis of the statutes of society, is one unconscious, but is it enough to accommodate the unconscious as such?
#46

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.39

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

Theoretical move: Lacan demarcates the Freudian unconscious from all prior and contemporary "romantic" or philosophical conceptions of the unconscious by establishing that Freud's unconscious is structured like language—it "speaks and functions" at the level of the signifier, just as elaborately as consciousness, and is therefore irreducible to any obscure primordial will or the merely non-conscious.

Freud's unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation… what Freud opposes is the revelation that at the level of the unconscious there is something at all points homologous with what occurs at the level of the subject—this thing speaks
#47

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

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

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

It is modern structuralism that has brought this out best, by showing that it is at the level of matrimonial alliance, as opposed to natural generation...that the fundamental exchanges take place
#48

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.167

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

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the break between signifying systems and sexual reality (illustrated through the history of science separating astronomy from astrology) poses the central question of whether the unconscious represents an archaic junction between thought and sexuality—a question that Lacan uses to distinguish his position from Jung's.

Claude Levi-Strauss emphasizes, than one can say that everything in primitive magic is phantasy and mystification, since an enormous collation of quite usable experiences is contained in it
#49

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Freudian libido as the effective presence of desire — irreducible to Jungian psychical energy or hermeneutic interpretation — by opposing it to both the archetypalism of Jung and Ricoeur's hermeneutics, which neutralize the radical cut that defines the unconscious.

it objects to structuralism, as it appears in the works of Levi-Strauss
#50

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

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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

We see this in set theory. At a time when the combinatory is coupled to the capture of sexuality, set theory cannot emerge.
#51

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

Theoretical move: Lacan defends his structural approach against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics by arguing that the topology of subject/Other division already accounts for drive dynamics, with the partial drive situated on the side of the living being called to subjectivity — thereby integrating sexuality into a structuralist framework rather than opposing the two.

in giving dominance to structure I was neglecting the dynamics so evident in our experience
#52

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230

THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Theoretical move: Lacan explicitly endorses the formulation "Lacan against Hegel," distinguishing his account of the subject—constituted by an exterior field—from Hegel's alienation of self-consciousness, while insisting this is not a philosophical debate but a structural one.

The death of structuralism, you are the son of Hegel
#53

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

Theoretical move: Lacan uses animal conditioning experiments (cross-modal frequency equivalence) to probe the boundary between perceptual structure and the signifier, suggesting that pure numerical frequency in the Pavlovian signal raises—but does not yet resolve—the question of the realism of number and the conditions under which something attains the full status of a signifier.

allows us perhaps to go a little further concerning the strictly perceptual structure.
#54

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

**Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**

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

it is enough to approach the function of language for there to be introduced a certain type of division which is not unambiguous, which is something that is completely radical, and by the situation of the fact that in this radical we are so implicated that we are only subjects... it is nothing other than what is called structure.
#55

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

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 2 December 1964**

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

What is it about? About structuralism, you can take my word for it, about syntactic structure, syntax.
#56

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

http://www.lacaninireland.com

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

He introduced his subject matter, Syntactic structures, by specifying it as having a goal: how can we establish the formalisation, the algebraic signs... which will allow there to be produced in the English language something grammatical
#57

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.177

**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.

if analysts consider the unconscious as empty, they are much closer to Claude Lévi-Strauss than they say.
#58

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.

if analysts consider the unconscious as empty, they are much closer to Claude Lévi-Strauss than they say.
#59

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

**Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965** > PRESENTATION BY Mr YVES DUROUX

Theoretical move: Duroux's presentation of Frege's *Grundlagen der Arithmetik* performs a foundational theoretical move for Lacanian psychoanalysis: it shows that the sequence of natural numbers cannot be grounded in any psychological subject or empirical activity of collecting/naming, but only in a purely logical relation between concept and object — with zero defined by self-contradiction (the concept of the non-identical-to-itself), thereby making Lack the originary operator from which the successor function and the entire number sequence is generated.

This reduction of the psychological can take place in two phases... By a separation that Frege carries out in the domain of what he calls... the domain of the Vorstellungen.
#60

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

http://www.lacaninireland.com

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

This example is found at the beginning of the work in question. It introduces something which is to be distinguished from the end of this work, namely, the constitution or the initiation, the outline of a reasoning about syntactic structure
#61

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

**Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**

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

it is enough to approach the function of language for there to be introduced a certain type of division which is not unambiguous, which is something that is completely radical, and by the situation of the fact that in this radical we are so implicated that we are only subjects... and that it is nothing other than what is called structure.
#62

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 2 December 1964**

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

What is it about? About structuralism, you can take my word for it, about syntactic structure, syntax.
#63

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

**Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**

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

a structural chain, that a distribution whose essence is properly speaking to be signifying
#64

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.82

**Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Möbius strip and its cuts to furnish a structural (non-metaphorical) account of the barred subject ($) and its relation to the non-specular objet a, arguing that the strip resulting from cutting a Möbius strip is applicable to the torus and models the subject, while the discal residue from cutting the projective plane models the o-object as non-specular.

a model, as one might say, if you wish, of historical method as it can be guided by structuralist considerations which guide us here in so far as they are employed with psychoanalytic references.
#65

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER

Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs, arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between Subject and Other (via the Mirror Stage) and between Subject and Ego Ideal (via Schema R), while the Symbolic field alone provides the third term—the Name of the Father—that structures the whole process, inaccessible by any direct route.

to mark the limits of agreement of this thinking - and no doubt of all psychoanalytic thinking - with modern structuralism.
#66

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

**Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses his travelogue of the US and Mexico to articulate a theoretical distinction between two modes of the past: a "past without repetition" (the inert, settled American suburban milieu) versus a past structured by repetition (the properly psychoanalytic dimension), and closes by positioning his own linguistic/structuralist programme as needing rigorous clarification against the dilution of "structuralism" as a fashionable rubric.

the word structuralism. It is here, rather, that it is going to be a matter of carrying out a very serious cleansing operation in order to be able to say all the same what structuralism is for us.
#67

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.34

A - The problem of the suture

Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture—the logical operation linking lack to the chain of signifiers—is not merely a formal linguistic procedure but requires the bodily, psychoanalytic dimension of the object (objet petit a / partial objects) as mediator between thing and cause; it advances a ternary (triangular) logic over binary structuralist opposition to account for the cutting-up of both signifier and signified, with the phallus as the vanishing term that holds the system together.

The embarrassment comes here from the fact that any direct reference to the signified would ruin the structuralist approach, since its accession by way of the signifier creates the necessary detour for an indirect, relative and correlative apprehension.
#68

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.5

**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the theoretical stakes of the "subject as cut" — the split between truth and knowledge, Wirklichkeit and Realität — and grounds his structuralism in topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Graph of Desire), arguing that the analyst's position is defined by, and must accommodate, this constitutive cut rather than escaping it through subjectivist laxity.

if my teaching has a sense and if it is consistent with the structuralism that it highlights... in order to ground the structuralism formulation
#69

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

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

Theoretical move: The passage, presented by André Green as a commentary on Lacan's o-object, argues that the psychoanalytic subject is constituted through the effacing of the trace—a logic linking the Death Drive, the Name of the Father, castration, and metonymy—and that this logic of effacement (cutting/suturing) is what structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) fails to capture, reducing symbolic difference to mere homology rather than recognizing the barred lack as the cause of desire.

there is situated the divorce with all non-psychoanalytic structuralist thinking: in the visible/invisible opposition, in the perceived/known opposition, we bring into play the order of truth, but in so far as this truth always passes by way of the problem of the effacing of the trace.
#70

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.146

**Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses his American travelogue—observations about Pop Art, psychiatric complacency, university audiences, Mexican hieroglyphs, and the spread of structuralism—to theorize a distinction between a "past without repetition" (inert cultural accumulation) and the psychoanalytically operative past structured by repetition, and to locate the objet petit a in pre-Columbian religious iconography as a marginal illustration of the concept.

the word structuralism. It is here, rather, that it is going to be a matter of carrying out a very serious cleansing operation in order to be able to say all the same what structuralism is for us.
#71

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

**Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the Möbius strip and its topological transformations (cutting, doubling, the toric strip, the projective plane, and the discal residue) as the structural support for the barred subject ($) and the non-specular objet petit a, arguing that the conjunction of identity and difference proper to subjectivity can only be rigorously grounded in these topological—not metaphorical—structures, and that distinctions between real and imaginary reversal depend entirely on which surface-structure is in play.

a model, as one might say, if you wish, of historical method as it can be guided by structuralist considerations which guide us here in so far as they are employed with psychoanalytic references
#72

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER

Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs—from the Mirror Stage to the L Schema and Schema R—arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between the subject and the Other, and between the subject and the ego ideal, while the symbolic field alone provides the third term (Name of the Father) that structures the whole process.

to mark the limits of agreement of this thinking - and no doubt of all psychoanalytic thinking - with modern structuralism.
#73

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be rigorously understood as a "cut" (not a subjectivist position), and uses this to articulate the analyst's impossible-but-necessary position; he connects the Möbius strip and cross-cap as topological figures that make the constituting cut of the subject graspable, while distinguishing Wirklichkeit (realizable analytic relation) from Realität (the impossible Real that determines failure).

if my teaching has a sense and if it is consistent with the structuralism that it highlights, if it was able to be pursued and be built up from year to year, it seems to me that it is rather normal to consider that it found favour in the fact that in order to ground the structuralism formulation
#74

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.34

A - The problem of the suture

Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture is not a mere logical operation but is grounded in the body's structure: castration enacts the rupture of signifying concatenation, the phallus (-phi) functions as the vanishing third term in a ternary (rather than binary) structure, and the object mediates the passage from thing to cause — thereby both accomplishing and exposing the suture within signification.

