Subject Supposed to Know
ELI5
When you go to therapy, you tend to secretly believe the therapist already knows the hidden truth about your problems — that's the "subject supposed to know." In Lacanian theory, this belief (not the therapist's actual knowledge) is what makes therapy possible, but the goal of analysis is eventually to let go of that belief entirely.
Definition
The sujet supposé savoir (subject supposed to know) is Lacan's formal designation for the structural position that the analysand attributes to the analyst in the transference: the analyst is presumed to already possess the key to the meaning of the analysand's symptoms, dreams, and desire. Crucially, however, what is at stake is the supposition of knowledge, not its actual possession. As Lacan formulates it canonically in Seminar XI: "As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere, there is transference." The concept is therefore positional rather than epistemic — it designates a structural slot that can be occupied by the analyst, by Freud himself, by God, by the orientalist's fantasy of the inscrutable Other, or by any figure to whom the subject delegates the secret of its own desire. The position is inaugurated by the analysand's fantasy that the analyst holds the missing signifier that would resolve the enigma of their suffering and desire; it generates transference love precisely because, as Lacan states in Seminar XX, "I love the person I assume to have knowledge."
The concept carries a constitutive paradox: the analyst's supposed knowledge is simultaneously the engine of analytic work and what analysis must ultimately dissolve. Lacan insists that the analyst does in fact "know nothing" — or at any rate "knows nothing about this particular subject," as formulated in Seminar XIII — and that the very foundations of psychoanalysis preclude the existence of a completed, totalizing subject of knowledge, since Freudian discovery is grounded in an irreducible lack at the level of the signifier. Analysis terminates not when the analyst is found to be genuinely omniscient, but when the Subject Supposed to Know "falls" — undergoes what Lacan in Seminar XV calls désêtre (destitution of being) — and is replaced at its place by the objet petit a as cause of the analysand's division. The function thus names the founding fiction of the analytic relationship and the necessary illusion that must be traversed rather than consolidated.
Evolution
In Lacan's early seminars (Seminar I, return-to-freud period), the concept is present only in embryonic form. Seminar I already argues that the analyst must practice ignorantia docta — a formative ignorance — refusing to become a "subject who knows" in psychology. The critique of ego-psychological analysts who accepted the transferential projection of omniscience is read retrospectively as an early articulation of the danger of inhabiting rather than holding the position. The hook-point for Seminar I is Freud's own formulation of the analytic pact — "our knowledge makes up for your ignorance" — which Lacan cites precisely in order to deconstruct it (Seminar I, p. 71).
The concept receives its first formal elaboration in Seminar IX (Identification, 1961–62, return-to-freud/structuralist transition), where Lacan states: "there has never been but a single subject which I would pinpoint under this form: the subject who is supposed to know (le sujet supposé savoir)." Here it is identified as the fundamental prejudice of post-Cartesian philosophy — the presupposition of a locus where knowledge is already complete — which psychoanalysis must radically subvert. Descartes' reliance on God as guarantor of the eternal verities is identified as the primal instance of this structure: God is "the subject who is supposed to know" who underwrites certainty. Lacan makes the critical move of mapping this theological-philosophical function onto the analytic relationship.
The mature formulation arrives in Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts, 1964, object-a period), Chapters 18–20. Here the concept is formally abbreviated as S.s.S. (sujet supposé savoir), introduced on the blackboard, and linked to three decisive theses: (1) it is the structural condition — not personal quality — of any transference whatsoever; (2) transference is "unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject supposed to know"; and (3) the "liquidation of the transference" means the permanent dissolution of the deceptive closure this structure installs over the unconscious, not the analyst's gaining genuine omniscience. Lacan also argues here that Freud was the sole analyst who legitimately occupied this position because he actually did produce the knowledge he was supposed to know. Seminars XII and XIII (Crucial Problems, 1964–66, object-a period) deepen the antinomy: the analyst must function as subject supposed to know for the analytic process to engage, yet Freudian discovery structurally precludes any such subject from existing, since knowledge is always grounded in a missing signifier.
In the later seminars (Seminar XV–XVII, discourses period), the concept is embedded in the theory of the Four Discourses and extended beyond the clinic. The analyst's position in the Discourse of the Analyst is defined precisely by not occupying the place of mastery/knowledge (S1 at top-left) but instead placing objet a as semblance — which is the inverse of University Discourse, where knowledge (S2) occupies the commanding place. In Seminar XVII, Lacan insists that the analyst "makes of himself the desire of the patient" rather than the guarantor of meaning. By Seminars XX (Encore) and XXIV–XXV (topology period), the concept is reformulated as a pleonasm — "the subject is never more than supposed" — generalizing the structure of supposition to subjectivity as such. Commentators (Fink, McGowan, Zupančič, Boothby) further extend the concept beyond the clinic: to theological figures (God as S.s.S.), to political leaders, to the digital algorithm, to expert culture, and even to the viewer's relationship to cinema.
Key formulations
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.247)
As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere—I have abbreviated it for you today at the top of the blackboard as S.s.S. (sujet suppose savoir) there is transference.
This is Lacan's canonical, formally abbreviated introduction of the concept: the S.s.S. is the minimal and sufficient structural condition for transference — any locus where this supposition of knowledge is installed produces the transferential relation, independently of who occupies it.
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.268)
The transference is unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject who is supposed to know. You will now have a better idea of what he is supposed to know. He is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it—quite simply, signification.
Lacan specifies what the analyst is supposed to know: not particular biographical content but signification as such — the capacity of speech to mean, which no speaking being can escape. This pins the concept to the structural rather than empirical dimension of knowledge.
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (p.68)
The term of analysis consists in the fall of the subject supposed to know and his reduction to the arrival of this o-object, as cause of the division of the subject which comes in its place.
This passage from Seminar XV defines the telos of analysis: the S.s.S. does not accumulate more real knowledge but 'falls,' yielding to objet a. This formulation shows that the concept's arc is one of necessary illusion traversed rather than truth obtained.
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (p.268)
Between the false position, of being the subject supposed to know (which he knows well he is not) and that of having to rectify the effects of this supposition on the part of the subject, and this in the name of the truth.
From Seminar XIV: the analyst's double-bind is articulated with precision — he must occupy a position he knows to be false while simultaneously working to undo its effects. This makes the S.s.S. structurally necessary and yet fundamentally untenable.
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.239)
He puts the field of this knowledge at the level of this vaster subject, the subject who is supposed to know, God. You know that Descartes could not help reintroducing the presence of God. But in what a strange way!
Lacan traces the structural genealogy of the S.s.S. to Descartes: the Cartesian cogito required God as the guarantor of suspended knowledge, prefiguring exactly the transferential function the analyst will later occupy. This historicizes and universalizes the concept beyond the clinic.
Cited examples
Hamlet's paralysis before acting (literature)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.268). Zupančič reads Hamlet's inability to act as structurally produced by the fact that he knows the Other knows — he cannot disavow the Other's knowledge and thus cannot act from his own desire. The dynamic is contrasted with Sygne de Coûfontaine who must act despite and through such knowledge, inverting the transference paralysis.
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) — 'Rosebud' investigation (film)
Cited by Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (p.49). McGowan uses Citizen Kane to illustrate how the reporter Thompson pursues Rosebud as a supposed key to the truth of Kane's desire — positioning himself as a detective who assumes some Other holds this secret. The film structurally enacts the S.s.S. dynamic: the investigation presupposes there is something to know, but the final revelation is that no adequate object satisfies this presupposition.
Alcibiades' pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates (Plato's Symposium) (literature)
Cited by Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) (p.165). Lacan reads Alcibiades' seduction of Socrates as the primal scene of transference: Alcibiades attributes to Socrates a 'mysterious, enigmatic, profound science' (agalma) that he cannot display but which organises all his behaviour toward him. This is the concrete historical prototype of the S.s.S. — the beloved/analyst is presumed to hold a hidden object of knowledge that the lover/analysand desperately seeks to extract.
Socrates in the Meno interrogating the slave (literature)
Cited by Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) (p.42). Lacan uses Socrates' questioning of the slave about geometry to argue that the very structure of 'bringing out knowledge' from the interlocutor presupposes somewhere a Subject Supposed to Know — whether the mythical form of reminiscence (the soul always already knows) or the structured transference of analytic questioning.
The ego-psychological analysts who accepted the position of the omniscient knower (case_study)
Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (page unknown). Hook et al. describe ego-psychological analysts as having 'corrupted' themselves by accepting the patient's projection of omniscience onto them — inhabiting rather than holding the S.s.S. position. This resulted in suggestion rather than analysis, with the analyst's ego substituted for the analysand's unconscious truth.
Anna O. / Bertha Pappenheim and Breuer's 'smooth operation' of the talking cure (case_study)
Cited by Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.172). Lacan reads the inaugural scene of psychoanalysis as a demonstration of what happens when the analyst fails to register his own desire's operation: Breuer believed the cure was going smoothly because sexuality had been excluded, only for it to return from the patient in the form of the famous hysterical pregnancy. Breuer's unacknowledged position as the S.s.S. generated transference love he could not theorize.
Little Hans and Freud as 'the Professor who knows everything' / 'God's confidant' (case_study)
Cited by Seminar IV · The Object Relation (p.316). In the Little Hans case, Freud occupies the position of 'supra-father' who speaks from a position the child imagines as divine authority ('The Professor must talk to the good Lord'). Lacan reads Hans's 'amused interest' in Freud's omniscience as marking the specific way the S.s.S. operates in child analysis — slightly inflected with humor because the child grasps its fictional quality.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether the subject supposed to know is primarily a transference phenomenon that must be dissolved or a necessary structural fiction that must be inhabited and then traversed — with different implications for the analyst's ethical position.
Lacan (Seminar XI): The S.s.S. is the necessary condition for transference and thus for analysis; the analyst must allow this attribution to install itself, and 'liquidation' of the transference means only the permanent dissolution of its closure of the unconscious, not the elimination of the analyst's knowledge-function. The analyst does in fact learn something about this particular subject by the end. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11 p. 282
Lacan (Seminar XIV–XV): The analyst's position as S.s.S. is fundamentally a 'false position' — the analyst 'knows well he is not' the S.s.S. yet must occupy it, placing him structurally 'between two stools.' The psychoanalytic act consists precisely in inhabiting a position one knows to be untenable and that must ultimately be replaced by the objet a. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-14 p. 268
This tension generates the question of whether the end of analysis involves a real epistemic transformation (the analyst finally knows something) or a purely structural event (the S.s.S. 'falls' regardless of actual knowledge). Seminar XI leans toward a paradox; Seminars XIV–XV resolve it structurally at the cost of the knowledge dimension.
Whether the S.s.S. is specific to the analytic clinic or is a universal structure underlying all transference-like relations (pedagogy, political authority, religious belief, historical knowledge).
Lacan in Seminar XI grounds the concept firmly in the structure of the analytic situation, noting that Freud was the one person who could legitimately occupy the S.s.S. because he actually produced the knowledge of the unconscious — making the function historically singular and clinically specific. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11 p. 247
Boothby extends the S.s.S. to theology (God as S.s.S., the Christian God described as 'fully sujet supposé savoir'), capitalism (the capitalist employee as 'subject supposed to consent'), and digital media (social media's promise of hidden knowledge as S.s.S. logic). This universalizes the concept beyond Lacan's original clinical framing. — cite: diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred p. 207
The clinical-versus-universal tension shapes whether the concept is primarily a structural formalization of transference or a general theory of authority, epistemic attribution, and ideological belief.
Whether the analyst should explicitly refuse the S.s.S. position (positioning themselves as occupying 'the place of lack') or must strategically maintain it to enable analysis.
Lacan in Seminar XII explicitly differentiates his own discursive position from the S.s.S., describing his role as 'risking himself at the place where he is lacking' — proposing a model in which the teacher/analyst should actively disavow the position of the subject supposed to know. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12 p. 23
Miller (in Seminar XII) argues that the analyst necessarily is the S.s.S. and that 'the analyst does not suture' precisely because he holds this position without collapsing it into certainty — i.e., the analyst must maintain the S.s.S. while preventing it from becoming a subject who 'supposes himself to know.' — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12 p. 282
This tension between explicit refusal and strategic maintenance of the S.s.S. reflects a genuine clinical-theoretical disagreement about whether the analyst's proper response to transference is disavowal or traversal from within.