The embarrassment comes here from the fact that any direct reference to the signified would ruin the structuralist approach, since its accession by way of the signifier creates the necessary detour for an indirect, relative and correlative apprehension.
#75

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

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

What is common to what are being called lately the 'structuralisms'? It is to make the function of the subject depend on signifying articulation.
#76

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.26

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

Theoretical move: This passage is largely a framing/administrative seminar introduction in which Lacan contextualizes the publication of his Écrits, defends the seminar format, distances himself from structuralism as a fashion, and briefly gestures toward the theoretical stakes of the year's work—notably the repetition of the unary stroke as grounding the division of the subject, and a passing remark on transference as a concept illuminated by the Eliza machine analogy.

including that of structuralism, which for the moment benefiting from a certain fashion, is not the least to inspire my suspicion
#77

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.98

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

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation from both Marxist and idealist versions, and uses this to argue that the objet petit a — exemplified by the breast as an unrepresentable object — is what supplies for the lack in Selbstbewusstsein, with the analyst necessarily occupying the position of this object, which grounds a legitimate anxiety in the analyst.

if these words have a sense, which is called structuralism … they ought of course to begin by articulating something about representation.
#78

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.111

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic knowledge "passes into the real" via the same mechanism as Verwerfung (foreclosure): what is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real. He then grounds this in a rigorous reading of Freudian repetition (Wiederholungszwang), demonstrating that repetition is irreducible to the pleasure principle, necessarily entails a lost object, and constitutes the subject through a retroactive, non-reflexive logical structure rather than a simple return to sameness.

there will also be structuralism, I mean: what is now entitled under this title with a certain value, quoted on the stock market of cogitation.
#79

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage re-articulates alienation as the structural elimination of a closed, unified field of the Other (no universe of discourse), and situates truth, jouissance, symptom, and repetition as the key concepts that must be reintegrated once the Other is understood as disjoint — building toward a quadrangular schema whose four poles are alienation, the unconscious/Es, castration, and the act/repetition.

We find ourselves put on the side - approximately qualified as structuralist - of linguistics. And that all the developments of linguistics, specifically, curiously, what can be called semiology... does not interest us to the same degree.
#80

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.108

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that a genuine discipline of thinking—one that constitutes a 'new era'—logically dissolves the master/disciple relationship: the word 'disciple' is evaporated by the style of relation such thinking inaugurates, distinguishing discipline (as rigorous practice) from discipleship (as personal subordination).

If we establish a discipline which is also a new era in thinking, something distinguishes us from those who have preceded us, in the fact that our word does not require disciples.
#81

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.

drowning this notion … by circumscribing … to drown this in something that I identify badly under the vague name of 'structuralism'
#82

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.110

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian Wiederholungszwang constitutes the logical foundation of the subject, irreducible to the pleasure principle, by demonstrating that repetition produces a lost object retroactively—the originating situation is lost as origin by the very fact of being repeated—and that this structure, grounded in the unary trait, is what allows analytic knowledge to pass into the real via Verwerfung.

what the journalists have already located under the label of 'structuralism' and which is nothing other than: your interest; the interest that you take in what is said here, an interest which is real
#83

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's constitutive relation to the body is mediated by the sexual act as a fundamental "difficulty," and that objet petit a—as a subjective residue or sub-product of signifying articulation—names the partial, fallen junction between subject and body that grounds the sexual act; this reframes the alienation/vel structure by locating the "I am not thinking / I am not" alternative as the logical form through which the subject encounters the impossibility of the sexual act.

What is common to what are being called lately the 'structuralisms'? It is to make the function of the subject depend on signifying articulation.
#84

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.98

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

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

if these words have a sense, which is called structuralism… they ought of course to begin by articulating something about representation.
#85

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.124

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation, understood as the elimination of the Other as a closed unified field (i.e., the impossibility of a universe of discourse), is the logical starting point from which he derives the interrelated poles of a structural quadrangle articulated around repetition, the act, the unconscious (Id), and castration - with truth emerging as the emanation from a disconnected field of the Other, made manifest in the symptom.

This is why we find ourselves put on the side - approximately qualified as structuralist - of linguistics.
#86

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.26

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

Theoretical move: This passage is primarily a seminar introduction by Lacan framing his pedagogical approach, the publication of his Écrits, and his distance from structuralism as a label, with brief theoretical gestures toward the repetition of the unary stroke as the radical foundation of the division of the subject, and toward transference as something that can be simulated by a machine (the ELIZA program), raising the question of the symbolic chain and memory in analytic practice.

including that of structuralism, which for the moment benefiting from a certain fashion, is not the least to inspire my suspicion
#87

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.

to drown this in something that I identify badly under the vague name of 'structuralism'
#88

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.137

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the irreducibility of the language-effect as its object and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust — thereby distinguishing it from psychotherapy and from Hegelian absolute knowing — and grounds this in the structural difference between hysteria and obsession as two modes of the subject's relation to the repressed signifier.

To take the language-effect as object is indeed, in effect, what can be considered as the common factor in structuralism.
#89

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.181

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **8 and 15 May 1968:** Notes

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the May 1968 student insurrection not as mere unruliness but as a structural phenomenon in which the relations between desire and knowledge are at stake, and argues that psychoanalysts bear a specific responsibility to these events precisely because psychoanalysis grounds the transmission of knowledge on lack and inadequacy—a responsibility they systematically evade.

what is at stake is a structural phenomenon, in which the relations between desire and knowledge are put in question.
#90

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.12

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Pavlov's experimental apparatus, far from being a materialist reduction of the speaking being, inadvertently reproduces the fundamental structure of language (the subject receiving its own message in inverted form), thereby making Pavlov an unwitting structuralist whose 'leaky' edifice conceals ideological presuppositions about what is 'already there' in the brain — a critique that pivots toward the question of the psychoanalytic act and what any founder of an experience does not know about its structural presuppositions.

Mr Pavlov shows himself in the fundamental instauration of his experiment, as I said, to be a structuralist and one of the strictest observance.
#91

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.18

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

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "psychoanalytic act" as a pivot to argue that the structural subversion of the subject it enacts cannot be confined to analysts alone—it concerns everyone—while simultaneously critiquing behaviourist/Pavlovian reductions of the signifier-chain as a fundamental misrecognition that forecloses the properly structuralist (and thus analytic) dimension of the act.

Pavlov's failure to recognise the implication that I called, more or less humorously, structuralist, not at all humorously in the fact that it is structuralist
#92

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

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

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural function — neither an insult nor a psychological category but a knot of "dé-connaissance" (mis-knowing) — in order to argue that the psychoanalytic act must reckon with the irreducible overlap between truth and stupidity, grounded ultimately in the inappropriateness of the sexual organ for enjoyment and the constitutive failure of truth when it encounters the sexual field.

it would indeed be the task of structuralism to articulate what links one to the other, the word and the thing
#93

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.10

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes *savoir* (knowledge as operative, structural) from *connaissance* (knowing as representation), and uses Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment to argue that what is truly demonstrated there is the structural formula of the signifier — that "the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier" — thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in any organo-dynamic or spiritualist model.

Pavlov reveals himself there, as I might say, to be a structuralist at the start... a structuralist of the strictest observance, namely, of the Lacanian observance
#94

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.168

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

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the dream as a phenomenon with multiple dimensions from the unconscious proper (of which the dream is merely the "royal road"), defends the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language against conflation with dream-work distortions, and pivots to the problem of the subject in logic and linguistics: the universal quantifier always covertly implies the "stating subject" (sujet de l'énonciation), and no formal system has succeeded in fully eliminating this enunciating subject from its statements.

It is a decisive act at the beginning. We are precisely going to abstain from thinking about everything that could emerge from language as an act of the subject. From that moment on, the extraordinary thing is that people made some valid discoveries in the matter of linguistics
#95

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.168

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language cannot be reduced to an act of the subject, and pivots to the logic of quantification to show how the universal proposition always secretly harbours an irreducible "stating subject" that cannot be elided — which is precisely what makes quantificational logic (and psychoanalysis) interesting beyond formal demonstration.

it is very precisely from the day when a certain number of people came together by engaging their honour to one another not to raise this question [of language as an act of the subject] that linguistics was able to begin.
#96

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.133

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

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

The transformation which is acceptable in the theory of quantifiers is represented as follows... Namely, that no x exists, that is such that it explodes the function F(x). -Jx-F(x).
#97

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.10

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Pavlovian conditioned reflex as a structural illustration to argue that the signifier's operation always implies the presence of a subject, while simultaneously distinguishing knowledge-as-savoir from mere representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in organo-dynamic or idealist models.

Pavlov reveals himself there, as I might say, to be a structuralist at the start... a structuralist of the strictest observance, namely, of the Lacanian observance
#98

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.12

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Pavlovian experimentation to demonstrate that its presupposed materialism is structurally equivalent to the speaking being's relation to language (receiving one's message in inverted form), and this structural miscognition is symptomatic of a broader ideological occlusion—serving as the ground from which to approach the question of the psychoanalytic act and the presuppositions unknown to its subject.

Mr Pavlov shows himself in the fundamental instauration of his experiment, as I said, to be a structuralist and one of the strictest observance.
#99

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.28

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

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function irreducible to a mere insult, arguing that the psychoanalytic act must grapple with the overlap between truth and stupidity—specifically, that the sexual act (marked by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment) renders truth irreducibly compromised, which is the very dimension the psychoanalytic act operates within.

it would be the task of structuralism to articulate what links one to the other, the word and the thing.
#100

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.18

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act—understood as a structural subversion of the subject's relation to knowledge—concerns not only analysts but everyone, and uses the foil of behaviourist/Pavlovian reductionism to mark precisely what the act is not: it cannot be grounded in conditioned-reflex models because the signifier-to-signifier link is already presupposed in the experimental setup itself.

Pavlov's failure to recognise the implication that I called, more or less humorously, structuralist…humorously in as much as I called him a Lacanian structuralist
#101

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.137

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is defined not by a criterion external to it but by the psychoanalyst as instrument, and that the psychoanalytic act brings the subject to an awareness of its constitutive, irreducible division as a language-effect — a division that definitively refutes the Hegelian project of exhaustive self-knowledge (gnothi seauton / pour-soi) and is exemplified in the contrasting logical structures of hysteria and obsession.

what people, on the whole, are trying to contribute this more precise discourse, which my own is supposed to be a part of, under the title of structuralism.
#102

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.181

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **8 and 15 May 1968:** Notes

Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes in the May 1968 context to argue that what is at stake in the student insurrection is not mere disorder but a structural phenomenon in which the relations between desire and knowledge are put in question — a terrain that psychoanalysts are uniquely positioned to address but consistently fail to occupy.

for Lacan what is at stake is a structural phenomenon, in which the relations between desire and knowledge are put in question.
#103

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.187

Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious apparatus — grounded in the pleasure principle, repetition, and homeostatic return to perceptual identity — is not a neurophysiological mechanism but a minimal logical structure of signifying articulation (difference and repetition), such that the dream functions as a 'wild interpretation' whose analysis reveals desire precisely at the point where the reconstituted sentence fails as a sentence, not as meaning.

by passing completely outside the circuit of any subject in which the representation is claimed to be unified, to a structure, to a structure made up of a weave and a network.
#104

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.369

Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the structural necessity of the "additional one" (un-en-plus) and the empty set within the field of the Other, demonstrating through set theory that the inclusion of a first signifier into the Other necessarily generates a second term (the empty set/S(Ø)) and that subjectivity only appears at the level of S2, reorienting the field from intersubjectivity to intra-subjective structure.

I took de Saussure as one takes an instrument, a system, to be used for quite different ends, those of the field that I designated earlier.
#105

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.3

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVI by arguing that psychoanalytic theory is constitutively 'a discourse without words' — that is, grounded not in phenomenological sense but in the cause-structure of the unconscious — and uses this to distinguish psychoanalytic discourse from both philosophy and structuralism as a worldview, while announcing that the seminar will develop the function of the objet petit a through a homology with Marx's analysis of the labour market.

structuralism, a word that moreover was not necessary on the part of the publicist who suddenly... put it forward in order to encompass a certain number of people whose labour had for a long time marked out some avenues of this discourse.
#106

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.9

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the structural homology between Marx's surplus value and his own concept of surplus-jouissance (plus de jouir), arguing that the o-object (objet petit a) is produced as a remainder/loss at the very point where the subject is constituted by the inter-signifier relation — a loss strictly correlative to the renunciation of enjoyment under the effect of discourse.

Whether his commentators are structuralist or not, they still seem indeed to have demonstrated that he for his part is structuralist.
#107

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.66

**Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

Theoretical move: By applying a Russell's-paradox-style logical operation to the big Other, Lacan demonstrates that the subject—defined as the subset of all signifiers that are not elements of themselves—cannot be universalised: the point where the subject is signified falls necessarily *outside* the Other, establishing the structural impossibility of a universe of discourse.

Structuralism everywhere is logic, which means, even at the level at which you may question desire
#108

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.57

**Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analogy of Marx's introduction of surplus value—and the capitalist's laughter at the moment of its revelation—to argue that surplus-jouissance names a structural "gag" or elision at the heart of the unconscious, while simultaneously warning against treating this as a "theory of the unconscious" and insisting that the subject only exists as the effect of an assertion (dire), with the Real defined as the impossible limit of that assertion.

it is a matter of knowing what 'structuralism' has to bring about. The question is raised in a collection that has just appeared… 'What is structuralism?'
#109

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.180

Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively illuminates the trajectory of Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis) from his 1969 vantage point, arguing that the Freud event grounds ethics in the Real—approached through the conjoint Symbolic/Imaginary—and that "truth has the structure of fiction" (via Bentham's theory of fictions) is the essential starting point for any psychoanalytic ethics, correlating the pleasure principle with the function of the unconscious.

a critical function thought it could pinpoint with this bizarre term that undoubtedly none of those who are in the forefront of it accept but by which we now find ourselves affected as it were by a bizarre label that has been stuck on our backs without our consent, structuralism.
#110

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.19

**Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces *surplus-jouissance* (Mehrlust) as the psychoanalytic homologue to Marx's surplus value (Mehrwert), and grounds this move in the claim that structure is real — not metaphorical — because it is determined by convergence toward an impossibility; discourse is what constitutes, rather than merely represents, the real, and this principle is the condition of seriousness for any practice of psychoanalysis.

what is essential here is to rally behind a flag. Namely, that as I already underlined on other occasions, what I am stating at least for myself when we are dealing with structure, I already said, is to be taken in the sense of what is most real
#111

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.222

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of a sexual signifier means Woman is irreducibly unknown, accessible only through representatives of representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz); sublimation is then theorised as the objet petit a functioning as what "tickles das Ding from the inside," linking drive topology (edge-structure, vacuole) to the production of art and courtly love.

the essential, as is said somewhere, of structuralism, if this word has a sense... the essential is at the same time this blank, this lack in the signifying chain, with what results from it in terms of wandering objects in the signified chain
#112

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.292

Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the stain/gaze as the structuring lack in the field of vision that inserts vision into desire via the o-object, then leverages this to distinguish perversion (where objet a fills/masks the phallic lack, restoring o to the Other) from neurosis (where the signified of the barred Other reveals the conflictual articulation at the level of logic itself), with the neologism 'hommelle/famil' marking the transition between these clinical structures.

If one can in any term qualify as structuralism - and you know the reservations I have about this philosophical label - it is in so far as the relationship between what allows there to be edified a rigorous logic and what on the other hand is shown to us in the unconscious
#113

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) is the structural analogue of Marxian surplus value within the Discourse of the Master, and that the Discourse of the Analyst uniquely situates knowledge in the place of truth — a position occupied by myth and governed by the law of half-saying — thereby reframing the Oedipus complex as myth rather than clinical universal.

Myth today has been made into a branch of linguistics. I mean that the most serious things said about myth come from linguistics. On this I cannot but recommend you to refer to chapter 11, 'The structure of myths' in Structural Anthropology
#114

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.59

*[A porter appears]*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that repetition—rooted in the pursuit of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle—necessarily produces a loss (entropy), and it is precisely at the site of this lost enjoyment that the lost object (objet petit a) and knowledge as a formal apparatus of enjoyment originate; the unary trait is redeployed from Freud as the minimal mark that simultaneously founds the signifier and introduces surplus-jouissance.

this simple fact is also an opportunity for us to illustrate what structure is... an element of impossibility is encountered. This is properly at the foundation, at the root of what a structural fact (fait de structure) is.
#115

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the usual claim about the Freud-Saussure relationship by arguing that the unconscious is the condition of linguistics (not the reverse), and that language is the condition of the unconscious — positioning the Lacanian reading of Freud as what makes modern structural linguistics possible rather than derivative of it.

Saussure and the Prague Circle produced a linguistics that has nothing in common with what this name covered previously... organised from an autonomy that is in no way inferior to crystal-type effects, in the system of the phoneme
#116

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.166

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

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

Structure is a word by which there is indicated the coming into play of the effect of language, starting from the fact that it a petitio principii to make of it an individual or collective function
#117

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.9

**Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVIII by arguing that discourse is a structure irreducible to any speaking subject, that the subject is necessarily alienated and split within it, and that the question of "a discourse that might not be a semblance" can only be posed from within the artefact of discourse itself — there being no metalanguage, no Other of the Other, and no true of the true from which to judge it.

people think that the signifier is a nice little thing that has been tamed by structuralism, people think that it is the Other, qua Other, and the battery of signifiers.
#118

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.39

**Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan defends his use of linguistics against charges of mere metaphor by grounding it in the structural necessity that the unconscious is structured like a language, while simultaneously arguing that no discourse — including the University discourse from which linguistics polices its borders — can claim to know what it is saying, since the introduction of the Freudian unconscious forecloses any such self-transparent mapping of knowledge.

is one a structuralist or not when one is a linguist? And people tend to demarcate themselves and say: I am a functionalist. Why am I a functionalist? Because structuralism, is something, moreover, that is a purely journalistic invention.
#119

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.160

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

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

It is a banter that gives a signal, a signal to me of course. It warns me that I am touching on structuralism. I am forced to touch on it, like that, naturally, it is not my fault.
#120

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan

J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer

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

It is in these three elements which will constitute the three vertices of the semiotic triangle.
#121

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.156

accommodate yourselves.