Across frameworks
vs Ego Psychology
Lacanian: For Lacan, ego psychology commits the fundamental clinical error of inverting the proper epistemological asymmetry of analysis: by positioning the analyst's ego as the gold standard of health and as the one who genuinely knows the contents of the analysand's unconscious, it institutionalizes the S.s.S. as a positive epistemic claim rather than a structural fiction to be traversed. The result is suggestion rather than analysis, and a redoubling of the analysand's alienation.
Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Anna Freud, Hartmann, the IPA mainstream) holds that the analyst's 'conflict-free ego sphere' and acquired clinical knowledge genuinely equip her to know the meaning of symptoms and the reality the patient distorts. The analyst's expanded consciousness is what enables therapeutic progress; the asymmetry is epistemically justified, not merely structural.
Fault line: The core disagreement is whether the analyst's authority in the clinical encounter rests on real knowledge (ego-psychological) or is constitutively fictional and must be traversed (Lacanian). For Lacan, any 'real knowledge' the analyst claims collapses the analytic position into suggestion and foreclosures the unconscious.
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: Lacanian theory holds that the assumption of a potential for complete self-knowledge and actualization is precisely the fantasy that analysis must dissolve. The S.s.S. in the clinic functions in part to organize the analysand's hope that the analyst holds the key to their 'authentic self' — a hope structured exactly like the humanistic belief in a true self awaiting realization. Lacan's clinical aim is the opposite: subjective destitution, not self-realization.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) holds that the therapist's role is to provide unconditional positive regard and to reflect back the client's own authentic voice, trusting the client's organismic wisdom to find its own growth direction. The therapist does not claim special knowledge of the client's unconscious but facilitates the client's own self-discovery.
Fault line: Despite superficial similarity (both traditions deny the therapist's omniscience), the fault line is deep: humanistic psychology posits a pre-given authentic self toward which the subject is oriented, while Lacan denies any such teleology of self-actualization — the subject is constituted by lack, and 'authentic desire' is not recovered but produced through the analytic process.
vs Cbt
Lacanian: Cognitive-behavioral therapy positions the therapist as a trained expert who genuinely possesses knowledge of cognitive distortions and their corrections — an explicit, institutionalized version of the S.s.S. For Lacan, this is not a structural fiction to be traversed but an ideological claim that forecloses the unconscious: when the analyst 'knows' in advance what the patient's distortion is, interpretation becomes suggestion and the analysand's desire is subordinated to normative schemas.
Cbt: CBT holds that therapists possess scientifically validated knowledge of maladaptive thought patterns, behavioral contingencies, and evidence-based interventions. The therapeutic alliance is built partly on the client's recognition of the therapist's expertise. The goal is to transfer cognitive tools to the client, making her eventually her own CBT practitioner.
Fault line: The fundamental disagreement is about what 'knowledge' in a clinical encounter consists of: CBT treats it as propositional and transferable (the therapist knows the cognitive model and teaches it), while Lacanian theory treats it as structural — the 'knowledge' at stake in analysis is always the analysand's own unconscious knowledge, which the analyst's position merely holds open.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (408)
-
#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.198
Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The theft of desire - and the mother in exchange
Theoretical move: The passage argues that guilt is constituted by the moment when the desire of the Other becomes the subject's own desire (finding surplus-enjoyment in objective necessity), and that Oedipus escapes guilt precisely because his desire is stolen from him from the outset — he is 'robbed of his desire' and given over to the social order in exchange, a structural theft that distinguishes his tragedy from those of Hamlet, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra.
It is not simply a matter of the Other knowing (in advance) the destiny of the subject, revealing it to him. The knowledge at stake is not, for example, of the form: 'You will kill your father and sleep with your mother'
-
#02
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.215
Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > What shall we do with Oedipus? > The hostage of the word
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx's riddle exemplifies "knowledge as truth" — a word wagered without guarantee from the Other — and that this act is not transgression but an act of creation that founds a new symbolic order, rendering ethics possible as fidelity to an inaugurating event.
It is this knowledge, the knowledge which might be called the knowledge guaranteed (by the Other), that Oedipus lacks. No one (neither a divinity nor a dictionary of riddles) can guarantee him in advance that his answer will be right (or 'true').
-
#03
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.268
Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "realization of desire" operates through an infinite measure (the logic of negative magnitude and endless metonymy) that can only be articulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement, and she uses the parallel between Kant's postulates and Lacan's ethics to show that the Act (as in Antigone) dissolves the divided subject by transposing it wholly to the side of the object—thereby distinguishing desire from jouissance and opening onto a "modern" ethics adequate to a symbolic order in which the Other's non-existence is itself known.
Hamlet hesitates; he cannot take it upon himself to act, because he knows (that the Other knows).
-
#04
Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.110
<span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Why Fight Club?**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club is an exemplary object for Marxist film theory precisely because the film itself theorizes—meaning analysis cannot take the form of applying masterful tools to a passive object, but must instead be dialectical, foregrounding the interpretive relationship and the film's own theoretical agency.
We cannot presume that we bring theory to explain a film, that the film is an object to which we apply our masterful tools.
-
#05
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.49
THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS
Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist accumulation operates by exploiting the subject's constitutive misrecognition of its own satisfaction: because satisfaction is located in the act of desiring (rooted in loss) rather than in the object obtained, the subject endlessly pursues objects via the fantasy of the Other's desire, and capitalism recruits this structural failure as its engine.
the desire that the subject associates with the other or others that the subject itself desires (and supposes to know the secret of desire)
-
#06
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.222
THE DIFFIC ULTIE S OF SUSTAININ G SC ARC IT Y
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that economic crises are not merely structural failures of capitalism but expressions of the subject's unconscious investment in sustaining scarcity: as capitalism approaches abundance, subjects recoil because desire depends on the inaccessibility of the lost object, and this psychic necessity of loss structurally reproduces scarcity, thereby propping up capitalism itself.
I believe that the other has an insight into this scarcity that I do not.
-
#07
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.299
. THE M AR K ET'S FETI SHI STIC SUBLIME
Theoretical move: This passage (a footnote/endnote section) develops the theoretical grounding for the chapter's argument that commodity fetishism produces a sublimity rooted in immanent transcendence—a structure Hegel makes possible and Marx theorizes—while also deploying Lacanian concepts (subject supposed to know, lack) to critique orientalism and capitalism's psychic appeal.