Theoretical move: Through Recanati's intervention on Peirce, the passage argues that the universal quantifier cannot stand alone but requires a prior inscription of inexistence (negation as function), and that the repetition of inscribed inexistence—not bare inexistence—grounds logical and mathematical structures; this move aligns Peirce's logic of the continuous with Lacan's concerns about the Not-all and the grounding of the universal.

He examines three definitions, specifically that of Aristotle, that of Kant, and that of Cantor, all of which he criticises, in function of a unique criterion.
#122

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.147

Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

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

the function of element [member]. To be an element in a set, is to be something that has nothing to do with belonging to a register that can be described as universal
#123

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.168

J Lacan - Start that again.

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

Pierce describes as *Phanéron*... the totality of everything that is present to the spirit... he decomposes the elements of the *Phanéron.* There are three indissociable elements
#124

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.36

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the occasion of speaking "to the wall" at Sainte-Anne to develop a structural argument about repetition (which requires a third, not merely a second), tying it to Nachträglichkeit, the Christian Trinity as a model of belief/self-grounding, Plato's cave as a proto-structuralist theory of the object and the origin of language in resonance, and jouissance as what the wall itself occasions.

if you suppose that Plato was a structuralist, he would have noticed what was really involved in the cave, namely, that it is no doubt there, that it is no doubt there, that language was born.
#125

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.7

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's knowledge is constitutively bound to ignorance (not as deficit but as passion), and polemically distinguishes his own claim — that the unconscious is structured like a language (grammar and repetition, hence logic) — from misreadings that conflate this with lalangue-as-dictionary or that opportunistically promote "non-knowledge" as a flag, thereby obscuring that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a matter of knowledge.

I had begun it by saying 'the unconscious is structured like a language'. People found an extraordinary contraption: the two chaps who could have best worked along this track, spun this thread, were given a very nice job: Vocabulaire de la Philosophie. What am I saying Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse.
#126

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.55

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the tetrahedron to ground the Four Discourses as a structural necessity derived from the properties of four points in space, then pivots to the question of the function of speech as the unique form of action that posits itself as truth—establishing the epistemological basis for the knowledge of the psychoanalyst.

when one studies in a serious way what is involved in mythologies, it is not to their sense that one refers, it is to the combinatorial of mythems.
#127

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

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

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

Cybernetics is a domain with very indeterminate frontiers. Finding its unity obliges us to cast our gaze over a variety of spheres of rationalisation, from politics. via the theory of games, to theories of communication
#128

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43

II > III

Theoretical move: The passage turns on the problem of universal contingency—introduced via Lévi-Strauss's nature/culture opposition and the incest prohibition—arguing that certain phenomena are simultaneously universal and contingent, dissolving both classical naturalism and institutionalism, while also theorising what it means to be a 'precursor' (seeing one's contemporaries' ideas from a future vantage) and flagging a mutation in the function of the machine that overturns classical mechanistic objections.

what brought Levi-Strauss to set himself the question of nature and culture was that it seemed to him that a certain form of incest, for instance, was both universal and contingent.
#129

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

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

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

The passage of man from the order of nature to the order of culture follows the same mathematical combinations which will be used to classify and explain. Claude Levi-Strauss calls them the elementary structures of kinship.
#130

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

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

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

Levi-Strauss is in the midst of backtracking as regards the very sharp bipartition which he makes between nature and symbol, whose creative value he nonetheless well appreciates, because it is a method which allows him to distinguish between registers.
#131

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62

II > A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness

Theoretical move: The Mirror Stage dialectic is radicalized through the automaton/machine model to show that the ego is constitutively imaginary and parasitic on an alien unity; only the intervention of the Symbolic Order — a 'third party' located in the unconscious — can break the impasse of dual imaginary rivalry and transform mere knowledge (connaissance) into recognition (reconnaissance).

as Claude Levi-Strauss told us the other day, the system of exchanges is to be found, the elementary structures. It is necessary for the symbolic system to intervene … so that an exchange can take place.
#132

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.41

II > III

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology to argue that the symbolic function constitutes a total universe that is irreducible to any natural, biological, or psychological substrate—and that this totalizing symbolic order is precisely what psychoanalysis presupposes when it speaks of the unconscious, as distinct from any Jungian "collective unconscious."

The closer we get, not to the origin, but to the element, the more the structuration, the amplitude, the intricacy of the specifically symbolic structure of nomenclature imposes itself.
#133

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.110

**VII** > 92 Complement

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

by which I distinguish myself from structuralism, insofar as the latter would like to integrate language into semiology
#134

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.217

J.Lacan-... of this?

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

the way in which I distinguish it from structuralism, and specifically in so far as it would integrate language and semiology
#135

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

Theoretical move: The passage introduces a structural crisis within linguistics itself — the shift from Saussurean structuralism to transformational grammar, and then the internal antinomies (realist/nominalist, intensional/extensional) within transformational linguistics — in order to ground Lacan's own concept of *linguisterie* as a distinct field that takes the unconscious as accessible only through the said, not through scientific linguistics.

These three propositions have given birth to a type of linguistics that is well known: structural linguistics. It is an important fact that these three propositions have been, all three of them, refuted.
#136

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

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

between the passage from Saussure to transformationalism which as we have seen is based on the inversion of propositions, there is something that I did not describe which remains intangible, it is what I could call the model of the syntactical subject
#137

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.236

**XVIII** > **1**

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

Owing to the properties of the signifier and the signified, the constant temptation to which linguists themselves... succumb is to consider that it's what is the most obvious in the phenomenon that says it all.
#138

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.33

**II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of paranoia cannot be grasped through the "pattern" of understandable behaviour, because the elementary phenomenon of a delusion is not a nucleus around which deduction builds but is itself an irreducible structure — the same structuring force operative at every level of the delusion — and that psychiatry's persistent failure to theorise this is evidenced by Kraepelin's definition, which point-for-point contradicts clinical observation.

the notion of element is to be taken in no other way than as structure, differentiated structure, irreducible to anything other than itself
#139

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.133

**VIII** > **IX**

Theoretical move: By insisting that the unconscious is fundamentally structured by language and that the signifier plays the primary role, Lacan argues that Schreber's delusion is fully legible through psychoanalytic method—the terminal state of the delusion preserves the same signifying elements as the originary experience of psychosis, making the symbolic relationship analyzable throughout.

M. de Saussure thinks that what enables the signifier to be cut up is a certain correlation between the signifier and the signified... no one-to-one correspondence between the two systems can be established.
#140

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.196

**XIV** > **1**

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

The notion of structure is by itself already a manifestation of the signifier... In fact, when we analyze a structure it's always at least ideally a question of the signifier.
#141

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.232

**XVII** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

What, on this basis, cannot fail to occur to one, and which occurred to a linguist friend of mine, Roman Jakobson, is that the distribution of certain disorders known as aphasias can be reconsidered in the light of the opposition between... relations of similarity... and on the other hand the relations of contiguity.
#142

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

**XIV** > **The signifier, as such, signifies nothing**

Theoretical move: This introductory passage frames the seminar's return to Freudian psychosis structures through the lens of language, using a Cicero epigraph to assert that language conceals marvels requiring diligent structural attention — positioning the study of psychosis as inseparable from the function of Language.

T H E NOTIO N O F STRUCTUR E SUBJECTIVIT Y I N TH E REA L
#143

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.273

**XXI** > **1**

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

The opposition between the signifier and the signified lies, as you know, at the basis of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory.
#144

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.284

HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

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

What guides Monsieur Lévi-Strauss in his article in the Journal of American Folklore? What does he use to introduce the notion of The Structural Study of Myth?
#145

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.285

HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is seized by the autonomous play of the signifier — not by drives or affects — and uses the case of Little Hans to show that phobia/myth functions as a structural solution to an impossible symbolic impasse; he then anchors this in Freud's Witz to demonstrate that condensation at the level of the signifier is the constitutive mechanism of both wit and symptomatic production.

it necessitates what has been termed the structural study of myth, the first step of which is never to consider any of the signifier-elements independently of the others that arise
#146

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.248

WHAT MYTH IS FOR

Theoretical move: By aligning Lévi-Straussian structural mythology (mythemes, formal decomposition) with Little Hans's "playful mythical production," Lacan argues that the child's fantasy constructions are governed by the same structural necessity as collective myths, and that both are ultimately organised around the signifier's power—particularly as it bears on the castration complex and the Oedipus complex as the central "peg" through which that power operates.

This formalisation extracts from myths what might be called elements or units which at their own level possess the character of a structural functioning that is comparable, without for all that being identical, to the one that in the study of linguistics extracts elaborations of various modern taxemic elements.
#147

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.23

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

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the 'famillionaire' witticism to argue that wit operates through a formal technique of the signifier (condensation of two signifying chains), that it requires the Other as a third party to codify the incongruous message, and that the essence of wit lies not in truth but in truth's alibi — a dimension always glimpsed only by looking obliquely, as with the unconscious itself.

Freud places himself at the level of this formalism, that is, of a structural theory of the signifier as such, and the result is not in doubt - it's even thoroughly convincing.
#148

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.274

**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Jones's naturalistic account of the phallic phase by insisting that the phallus is only conceivable as the signifier of lack — the signifier of the distance between demand and desire — and that entry into femininity requires inscription in the signifying dialectic of exchange (as theorized by Lévi-Strauss), not a return to a primitively given female position; the child's entry into this same dialectic is conditioned by the mother's desire, itself signified by the phallus she lacks.

the necessity for one half of humanity to become a signifier of exchange, according to various laws, more simply structured in elementary structures, bearing much more sophisticated effects in the complex structures of kinship… most recently articulated by Levi-Strauss in his Elementary Structures of Kinship.
#149

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Winnicott paradox—that optimal maternal satisfaction makes hallucination indistinguishable from reality—to expose the theoretical dead-end of grounding psychoanalytic development in a purely imaginary, hallucinatory primary process, and argues instead that desire, not need, is the originary term, requiring a structural (symbolic) account of the pleasure/reality principle opposition.

set aside all its structural characteristics and place in the background condensation, displacement and so on
#150

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.31

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

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

the metaphorical and metonymic functions of language can be very simply expressed in the register of signifiers... following Roman Jakobson who invented them
#151

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.61

THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of associationism (contiguity and similarity) maps directly onto metonymy and metaphor in the signifying chain, thereby subordinating psychological atomism and its Gestalt critique to a single linguistically-grounded theory; the dream's wish-satisfaction operates at the level of "being" as verbal appearance rather than substance, and desire—irreducible to demand—is located at the enigmatic point opened by the subject's relation to the signifier.

the instance of the signifier is at the crux of the very structuring of a certain psychological field.
#152

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76

**V**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—identified with the mother as the primordial forbidden object—is both the structural ground of the prohibition of incest and the constitutive condition of speech and the pleasure principle itself; the Ten Commandments are reread as the preconscious articulation of this distance from the Thing, and Freud's doctrine is presented as the overturning of any Sovereign Good.

Claude Lévi-Strauss in his magisterial work no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law as such, namely, the introduction of the signifier and its combinatoire into human nature through the intermediary of the marriage laws
#153

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.238

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

Theoretical move: Through an ekphrastic reading of Zucchi's painting of Psyche and Cupid, Lacan argues that the myth of Psyche—properly understood via Apuleius—is not about the couple (man/woman relations) but about the relation between the soul and desire, with the castration complex (the blade/phallus/threat triad) functioning as the structural pivot of this mythic articulation.

Since Claude Lévi-Strauss analyzes a certain number of North American myths, I don't see why one would not devote oneself to the same kind of analysis concerning Apuleius' fable.
#154

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.331

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

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that myth (via structuralist decomposition) and the concept of *Versagung* (primordial refusal grounded in the signifier) provide the only rigorous framework for psychoanalytic practice, displacing both normalization narratives and crude economic-topographic models; the Graph of Desire is presented as the minimal structural map of the necessary encounter between subject and signifier, while trauma is recast as an event's occupation of a pre-given structural place.

I will briefly define the structuralist articulation of myth. Taking a myth as a whole... we construct a model that is constituted solely by a series of oppositional designations of the functions that are involved
#155

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.302

*Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object (objet petit a) is specifically the object of castration — distinguished from objects of privation or frustration — and demonstrates this through topological analysis of the cross-cap, showing that the object of desire only rejoins its intimacy by a centrifugal (outside-in) path, structurally irreducible to Aristotelian logic's object of privation.

it is thanks to Claude Lévi-Strauss that you have henceforth the corpus, the dogmatic articulation of the classificatory function at what he calls himself... 'the savage state', much closer to Platonic dialectic than to Aristotelian
#156

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.60

*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962* > What is the proper name?

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper name reveals the signifier "in the pure state" — not as phonemic differentiation but as the mark/sign that is read as an object, tracing writing's genesis to a primordial coalescence of sign and vocal utterance that already carries a negativity-reference; the unary trait, extracted from the object by effacement, is the hinge point at which sign becomes signifier.

its system, as something which is in no way satisfied by a purely utilitarian, instrumental, practical genesis, by a psychological genesis, which shows us language as an order, a register, a function
#157

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.291

*Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

within his very pertinent exhaustions of the classificatory mode... the function of Totem and Taboo appears entirely reduced to these signifying oppositions
#158

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.257

*Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 23*: *Wednesday 6 June 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus (and its paired-torus construction) to formalise the formula "the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other," and then pivots to the cross-cap/projective plane as the privileged topological support for the structure of fantasy, before offering contextual remarks on Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us that it is quite impossible to make here such a radical cut because the thinking which has not yet conquered its scientific status is already quite appropriate for carrying certain scientific effects.
#159

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.3

*Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar IX by arguing that identification must be approached not through the imaginary relation to the other but through the logical problem of identity (A = A), and that the subject is constituted not by any self-present cogito but solely through the existence of the signifier and its effects — a thesis which frames the entire year's inquiry.

it was with the signifier, with the elaboration of the function of the symbolic that we began, makes us land this year also on the signifier because we are at an odd number.
#160

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.42

*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 December 1961*

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes between a productive 'crystallographic Gestalt' (structurally homologous to the signifying combinatory) and a confusing 'anthropomorphic Gestalt' (the macrocosm/microcosm analogy), then pivots to argue that the automatism of repetition is not a natural cycle of need-satisfaction but the compulsive re-emergence of a unique signifier — a letter — that a repressed cycle has become, thereby grounding repetition in the agency of the signifier rather than in biological or imaginary schemas.

what constitutes the core of some of the productions of this mode of exploring the field of the Gestalt, what I would call crystallographic Gestalt... is what gives the subjective force, the efficacy of this point which, for its part, is ontological
#161

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.13

*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that analytic identification is fundamentally signifier-identification (as opposed to imaginary identification), and grounds this in a critique of the Saussurean signifier, information theory, and the Subject Supposed to Know—arguing that the Cartesian cogito reaches an impasse precisely because the subject of enunciation cannot be grounded in any absolute knowledge.

Diachrony and synchrony are the terms to which I pointed out you should refer... the distinction having to be drawn with this de facto diachrony: too often it is simply what is aimed at in the articulation of the laws of the signifier.
#162

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.259

*Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 23*: *Wednesday 6 June 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychoanalytic search for the primordial status of the object—irreducibly the object of desire—from parallel but distinct enterprises in Heidegger (utensil/Zuhandenheit) and Lévi-Strauss (bricolage), then deploys the topology of the cross-cap (projective plane) as the structural support for the fundamental fantasy, arguing that the non-eliminable singular point on this surface captures something intrinsic to the subject-object relation of desire that cannot be dissolved into three-dimensional representational conventions.

this sort of structured access which is ours with respect to the field of scientific investigation, in so far as it allows it to be distinguished as founded on an articulation of the objectiveness
#163

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.55

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

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

everything happens as if the signifiers of writing having first of all been produced as distinctive marks… writing learns, as I might say, to function as writing.
#164

Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECTION II. Of Time.

Theoretical move: Kant establishes that space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition—not properties of things in themselves—thereby grounding the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition while strictly delimiting the sphere of valid knowledge to phenomena; this transcendental idealism is contrasted against both the Newtonian (substantivist) and Leibnizian (empiricist-relational) positions, both of which fail to secure the apodeictic certainty of mathematics.

the Leibnitz-Wolfian philosophy has assigned an entirely erroneous point of view...inasmuch as it regards the distinction between the sensuous and the intellectual as merely logical, whereas it is plainly transcendental
#165

Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding. > TABLE OF THE CATEGORIES

Theoretical move: Kant presents his Table of Categories as a systematic, principle-derived classification of the pure concepts of the understanding—contrasting it with Aristotle's rhapsodic enumeration—and argues that these categories, together with their derivable 'predicables,' constitute the complete a priori conceptual apparatus through which the understanding renders intuition thinkable.

The compartments already exist; it is only necessary to fill them up; and a systematic topic like the present, indicates with perfect precision the proper place to which each conception belongs
#166

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.155

A month later: > Lalangue

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

the ghost of lalangue was haunted structuralism from the outset
#167

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.45

chapter 2

Theoretical move: The structural reduction of the voice by phonology does not eliminate the voice but produces it as a remainder — the Lacanian object petit a — thereby reversing the phonological assumption that voice is raw material prior to structure and instead positioning it as the outcome of the signifying operation.

the reduction of the voice that phonology has attempted—phonology as the paradigmatic showcase of structural analysis—has left a remainder
#168

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.214

Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

If the epistemological program of all early structuralism was based on phonology, then a very different kind of epistemology follows from the matheme as the detritus, as it were, of the phonological operation.
#169

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

A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

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

Phonology, defined in such a way, was destined to take a preeminent place in structural linguistics, soon turning into its showcase, the paramount demonstration of its abilities and explanatory strength.
#170

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.21

Read My Desire

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the impossibility of metalanguage—rather than "flattening" social analysis—installs a split between appearance and being that gives society a generative principle; this move, paralleled in Freud's primal father and death drive, is what Lacan's "structures are real" claim means, and it constitutes psychoanalysis's fundamental challenge to Foucauldian historicism by grounding desire in the non-coincidence of appearance and being.