For Hegel, there is no subject supposed to know, as there is for the orientalist, who believes that oriental subjects have access to a secret knowledge and thus do not suff er from the unconscious in the way that Westerners do.
-
#08
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
<span id="ch10.xhtml_page_1"></span>[Introduction to ‘Reading the <span class="italic">Écrits</span>’: <span class="italic">La trahison de l’écriture</span>](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-002)
Theoretical move: The Écrits is theorized not as a conventional book but as a labyrinthine, desire-engendering psychoanalytic tool whose deliberate obscurity, resistance to writing, and symptomatic relation to the seminars position it as a transference-inducing object rather than a vehicle of rational comprehension.
the Écrits surely works less within the pragmatic goals of comprehension or rational intelligibility than as a means of inducing in us the perplexity and the suspension of knowledge that the analysand experiences in respect of the analyst and the analytic process itself.
-
#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) > Situation in time and place of this exercise
Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is theorized as a repetition-with-difference (après-coup) that counters the ego-psychological Americanization of psychoanalysis, which is diagnosed as a symptomatic repression of the unconscious behind an adaptive, autonomous ego and a medicalized analyst-as-knower structure that inverts the true knowledge-relation of the clinic.
The 'corruption' of these analysts amounts to their giving in to transferential demands from their analysands for them to occupy the position Lacan subsequently, in Seminar XI, identifies as that of 'the subject supposed to know'.
-
#10
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.30
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Resistance to the resisters
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological defense analysis shows it to be self-defeating: by privileging the ego as analytic interlocutor, it redoubles alienation and misrecognition, reinforces defenses rather than dissolving them, and substitutes the analyst's suggestive opinions for genuine analytic truth—whereas Lacan insists that the Freudian Thing speaks even through defenses, making everything said (or unsaid) by the analysand available to interpretation.
the analyst is assumed by both parties in the analysis to know more and better the contents and workings of the analysand's unconscious (as well as what ultimately counts as 'reality')
-
#11
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.38
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The other’s discourse
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology is mobilized to demonstrate that the ego is structurally an alienating sedimentation of the other's discourse and a device of resistance against the unconscious, such that the proper analytic use of the ego is as a *via negativa* — a negative index pointing toward the speaking subject of the unconscious rather than a therapeutic ideal to be strengthened.
the axiomatic standpoint of Freudian psychoanalysis according to which knowledge resides on the side of the analysand, not the analyst
-
#12
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.57
[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 Freudian unconscious is constitutively Symbolic rather than Imaginary: needs (hunger as paradigm) are sublated into demand and desire through Imaginary-Symbolic mediation, and post-Freudian reduction of analysis to affective/imaginary phenomena distorts Freud's discovery, culminating in a socio-cultural "general infantilization" through scientistic misidentification with the subject supposed to know.
misidentifying themselves with the essential, paradigmatic transferential illusion of being le sujet supposé savoir
-
#13
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.75
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The talk given was couched in the following terms
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's abstract simultaneously enacts and reflects on his mode of teaching psychoanalysis, sketching key theses (split subject, linguistic unconscious, the analyst as Other) while critically noting the social cost of psychoanalysis's fashionable acceptance—which distorts the analyst into a figure of omniscient authority rather than a rigorous clinical and theoretical position.
The analyst himself was now invested ('rather thoughtlessly, in truth') with the image of the one-who-knows, and perhaps the one-to-fear, in bourgeois and medical culture.
-
#14
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.108
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Action figures
Theoretical move: Lacan's "Return to Freud" is theorized here as a corrective practice that reinstates the primacy of the symbolic (signifier, speech, structure) against post-Freudian distortions—particularly object relations and affect-based readings of transference—thereby renewing both the conceptual foundations and the institutional situation of psychoanalysis.
To know what transference is, one must know what happens in analysis. To know what happens in analysis, one must know where speech comes from.
-
#15
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.151
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is a symptomatic compromise-formation that covers over the radical heteronomy of the subject, while the unconscious, understood as the Other's discourse, is the true object of psychoanalysis; the letter's insistence through metaphor and metonymy links being to desire and repetition, grounding Lacan's claim that subjects are spoken by signifiers rather than speaking them.
The analyst, the one who is supposed to know, may represent a set of social conventions or expectations, even the paternal authority so often discussed by Freud.
-
#16
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.211
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > I. Who analyzes today?
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of post-Freudian (especially ego-psychological) psychoanalysis is mobilized to argue that authentic analytic practice requires orienting from the symbolic axis (Other, lack, desire) rather than from imaginary ego-to-ego relations, with the L-schema formalizing why the analytic situation must be understood as four-positional rather than dyadic.
Lacan seems to imply the notion of a 'subject supposed to know' (Sujet supposé Savoir, SsS)… This serves as the basis for transference and refers to the patient's assumption that the analyst knows the secret meaning of his words.
-
#17
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.216
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?
Theoretical move: Lacan's account of interpretation displaces ego-psychological and Gestaltian frameworks by grounding interpretation exclusively in the function of the signifier and the place of the Other, arguing that subjective transmutation occurs through the signifier rather than through ego-adaptive understanding, and that analytic direction must begin from subjective rectification rather than adaptation to reality.
the analyst's initial belief in the analyst as a knowing other
-
#18
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.47
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Analytic action
Theoretical move: The L-schema is deployed to argue that the fundamental axis of analytic action is the Symbolic (between unconscious subjects), not the Imaginary (between egos), and that the analyst's strategic self-effacement/silence opens space for the unconscious to speak by dissolving the transference and instantiating the symbolic order as condition of possibility for the analysand's speech.
the analyst abstains from gratifying his/her ego-level narcissism by refusing to identify with the analysand's transferential attributions to his/her person of omniscience as the subject supposed to know
-
#19
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Truly the most, the most truly
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what is "truly proper" to psychoanalysis—the Freudian unconscious—has been systematically domesticated by Neo-Freudian adaptations, institutional identification, and mimetic transmission, and that reclaiming psychoanalysis requires a "militant" return to what is singular in Freud's concept of the unconscious rather than an imaginary identification with an acceptable image of Freud.
the questioner is faced with a darker question: is that recognition in any way legitimate, since it would seem to lack any basis in 'firmer alterity' than membership and identification?
-
#20
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.31
Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship > Rethinking Religion
Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan, despite offering no explicit theory of religion, provides uniquely suited resources for interpreting worship; the passage surveys two dominant approaches—identifying God with the Real or with the Symbolic—before proposing that the key to a Lacanian theory of religion lies in the relationship between the big Other and the little other.
'The subject supposed to know,' says Lacan, 'is God, full stop, nothing else.'
-
#21
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.42
Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > Alone Together
Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—located in the Other rather than in consciousness itself (contra Sartre)—is the primal source of both anxiety and desire in intersubjective life, and that contemporary digital behaviour (social-media addiction, 'alone together' gadget use) is best understood as a defensive yet ambivalent negotiation with this void in the Other, simultaneously evading and chasing it.
The user is constantly reseduced by the promise of an elusive but crucial something 'out there' that hasn't yet been discovered.
-
#22
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.60
Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Thing about a Psychoanalyst
Theoretical move: The analyst embodies both the little Other (das Ding) and the big Other (subject supposed to know) at different levels of the analytic encounter; the progress of analysis moves from the patient's identification of the analyst with the symbolic big Other toward the dissolution of that Other, ultimately returning the subject to the pre-symbolic abyss of das Ding as the core of the unconscious.
how are we to make sense of Lacan's other, ubiquitous characterization of the position of the analyst as the 'subject supposed to know'?
-
#23
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.126
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Voice from the Burning Bush
Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of "Eyeh asher eyeh" and the shofar together argue that the Jewish sacred is constituted by the divided subject and the pure voice as objet a: the burning bush declares the non-coincidence of the subject of enunciation with the subject of the enounced, while the shofar embodies das Ding as lost object, making Judaism the religion of the law of language.
The question becomes what it is that the Other wants of me, and how I am to respond to it.
-
#24
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.138
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Living with the Law— the God Symptom
Theoretical move: Judaic monotheism's unprecedented proximity to *das Ding* is argued to generate anxiety that is structurally managed through a symptomatic displacement into obsessive legal observance (halacha), which simultaneously creates distance from and intimacy with the terrifying Other; this symptom formation is socially stabilized not by verified conformity but by a collective suppositional regime—what Pfaller calls "interpassivity"—in which the big Other's authority rests on the fiction that everyone else obeys.
As the subject supposed to know and the overseer of conformity to the law, the big Other is largely a tissue of social fiction.
-
#25
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.159
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Abyss of Freedom
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the radical Christian ethic of love—grounded in freedom, unknowing, and relation to das Ding beyond the law—is systematically betrayed by orthodox Christian dogma, which functions as a defensive, compensatory reinvestment in the symbolic big Other against the anxiety produced by that original abyssal encounter; the psychoanalytic transference is offered as a structural parallel to this dynamic of supposed knowledge arising from a void of unknowing.
For Lacan, the default position of the transference construes the analyst as a 'subject supposed to know.' But this supposition is erected in response to a void of unknowing.
-
#26
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.166
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology
Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Christianity's distinctive innovation is the elevation of *belief itself* (the act of believing, for-itself) over religious action or content, and that this structure of belief is fundamentally a social/ideological defense against the unknown Other — making it the very mechanism by which the church betrays Jesus's teaching of love.
To put the point in parallel to Lacan's characterization of the analyst as the subject supposed to know, believers position themselves in relation to *the subject(s) supposed not to believe or to believe otherwise*.
-
#27
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.170
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology > The Manichaean Temptation
Theoretical move: The Lacanian architecture of belief—which requires a supposed non-believer as its structural support—explains why mainstream Christianity persistently "substantializes" evil into a gnostic dualism despite both orthodox Augustinian theology and Jesus's own teaching; the psychic requirement of belief generates the division between good and evil as its ideological shadow.
the way belief relies implicitly or explicitly on a supposition about others who fail to believe, or believe differently. That divide is nothing other than the psychic architecture of belief itself.
-
#28
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.198
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Money God
Theoretical move: The passage argues that money functions as the true interpellating agency of modern capitalist society—replacing Althusser's divine Big Other with an anonymous, faceless force—by occupying the structural position of das Ding: it colonizes the void of desire so completely that subjects are always-already constituted as 'free' agents before any explicit ideological address, atomizing the social body and foreclosing collective solidarity.
On the model of the Lacanian analyst as the subject supposed to know, the capitalist employee is the subject supposed to consent. The assumption is that every worker is a subject who freely signs on for the job.
-
#29
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.207
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > Sex and the Sacred
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the two sides of the religious phenomenon—opening onto das Ding versus symptomatic defense—are gender-relative, mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation: the masculine logic of exception underwrites phallic jouissance and doctrinal/hierarchical religion, while the feminine logic of the non-all underwrites Other jouissance and a radical, kenotic Christianity; this allows a gendered re-reading of das Ding and a reinterpretation of divinity as unknowing, loving, and structurally aligned with the feminine.
On the side of Christian doctrine that links Christ with the masculine logic of exception, God remains omniscient. God is fully sujet supposé savoir.
-
#30
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.244
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**
Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 244–247) listing conceptual terms, proper names, and their page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage but reveals the conceptual architecture of Boothby's text by mapping Lacanian concepts (das Ding, objet a, jouissance, sujet supposé savoir, sexuation, etc.) onto comparative religion.
crucifixion: … and sujet supposé savoir, 197 … God, Christian: … as sujet supposé savoir, 197–98
-
#31
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.250
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**
Theoretical move: This is an index page (pp. 250) from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive in itself but maps the key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts deployed throughout the work, including das Ding, objet a, sexuation, the subject supposed to know, the symbolic, symptom, and the void in relation to religion and the sacred.
sujet supposé savoir (subject supposed to know): analyst as, 51–52, 156, 188; God as, 197–98; and master signifiers, 22
-
#32
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.248
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**
Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage (pages 248–249) listing key terms, persons, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but surfaces the book's central conceptual architecture through its entry clusters.
master signifier: God as, 196–97; and imaginary identities, 184–85; in postmodern life, 187; and subject supposed to know, 22
-
#33
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.69
I > 2 > Th e Secret of the Symptom
Theoretical move: The symptom is not a barrier to enjoyment but its very source and foundation: psychoanalytic intervention works not by eliminating the symptom but by transforming the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it already obtains through symptomatic disruption, and desire itself is a fundamental misrecognition of the death drive.