Lacan's diagrams bear no resemblance to the scientistic maps drawn by the structuralists; his diagrams are offered to the audience as antistructuralist.
#171

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.69

Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Achilles and the Tortoise

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

Having established a certain structural instability in the most powerful attempts to provide models of structuration, it was probably inevitable that Derrida should then begin to explore the other side of the coin
#172

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.11

Read My Desire

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's reduction of society to immanent relations of power and knowledge constitutes a historicism that undermines his own best insights about a 'surplus existence' that escapes predication—an insight whose Lacanian inflection (the non-existence of 'The' woman, the 'il y a') Copjec identifies and defends against Foucault's own anti-linguistic turn.

Structuralism was denounced for its universalizing program and for its adherence to empty, moribund forms, conceived at all times to be always already in place, sedimented.
#173

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.216

LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

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

Saussure's displacement of his own notion of 'pure difference' by the more 'positive' notion of 'determinant oppositions' is a type of illegitimate solution that may be referred to as the 'structuralist solution.'
#174

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.281

LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Chapter S

Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 281-283) listing topics, authors, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive filler with no theoretical argument.

Structuralism and Foucault, 4, 7 French students' opposition to, 1, 4, 11 and Freud's hypotheses, 1 1 13 and Lacan, 11
#175

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.85

Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Colonies and Colonnades

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

Clerambault's succinct pronouncement that 'a draped costume must be defined by the scheme of its construction.'
#176

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.

Saussure's displacement of his own notion of 'pure difference' by the more 'positive' notion of 'determinant oppositions' is a type of illegitimate solution that may be referred to as the 'structuralist solution.'
#177

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.11

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

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's failure to theorize the generative principle of a social regime stems from his rejection of the linguistic model (and its ban on metalanguage), and that Lacan's claim that "structures are real" — i.e., that a regime's instituting principle is irreducible to and negates its positive relations — is precisely what allows one to think the genealogy, resistance, and institution of social space without collapsing into historicism or nominalism.

Lacan's diagrams bear no resemblance to the scientistic maps drawn by the structuralists; his diagrams are offered to the audience as *anti*structuralist.
#178

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.74

**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's succinct pronouncement that 'a draped costume must be defined by the scheme of its construction.'
#179

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.58

**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.

Having established as certain structural instability in the most powerful attempts to provide models of structuration, it was probably inevitable that Derrida should then begin to explore the other side of the coin
#180

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.142

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

Theoretical move: By reading the "Teflon President" phenomenon through Lacan's concept of objet petit a (as the instance of enunciation that exceeds all statements), Copjec argues that "realist imbecility"—the sacrifice of the signified for the referent—structurally disables television's (and the police's) capacity to menace the subject, and that democratic ideology is founded on a Cartesian universal subject whose "innocent" enunciating instance mirrors the logic of objet petit a.

in 'The Seminar on "The Purloined Letter,"' where Lacan used it to explain the police's failure to locate the object of its methodically misdirected search
#181

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.

Structuralism was denounced for its universalizing program and for its adherence to empty, moribund forms, conceived at all times to be always already in place, sedimented.
#182

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.11

Introduction Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

Theoretical move: Boothby positions Lacan's "return to Freud" as a theoretically ambitious refounding of psychoanalysis through three cardinal registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), a radical critique of Ego Psychology's adaptation model, and an insistence that the signifier—not the ego—determines the subject, with the Other as the ultimate horizon of desire.

In his concept of the symbolic, Lacan draws upon the structuralist conception of language as a diacritical system in an effort to provide a new understanding of the nature and destiny of unconscious desire.
#183

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.15

Introduction Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

Theoretical move: Boothby poses the central tension of his project: Lacan's "return to Freud" appears to replace Freudian energetics with the algebra of the signifier, yet he argues this apparent betrayal is possible precisely because Freud's own metapsychology contains a latent content that only Lacanian concepts can bring to light.

The Lacanian turn to language seems closer to Ferdinand de Saussure or Claude Levi-Strauss than to Freud.
#184

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.223

Chapter 4 The Freudian Thing > Speaking of the Thing

Theoretical move: The passage argues that access to *das Ding* is constituted through linguistic competence—specifically "positional articulation"—and that this is the deepest form of Nachträglichkeit: language retroactively restructures human perception itself. Hegel's dialectic of the implicit/explicit (an sich/für sich) and his account of the arbitrary linguistic sign are marshalled to show how naming liberates the Thing from perceptual intuition, anticipating Saussure and preparing the ground for a structuralist resolution.

We must turn to the structuralist linguistics that was available to neither Hegel nor Freud.
#185

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.86

Chapter 2 Between the Image and the Word > From Image to Sign

Theoretical move: By mapping Freud's distinction between focal and diffuse cathexis onto Lacan's Imaginary/Symbolic opposition, Boothby argues that every act of symbolic signification necessarily passes through an imaginary moment—a perceptual gestalt registration—revealing that the Imaginary is not external to but constitutively embedded within the Symbolic.

Lacan follows the teaching of structuralist linguistics in conceiving of language as a network of differences in which the meaning of each element is determined by its relation of difference to the other elements in the system.
#186

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.156

Chapter 3 The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian death drive has two complementary faces—the pressure of the Real against the Imaginary and the agency of the Symbolic—and that both operate by dissolving the alienating coherence of the imaginary ego, thereby opening the subject to jouissance either through violence or through symbolically mediated exchange.

As Saussure had already remarked, not only is it exceedingly difficult to circumscribe the unity of the sign, in an important sense the sign cannot be said to be a unit at all, but must rather be understood as a selective network of relations contained within the still larger web of a language.
#187

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.216

Chapter 4 The Freudian Thing > Speaking of the Thing

Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding is accessible only through language, and that the signifier's binary (presence/absence) structure is what enables it to "represent the unrepresented" — functioning as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — thereby opening a dimension of constitutive absence in perception that orients speech toward das Ding as its primordial, indeterminate horizon.

Lacan develops the idea far beyond the letter of Freud's text, in part because he is able to draw upon the resources of structuralist linguistics that were unavailable to Freud.
#188

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

Chapter 4 The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson

Theoretical move: By reading Freud's concept of das Ding through Jakobson's linguistics, the passage argues that the phoneme—as a signifier that signifies nothing—provides the structural condition for an open, indeterminate horizon of meaning, thereby grounding the relation between language and the Thing at the level of pure differential structure rather than binary semantic necessity.

Jakobson begins with the essential teaching of Saussure: the linguistic sign is structured by binary opposition.
#189

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.69

Chapter One Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > The Unthought Ground of Thought in the Freudian Unconscious

Theoretical move: The passage argues that while phenomenology (Gestalt figure-ground relation) offers a partial analogy to Freudian repression, it cannot account for the structural, linguistically-organized character of the unconscious; the resolution lies in reinterpreting Freudian energetics not as crude mechanism but as a structural-differential concept capable of integrating both perceptual and linguistic dimensions, thereby positioning psychoanalysis at the intersection of phenomenology and structuralism.

It will allow us to demonstrate not only the internal connectedness of phenomenology and structuralism but will suggest the way in which psychoanalysis is crucially situated at the intersection of the two.
#190

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.286

Conclusion

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "return to Freud" is not a Oedipal critique but a structural recovery that reveals the inner coherence of Freudian metapsychology, and that the Freudian-Lacanian subject is constituted by an irremediable gap and a double ground of representation (imaginary/symbolic) that situates psychoanalysis at the intersection of phenomenology and structuralism.

psychoanalysis can be seen to form an intersection between two great currents of contemporary theory, phenomenology and structuralism, each devoted to a different facet of the problem of representation
#191

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

Chapter 4 The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson > 3. The phoneme constitutes a unique intersection of positionality and dispositionality.

Theoretical move: The phoneme is theorized as a paradoxical "positional-dispositional metastasis": its positional registration as a perceptual object is entirely conditioned by the dispositional field of differential meaning it simultaneously constitutes, making it the most elementary cell of the dialectic between positionality and dispositionality that structures language and experience.

The entire validity of structuralist linguistics rests upon the assumption that understanding the meaning of speech requires some minimal yet accurate perception of the phonemes from which speech is constructed.
#192

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.235

Chapter 4 The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson > 2. The dynamics of opposition that operate variously on the vocal-physiological level of differential features and on the semantic level of morphemes are stabilized in relation to one another by the fact that the phonemes constitute an ordered system.