They view the analyst as a subject supposed to know, that is, as a subject who knows the secret of the symptom.
-
#34
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.151
I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success
Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic success consists in the subject publicly avowing its fantasy and acting from the "nonsense" of its own enjoyment rather than sacrificing that enjoyment to social authority — thereby exposing the groundlessness of all symbolic authority and opening a path for collective transformation. Hamlet's trajectory from perverse fool to authentic fool is used as the paradigmatic illustration of this move.
Subjects who hope to make an impact on social authority never act because they cannot calculate how the authority will respond to the act.
-
#35
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.185
I > Against Knowledge > Rule by Experts
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the historical shift from master authority to expert authority under capitalism transforms knowledge from a liberating force into a mechanism of subjection, and that this shift demands a political program oriented around enjoyment rather than knowledge, since the knowledge that once subverted mastery is now the very weapon the expert wields against subjects.
Expert knowledge — a knowledge not accessible to the ordinary subject — has all the answers and thus becomes the undisputable locus of authority. The popularity of these shows derives from their ability to allow audiences to share in the expert's enjoyment.
-
#36
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.203
I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that emancipatory politics fails when it aligns itself with knowledge/expert authority against enjoyment, because popular identification with political figures operates precisely through shared enjoyment rather than rational conviction — and documentary film, as a form structurally committed to facts over enjoyment, exemplifies this failure.
The entire film is an act of consciousness-raising and enjoyment-restricting. By seizing on Gore's film as a rallying point, the forces of emancipation again cede the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism.
-
#37
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan
I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge
Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory politics fails by investing in knowledge-transmission (the documentary form) while ceding the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism; genuine political transformation requires reorganizing enjoyment, not merely supplementing knowledge.
the form itself almost implicitly takes the side of the expert
-
#38
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.345
I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 10. The Necessity of Belief
Theoretical move: This notes section develops several interlocking theoretical claims: that psychoanalysis addresses the trauma of existence that neither God's existence nor nonexistence can resolve; that religion functions to mask social antagonism; that Pascal's wager affirms a point of non-knowledge irreducible to calculation; and that authentic events retroactively restructure the field of probability and meaning.
He recognizes that there is a point of nonknowledge within the known world that no amount of speculation or scientific discovery can penetrate
-
#39
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_148"></span>**perversion**
Theoretical move: Lacan redefines perversion not as deviant sexual behaviour but as a distinct clinical structure, characterized by the operations of disavowal (in relation to the phallus) and a specific positioning of the subject as object/instrument of the Other's jouissance—inverting the structure of fantasy—and argues this structure is equally complex to neurosis, differing not in richness but in the inverse direction of its structuration.
comparing the certainty of the pervert with that of the psychotic, and arguing that perverts cannot take the position of 'one who does not know' before a 'subject supposed to know'
-
#40
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_196"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0223"></span>**subject suppposed to know**
Theoretical move: The passage elaborates the Subject Supposed to Know as a transferential function—not a person but a position the analyst comes to embody—whose establishment and dissolution structure the entire arc of analytic treatment, while also showing that the function is reversible: the analyst equally institutes the analysand as a subject supposed to know via the fundamental rule of free association.
'As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere there is transference' (S11, 232). This definition emphasises that it is the analysand's supposition of a subject who knows that initiates the analytic process.
-
#41
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_198"></span>**Suggestion**
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion/hypnosis by arguing that psychoanalysis operates precisely where suggestion fails: by maintaining the distance between identification (I/ego-ideal) and objet petit a, rather than collapsing them as hypnosis does, and by directing the treatment rather than the patient, embracing nonsense over signification, and holding the analyst's knowledge as merely presumed rather than real.
the analyst must realise that he only occupies the position of one who is presumed (by the analysand) to know, without fooling himself that he really does possess the knowledge attributed to him.
-
#42
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_50"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0064"></span>**desire of the analyst**
Theoretical move: The passage articulates a constitutive ambiguity in Lacan's concept of the desire of the analyst: on one side, it functions as an enigmatic attributed desire that engines the analytic process by sustaining the Che vuoi? question; on the other, it names a properly analytic desire oriented not toward identification or cure but toward 'absolute difference', situating it at the heart of the ethics of psychoanalysis and requiring a training analysis to constitute it.
The analyst is therefore not only a SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW but also a 'subject supposed to desire'.
-
#43
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_61"></span>**end of analysis**
Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's evolving formulations of the 'end of analysis' across his teaching, arguing that the end-point is a logical terminus defined by subjective destitution, traversal of fantasy, and identification with the sinthome—not therapeutic cure, ego-strengthening, or identification with the analyst—and that it always involves the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and the reduction of the analyst to objet petit a.
a corresponding change in the position of the analyst (the loss of being [Fr. désêtre] of the analyst, the fall of the analyst from the position of the subject-supposed-to-know)
-
#44
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_16"></span>**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.
even other symbols which are relatively stable in meaning are occasionally used in very different ways; for example, *s* nearly always designates the signified, but is used in one algorithm to denote the subject supposed to know
-
#45
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_40"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0053"></span>**Consciousness**
Theoretical move: Lacan systematically devalues Freud's account of consciousness relative to his theory of the unconscious, arguing that consciousness is not naturally evolved but radically discontinuous, and that the illusion of self-transparent consciousness is ultimately rethought through the concept of the Subject Supposed to Know.
In the 1960s Lacan rethinks the illusion of a self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein) fully present to itself in terms of his concept of the SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW.
-
#46
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_13"></span>**adaptation**
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of adaptation as a psychoanalytic aim demonstrates that ego-psychology's biologistic framework distorts psychoanalysis by misreading the ego's alienating function, naturalizing the analyst's authority, and ignoring the de-naturalizing effect of the symbolic order and the death drive on human beings.
it is automatically assumed that the analyst is better adapted than the patient. This inevitably turns psychoanalysis into the exercise of power
-
#47
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_208"></span> **transference**
Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.
In 1964, Lacan articulates the concept of transference with his concept of the SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW, which remains central to Lacan's view of the transference from then on
-
#48
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_ncx_101"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_page_0119"></span>***K***
Theoretical move: This passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it positions Kleinian psychoanalysis as a key foil for Lacan's reading of Freud, cataloguing his criticisms (fantasy in the imaginary, neglect of the symbolic, linguistic unconscious) while acknowledging partial affinities; second, it articulates Lacan's fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge—imaginary connaissance (ego-based misrecognition) and symbolic savoir (unconscious desire, jouissance of the Other)—establishing their opposed roles in psychoanalytic treatment.
this does not prevent one supposing that somewhere there is a subject who possesses this symbolic knowledge (see SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW).
-
#49
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.79
<span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*
Theoretical move: Fisher uses the figure of Smiley to theorize a subject driven not by repressed sexuality but by a constitutive lack of interiority — a "chameleon" subjectivity that dissolves into role-playing, making desire, drive, and perversion irreducible to sadomasochism or therapeutic models of repression. The passage pivots on distinguishing Smiley's ascetic renunciation-as-perversity from both repression and sadomasochistic enjoyment.
isn't that a large part of Smiley's appeal to those of us from a more adolescent, more compulsively loquacious time: his grownup capacity to engender respect, and to quietly solicit our need for his approval?
-
#50
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.278
xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI:** *Western moralism.*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is a dialectical art whose foundational operator is 'ignorantia docta' — the analyst's formative ignorance that guides the subject along the paths of error toward truth — and that symbolic investiture (not psychological capacity) constitutes the dimension in which being is realised, with transference, the signifier, and non-sense articulated as interconnected structural phenomena.
The analyst's ignorance is also worthy of consideration... the position of the analyst must be that of an ignorantia docta
-
#51
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.71
**VI**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego analysis must be reframed as discourse analysis: the ego's function is constitutively one of méconnaissance, and analytic progress requires moving beyond the dual imaginary relation (ego-to-ego) toward the symbolic structuration of the subject, with the Oedipus complex understood as a triangulated, asymmetrical symbolic structure rather than a simple content to be interpreted.
Our knowledge is to make up for his ignorance and to give his ego back its mastery over lost provinces of his mental life. This pact constitutes the analytic situation.
-
#52
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.178
**Xffl**
Theoretical move: The Fort/Da game is read as the originary moment where desire becomes human through its entry into language: the symbol's power to negate the thing (the "original murder of the thing") opens the world of negativity, grounds both human discourse and reality, and locates primal masochism at this inaugural negativation; desire thereafter is only ever reintegrated through symbolic nomination, and analytic technique must be understood in terms of freeing speech from its moorings within language.
What do we try to show to the subject in analysis? Where do we try to guide him to in authentic speech?
-
#53
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.55
**IV** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Rejection [rejet]?*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that speech has two fundamental dimensions—mediation (hooking onto the other) and revelation (of the subject's truth)—and that resistance arises precisely when revelatory speech fails to arrive, causing speech to collapse entirely into its mediatory/relational function; this dialectic between full and empty speech structures the entire analytic experience, including the ego's constitutive dependence on the other.
the call to bear witness... A little further and it will be seduction. A little further still, the attempt to inveigle the other into a game
-
#54
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.115
**IX**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of analytic experience rests on full speech as a performative, symbolic act of recognition—not on imaginary transference or indoctrination—and critiques object-relations and superego-based accounts (Strachey, Klein) for remaining trapped on the imaginary plane, proposing instead to relocate the question to the narcissistic/ego economy of the subject.
the question as to what constitutes the mainspring of what takes effect in analysis remains obscure… the question is often caught sight of, that someone gets as close as is possible to it, but that it exerts some sort of repulsion which forbids it being rendered into concepts.
-
#55
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.140
**XI**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the animal ethology of Gestalt-governed sexual behaviour (stickleback dance) as a contrast case to argue that in the human animal, the imaginary function is radically disordered — no image adequately releases sexual behaviour — which is precisely why the mirror apparatus (real image/spherical mirror schema) is needed to theorise how the ego-ideal operates at the joint of the imaginary and the symbolic, and how this bears on the question of the end of analysis.
if such an agency exists, it is not possible that it is the sort of thing that we would not yet have discovered. That's because he identifies it with the censorship
-
#56
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.68
BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dimension of the Other is structurally irreducible across all approaches to anxiety—experimental (Pavlov, Goldstein), philosophical, and analytic—and that the illusion of self-transparent consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein / Subject Supposed to Know) is precisely what blocks recognition of this, while the uncanny marks the point where specular identification fails and anxiety's structural void becomes legible.
The Selbstbewusstsein, which I've taught you to name subject supposed to know, is a deceptive supposition.
-
#57
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.117
BookX Anxiety > **VIII**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and law are structurally identical—sharing the same object—such that the Oedipus myth encodes the originary coincidence of the father's desire with the law; this identity is then mapped onto masochism (where the subject appears as *ejectum*/objet a), the castration complex, transference (structured around agalma and lack), and the passage à l'acte, illustrated through Freud's case of the young homosexual woman.
the dimension of transference, which always gets neglected and for good reason, is established. This place, inasmuch as it is circumscribed by something that is materialized in the image
-
#58
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.363
**xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.
subject supposed to know 59
-
#59
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.91
BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and the law are not antithetical but identical — both functioning as a single barrier barring access to das Ding — and that this insight, masked in the Oedipus myth, is Freud's decisive answer to the philosophical question of desire's relation to law, which philosophy has always elided.
it will lead me instead, if need be, to recognize it as my bladder.
-
#60
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.239
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Descartes's cogito as the paradigm case of the vel of alienation — the forced choice between annihilation of knowledge and scepticism — arguing that Descartes's error is to mistake the 'I think' for a knowledge rather than a point of fading, and that this error is sutured only by positing God as the Subject Supposed to Know who guarantees the field of all suspended knowledge.
He puts the field of this knowledge at the level of this vaster subject, the subject who is supposed to know, God.
-
#61
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Theoretical move: Lacan locates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz at the precise point where the vel between signifier and subject is enacted, distinguishing this from the mirror-relation, and uses this to delimit the psychosomatic as a signifying induction that does not trigger aphanisis of the subject—thereby limiting the scope of psychoanalytic interpretation.
the relation between the subject and the mirror, insofar as this relation refers the subject to the subject who is supposed to know, who is in the mirror
-
#62
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH
Theoretical move: The analytic relation is constitutively asymmetrical: one pole is "supposed to know," which installs the dimension of truth as structurally irreducible, while the patient is essentially situated—not statically but dynamically—in the dimension of self-deception (se tromper); Szasz's critique of this asymmetry is diagnosed as eristic impasse rather than genuine heuristic critique.
there is established a search for truth in which the one is supposed to know, or at least to know more than the other.