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phoneme's bundling of differential features generates a "pure readiness-for-meaning" — an indeterminate semantic pressure that is the structural condition of linguistic signification and, crucially, the relation to the Freudian Thing (Das Ding); this readiness-for-meaning is rooted in the felt necessity of binary opposition at the phonological level, passed up into the system of language and freed from any particular coupling.

What enables passage of this spark is the organization of phonemes in a system. The phonological system enables the speaker of a given language to identify an unknown word as belonging to the language.
#193

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.291

Conclusion > 3. The Body of Phantasy

Theoretical move: The objet a is theorized as a "vanishing mediator" that is irreducibly equivocal—simultaneously a locus of pure lack and a virtual impress of imaginary embodiment—and this apparent contradiction is resolved not by choosing one pole but by understanding primal repression as the very mechanism that keeps the object straddling the imaginary and symbolic. The phoneme is identified as the prime structural analogue (and indeed instance) of the objet a, since it similarly conjoins material/bodily positionality with pure differential function.

Defined by Jakobson as a hinge between sound and meaning, the phoneme conjoins two levels of structure—the battery of differential features defined by various binarisms attributable to the spatiality of the speech apparatus… and the level of purely conventional oppositions that comprise a language.
#194

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

Index

Theoretical move: This is a back-of-book index from Boothby's "Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan" (2001), listing concepts and page references from S through V. It is a navigational aid and contains no substantive theoretical argument.

Structuralism 12, 69, 87, 89, 93, 216, 286
#195

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.265

Chapter 5 Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

Theoretical move: By mapping the *objet a* across Schema L, Schema R, the Gestalt figure/ground distinction, and the Greimasian semiotic square, Boothby argues that the *objet a* is not a positional object but an "objectality" function that emerges from the structural tension between das Ding (maternal) and the paternal Law (symbolic order), a tension whose topology is best captured by Schema R rather than Schema L.

the schema we are developing in Lacanian terms can be recognized as homologous with the basic schema of structuralism, based on the logic of the Klein Group and most evocatively worked out in the semiotic square of A. J. Greimas.
#196

The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object functions as the material subsistence of the symbolic Other's suspension, identifying it with objet petit a as a paradoxical "effect-cause" rather than a mere effect, and distinguishes genuine comedy (which produces the Thing as objectified surplus) from derision (which veils the Thing's comedy by prematurely exhibiting its obscene underside). She then extends this to Marivaux, where the comic mechanism operates through pure structural difference rather than surplus-object.

One could define Marivaux as a 'dialectical structuralist' among classic comedy writers; he is a proper mathematician of comedy who invented one fundamental axiom that he keeps repeating and testing from one comedy to another.
#197

Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.119

*Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectics for Marx**

Theoretical move: Against Postone's historicist reduction of dialectics to capitalism's lifespan, the passage argues that dialectics acquires a transhistorical, retroactive logic: social forms outlive their conditions of production, and the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic operates not chronologically but retrospectively, with the present 'creating' the past and capital functioning as Hegelian Subject-Substance.

Another dimension to this is the lesson of structuralism, according to which a historical development of a notion, concept, phenomena, etc. cannot be reduced to the special and temporal boundaries within which it was 'produced.'
#198

Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.18

*Unexpected Reunions* > **Notes**

Theoretical move: Against assemblage theory's logic of exteriority and contingent combination, Žižek argues for a Hegelian-Marxist position: the "desire-for-assemblage" reveals that universality (in the form of constitutive antagonism/negativity) is already immanent to each element, so that elements strive for assemblage not to form a larger whole but to actualize their own contradictory identity — making totality the dialectical completion of differential structure, not its rival.

It is this 'regression' to mechanism that sustains the passage from organic-expressive Whole characteristic of organisms to differential structure characteristic of symbolic networks.
#199

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.33

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Parallax of Ontology > [Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement](#contents.xhtml_ahd2)

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

Lévi-Strauss designated structuralism as transcendentalism without subject… what we should aim at is exactly the opposite: the notion of a non-transcendental subject
#200

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.268

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three Unorientables > [A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)

Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology functions by retroactively constructing its own past (its "fossils"), and that the closed ideological universe conceals its constitutive blind spot—the withdrawal of the subject's objectal correlate (objet petit a)—which is the structural condition for the appearance of reality; this is articulated topologically through the distinction between the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle, the latter alone capturing the emergence of the subject as pure difference.

this is why, paradoxically, true historicity always asserts what French structuralism formulated as the 'primacy of synchrony over diachrony.'
#201

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.52

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Parallax of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

Althusser's structural Marxism in which he basically applies to Marxism Lévi-Strauss's transcendentalism without (the Kantian) subject
#202

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a Snout > Notes

Theoretical move: This endnotes passage is largely bibliographic, but note 7 makes a substantive theoretical move: it distinguishes the Klein bottle's twisted structure from classical structuralist-materialist ideology critique by arguing that the "machinery" behind the ideological spectacle is symbolic/virtual rather than material, so demystification cannot dissolve the effect.

the old structuralist-materialist topic of structure as the machine which generates imaginary effects (spectacle on the ideological stage)
#203

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.

structuralism [here](#theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-2185)
#204

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

Introduction

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the visible Habermas-Foucault debate masks a theoretically more fundamental opposition—the Althusser-Lacan debate—and that Habermas's systematic avoidance of both figures (Lacan treated only in chains of equivalence, Althusser not mentioned at all) is symptomatic rather than accidental.

den zeitgenossischen Strukturalismus, die Ethnologie von Levi-Strauss und die Lacanische Psychoanalyse
#205

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

That is why Hitchcock (and with him Lacan) is no longer a 'structuralist': the basic gesture of 'structuralism' is to reduce the imaginary richness to a formal network of symbolic relations: what escapes the structuralist
#206

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Žižek traces Lacan's theoretical development from symptom as symbolic/coded message to symptom as sinthome—the real kernel of enjoyment that is the subject's only ontological substance—arguing that this universalization of symptom (paired with a universalization of foreclosure) is Lacan's answer to the philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing.

the fundamental gesture of post-structuralism is to deconstruct every substantial identity, to denounce behind its solid consistency an interplay of symbolic overdetermination... the notion of symptom is the necessary counterpoint to it, the substance of enjoyment, the real kernel around which this signifying interplay is structured.
#207

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.29

Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical scaffolding of the introduction by documenting the critique of historicism/cultural materialism and new materialism through the lens of Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, desire, the Real, the subject), establishing that both movements fail to account for the ahistorical traumatic kernel and the subject's position of enunciation.

'declares the death of the author and (in a move endemic to structuralism) asserts the autonomy of the text as a play of signifiers'
#208

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.165

Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian subject is not one object among others but the objective embodiment of reality's inherent contradiction/impossibility, and that a genuinely materialist thinking must pass through the subject rather than eliminating it, because the Real of reality's antagonism is only accessible via the subject's irreducible excessiveness.

even though the new materialisms usually take their starting point in rejecting the 'linguistic turn' and all that is labeled 'structuralism' and 'poststructuralism,' they actually share with them precisely this conviction according to which the 'subject' is a rotten apple
#209

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.51

Mladen Dolar > What's the Matter?

Theoretical move: Against both naturalist-scientific materialism ("there are only bodies") and (post)structuralist culturalism ("there are only languages"), Dolar argues that the truly materialist position locates the Real at their impossible interface—the point where the symbolic cuts into the body—and that the objet a names precisely what is irreducible to either term, requiring a third axiom: "there are only bodies and languages, except that there is the objet a."

the doxa of (post)structuralism (and postmodernity) was rather that 'there are only languages': everything is a text; there is nothing outside text
#210

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.276

Index > **INDEX**

Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 276–277) listing terms and proper names with page references; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

structuralism, 22n3, 24n25, 45, 158
#211

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.217

*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

In many ways, Lacan remains a structural thinker, and his way of understanding masculine structure and feminine structure (as bounded/unbounded, closed/open, finite/infinite) makes them strict contradictories, not simple contraries.
#212

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.40

The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **The Unconscious Assembles**

Theoretical move: The unconscious operates as a formal, non-semantic ciphering system: it is structured not by meaning but by letter-assemblages functioning like set-theoretical inscriptions, so that psychoanalytic interpretation aims not at unveiling meaning but at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning in order to locate the determinants of the subject's behavior.

This characterization of unconscious thought was by no means a passing fancy of Lacan's, representative at best of his 'structuralist' years.
#213

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.145

THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **A New Metaphor for Sexual Difference**

Theoretical move: Lacan's account of sexual difference introduces a genuinely new topological metaphor—grounded in the cross-cap and set-theoretic distinctions between open and closed sets—that replaces the classical Western model of concentric spheres and recasts masculine/feminine structure as closed/open sets respectively; this is further characterised as a "Gödelian structuralism" that systematically points to incompleteness and undecidability within any formal system.

Were I to qualify this symptomatic way of seeing, I might be tempted to call it 'Godelian structuralism,' insofar as it maintains the importance of structure, while continually pointing to the necessary incompleteness thereof.
#214

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.38

The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **Heads or Tails**

Theoretical move: By constructing a symbolic matrix from random coin-toss results, Lacan demonstrates that the act of coding raw events into a signifying chain generates structural impossibilities and a built-in memory function ex nihilo — that is, the symbolic order imposes syntactic constraints (a grammar of permissible and impermissible combinations) that are irreducible to, and unforeseeable from, the real events they encode.

The similarities between this kind of apparatus and language will be explored further on.
#215

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.142

THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **Existence and Ex-sistence**

Theoretical move: By distinguishing 'existence' (what can be said) from 'ex-sistence' (what can only be written, standing apart from the symbolic), Fink argues that the Other jouissance and objet petit a ex-sist in a way that renders Lacan's libidinal economy irreducibly open and untotalizable, foreclosing any complementarity between phallic and Other jouissance.

It can never be recuperated into a 'phallic economy' or simple structuralism.
#216

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.51

The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Structure** versus Cause

Theoretical move: Fink distinguishes two irreducible levels in Lacanian theory—the automatic functioning of the signifying chain (structure/automaton) and causation as that which interrupts this automatism—arguing that Lacan's departure from structuralism lies precisely in refusing to reduce the latter to the former, and that science's progressive "suturing" of the gap between cause and effect mirrors its attempt to evict subjectivity.

Lacan parts ways with structuralism here, as structuralists attempt to explain everything in terms of the first level, that is, in terms of a more or less mathematically determinate combinatory which plays itself out without any reference whatsoever to subjects or objects.
#217

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.57

**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Lacanian Subject Is Not the Subject of the Statement**

Theoretical move: By mapping Jakobson's linguistics of shifters onto psychoanalytic categories, Fink/Lacan demonstrates that the grammatical subject of a statement ("I") represents only the ego—the conscious, self-identifying instance—and not the split Lacanian subject, thereby opening the question of what agency disrupts the ego's enunciations.

Lacan makes explicit reference on a number of occasions to Roman Jakobson's paper on 'shifters.'
#218

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.159

Psychoanalysis and Science > Su~uring **the Subject**

Theoretical move: Science "sutures" the subject by excluding it and reducing Truth to propositional value, whereas psychoanalysis is distinguished precisely by taking into account the cause, the split subject, and the subject's libidinal relation to jouissance—making science, as currently constituted, incapable of encompassing psychoanalysis.

This is as true of Levi-Strauss' brand of structuralism as of Newtonian physics; the speaking subject is considered irrelevant to the field.
#219

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.31

Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

The Other corresponds here to what goes by the name of structure in the movement known as structuralism.
#220

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.34

The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks"

Theoretical move: The passage argues that language operates autonomously as an Other that subjects are "used by" rather than merely using, and that unconscious thought processes — structured by condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy — constitute a parallel chain of discourse whose autonomous functioning Lacan sought to model through artificial/formal languages and combinatories.

Lacan's approach to linguistics rebukes any strictly referential theory of language whereby each word uttered would have a strict one-to-one relation with a thing existing in 'reality.'
#221

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

Psychoanalysis and Science > **Probability and Possibility**

Theoretical move: By working through Lacan's second-order combinatory matrix, Fink demonstrates that the symbolic apparatus generates a distinction between probability and possibility ex nihilo: certain combinations are structurally impossible regardless of empirical probability, and the matrix's real theoretical yield is the syntactic law—the grammar—it produces, which parallels the structure of language.

the most important outcome, to my mind, is the syntax produced, which allows certain combinations and prohibits others.
#222

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.55

**The Lacanian Subject**

Theoretical move: Lacan uniquely defends both structure and subjectivity simultaneously, treating the subject not as a demonstrable entity but as a necessary theoretical construct—analogous to Freud's "second phase" of fantasy—without which psychoanalytic experience cannot be accounted for.

EVEN WHEN structuralism was alive and well, subjectivity was often taken to be incompatible with the notion of structure.
#223

The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.183

Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

Theoretical move: Against the Deleuzian thesis that pure difference is the being of repetition, Lacan insists that repetition is inseparable from the signifying dyad of alienation (automaton) while its real stake is the tuche — the gap inhabited by objet petit a — which is what the subject compulsively seeks to glimpse, not as triumph of difference but as the subject's own fleeting presence in the Real.

repetition is essentially repetition of a configuration; that it doesn't represent anything, but is itself the very content of what it represents: repetition itself is the Repräsentanz of the Vorstellung.
#224

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.56

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

Theoretical move: Žižek, following Karatani's Kantian reading of Marx, argues that the parallax gap between production and circulation is irreducible and constitutive of Capital's movement—value is generated "in itself" in production but actualized only retroactively through circulation (futur antérieur)—and that this structural antinomy cannot be resolved by privileging either side, making Capital's self-movement a "spurious infinity" rather than Hegelian dialectical closure.

Bailey opened up the path toward the structural-formal approach of Marx, which insists on the gap between an object and the structural place it occupies
#225

Theory Keywords · Various · p.80

**Surplus-***jouissance*

Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary chunk that defines and illustrates multiple Lacanian and related theoretical concepts — Surplus-jouissance, Surplus Repression, Structuralism, Symbolic Castration, Symbolic Identity, Symbolic Order, and Symptom — each entry doing distinct theoretical work: homologizing Marx's surplus-labour with Lacan's surplus-jouissance via the entropic Real; distinguishing the Symbolic from the Imaginary and Real orders; and articulating the symptom's double function as both repressive and gratificatory.

The basic premise of structuralism was that all social activity constitutes a language insofar as it involves sign systems with their own intrinsic rules and grammar.
#226

Theory Keywords · Various · p.89

**Transference** > **Unconscious**

Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.

Lacan saw in Jakobson's structural model of metaphor and metonymy a direct correspondence with Freud's process of dream work.
#227

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.147

Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > The Foundationless Subject

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's non-foundational, dynamic model of the psyche (the eyeball diagram) is fundamentally incompatible with structural/foundational readings (the iceberg metaphor), and that Lacan's structuralist turn, far from rigidifying the psyche, reinforces this anti-foundational insight — setting up Žižek as the thinker who properly brings the psychoanalytic subject to bear on ideology critique.

Bringing structuralism into psychoanalysis, however, did not produce an idea of Freud's psyche as itself a rigid structure. Instead, structuralism led Lacan in the opposite direction.
#228

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.77

Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real](#contents.xhtml_ch3) > Žižek’s Retroactive Ontology

Theoretical move: Žižek's key philosophical contribution is the concept of retroactivity—the ontological claim that necessity is retroactively produced by contingent acts rather than pre-given—which challenges both essentialist ideology critique and standard readings of Hegel as a thinker of absolute reconciliation, while coupling Hegel's dialectic with a suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Žižek's emphasis on retroactivity also brings him close in one respect to the structuralist concept of time, which famously favors synchrony over diachrony.
#229

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

Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Intervention

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of ideology is constitutively different from Marx's and Althusser's because it grounds the social order in the Real (unconscious, split subject, antagonism) rather than material-economic conditions, and achieves this by fusing Lacan's non-existent Big Other with Hegel's foundationless dialectics — locating ideology as a cover for external social antagonism rather than as the effect of an economic base.

in this theoretical move he brings subjectivity and structuralism together
#230

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.151

Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Intervention

Theoretical move: Žižek's theory of ideology is grounded in a "parallax Real" — a non-existing antagonism reconstructed retroactively from multiple symbolic perspectives — which synthesizes Marx's political theory of class struggle with Lacan's theory of the subject while departing from both: against Marx, antagonism is unsolvable; against Lacan, the Real is politicized and mobile rather than returning to the same place.

One of Žižek's most powerful examples… is from structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work Structural Anthropology.
#231

What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.87

Object-Disoriented Ontology > Realism in Psychoanalysis

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian Real offers a more rigorous response to the problem of realism than Meillassoux's speculative realism, because the "great Outside" fantasy conceals a Real already immanent to discourse; simultaneously, Lacan's theory of modern science—wherein science *produces* its object through mathematization—provides the proper ontological ground for psychoanalysis's own realism, distinguishing it from both naïve and correlationist positions.

to some extent this theory is part of a broader structuralist theory of science.
#232

What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.68

Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

Lacan's crucial addition which allows him to reintroduce the concept of the subject (of the unconscious) at the very highest point of the structuralist attacking of this notion.
#233

What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not merely one example of signifying differentiation but rather the ontological presupposition of the signifier's functioning: the constitutive gap and surplus-enjoyment that prevents the signifying field from being a closed, consistent structure are the very ground on which sexuation is configured, making the subject of the unconscious irreducibly sexed.

the structuralist side that Lacan includes in his theory they are separated from the signified in the sense that there is no inherent connection leading from the signifier to its meaning. Yet, if this were all, the signifying field would be a consistent system and, as the structuralist motto goes, a structure without a subject.
#234

What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.129

Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze converge in treating the death drive as a foundational "crack" around which drives congregate, but diverge crucially: where Deleuze collapses the tripartite topology (original negativity / surplus-enjoyment / signifiers) into a single dynamic movement of pure Difference, Lacan preserves the Real as an irreducible third term whose effect is the subject itself — making subjectivation the very index of an irreducible Real rather than an obstacle to realism.

even though new materialisms usually take their starting point in rejecting the so-called 'linguistic turn,' and all that is labeled 'structuralism' and 'poststructuralism,' they actually share with them precisely this conviction according to which the 'subject' is a rotten apple in the barrel of philosophical concepts.