-
#63
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.7
CONTENTS
Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive structural/navigational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.
i8 Of the Subject who is Supposed to Know, of the first Dyad and of the Good
-
#64
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.286
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological figure of a surface crossing itself (cross-cap/Möbius-type surface) to argue that the line of self-intersection symbolizes identification, and then critiques any conception of analysis that terminates in identification with the analyst as eliding the true motive force of analysis — insisting there is a "beyond" to identification.
the subject, realizing himself in his speech, is instituted at the level of the subject who is supposed to know
-
#65
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.275
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the institutional contradiction within psychoanalysis—analysts reproducing university-style hierarchies of qualification in the very field committed to free search governed by truth—as an illustration that analysts themselves are caught in the problem of the unconscious, exposing the tension between the analytic field and the university field.
it is through others, whom they regard as fools, that they will try to find the authorization, the express qualification that they are actually capable of practising analysis
-
#66
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.248
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transference is constituted precisely by the subject's positioning of another as the "subject supposed to know," and that the analysand's withholding of information from the analyst reveals that what most limits the analytic process is not fear of deception by the analyst but fear of being understood too quickly—i.e., fear that the analyst will reduce the symptom to an organic or biographical cause, foreclosing the analytic work itself.
The analyst, I said, occupies this place in as much as he is the object of the transference. Experience shows us that when the subject enters analysis, he is far from giving the analyst this place.
-
#67
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.246
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan situates psychoanalysis in relation to modern Science (La science) by articulating the unconscious upon a revised Cartesian subject, and introduces transference as the nodal phenomenological site where this articulation becomes operative — irreducible to the transference/counter-transference split and essentially bound up with desire.
it is what I designate under the term the desire of the psycho-analyst.
-
#68
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.245
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD
Theoretical move: The passage argues that analytic training turns on the problem of trust — specifically, that transference emerges wherever there is a subject supposed to know, and that the analyst must grasp through lived experience what this trust (and the movement it sets in motion) is actually oriented around, rather than substituting ceremony for genuine criteria of qualification.
As soon as there is a subject who is supposed to know, there is transference
-
#69
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.252
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Pavlovian experiment is not about sign-thing association but about the signifier cut from an interrupted need-cycle, which models the psychosomatic effect; crucially, when S1 and S2 are "holophrased" (no interval between them), the solidified dyad serves as the structural model for cases such as mental deficiency, where the subject is reduced to the support of the Other's desire.
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD
-
#70
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.284
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Through the fable of the Chinese restaurant menu, Lacan illustrates how the analytic situation transforms the subject's demand into a question about desire, with the analyst occupying the place of the Subject Supposed to Know while the objet a operates as the hidden motor of transference.
to the analyst, that is to say, to the subject who is supposed to know, but of whom it is certain that he still knows nothing
-
#71
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.258
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the object of love from the object of desire/drive by locating love in the narcissistic field (Lust/Lust-Ich symmetry) while insisting that the object of desire is not clung to but circled around as its cause — the drive's object — and that desire can also arise "emptily" from prohibition alone.
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
-
#72
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: This transitional passage uses the analogy between Freud's early followers and the apostles around Socrates to frame the question of the analyst's desire, suggesting that the naivety of disciples paradoxically best witnesses the transference — setting up the next session's theoretical elaboration.
It is precisely at this level that they could bear the best witness. It is by virtue of a certain naivety, a certain poverty, a certain innocence that they have most instructed us.
-
#73
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the 'liquidation of the transference' cannot mean dissolving the unconscious or eliminating knowledge; rather, it must mean the permanent liquidation of the deceptive movement by which transference closes the unconscious—culminating not in identification with the analyst but in the dissolution of the Subject Supposed to Know as a structural position.
is it, to take up what I said before, the subject who is supposed to know who must be liquidated as such?
-
#74
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.229
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Separation as a second operation distinct from Alienation, grounding it etymologically in the Latin 'separare/se parere' (to engender oneself) and showing how the subject responds to the lack perceived in the Other's discourse by offering its own disappearance as the first object — thereby locating desire in the interval between signifiers and founding the dialectic of the subject's self-engendering through the Other's lack.
He is saying this to me, but what does he want?
-
#75
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.240
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS
Theoretical move: Lacan leverages Descartes's voluntarist solution to the problem of the guaranteeing subject (God as the subject supposed to know) to introduce the analytic transference as a structural replacement for that theological guarantee, and simultaneously grounds his concept of alienation in the non-trivial logic of cardinal addition, showing that the vel of alienation cannot be collapsed into simple arithmetic totality.
the subject who is supposed to know, in analysis, is the analyst.
-
#76
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.250
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and "not wanting to desire" are structurally identical (like a Möbius strip), and that this paradox is precisely the site where the analyst's desire functions as the essential pivot through which the subject's desire—constituted as desire of the Other—is both approached and indefinitely deferred in its recognition, rendering aphanisis an irreducible obstacle rather than a resolvable impasse.
In so far as the analyst is supposed to know, he is also supposed to set out in search of unconscious desire.
-
#77
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.231
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS
Theoretical move: The passage introduces the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as a key Freudian concept at the level of repression, and pivots to articulating alienation through a special logical structure (the "vel") illustrated by the Master/Slave dialectic, where a necessary condition (freedom vs. life) produces the loss of the original requirement — demonstrating how alienation operates as a forced choice.
Scepticism, certaint) and the subject who is supposed to know
-
#78
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Subject Supposed to Know is the constitutive condition of transference, and that Freud occupies a uniquely legitimate—and unrepeatable—position as the one analyst who genuinely held the knowledge he was supposed to know, making his function the permanent horizon against which every analytic position is measured.
As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere—I have abbreviated it for you today at the top of the blackboard as S.s.S. (sujet suppose savoir) there is transference.
-
#79
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.274
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's relationship to truth requires a paradoxical self-dethroning from collusion with truth, grounding this in Freud's engagement with the Jewish prophetic tradition and connecting it to the structural division of the subject.
of being a director of studies, or in charge of a research group, or laboratory boss of a senior researcher whose ideas you must take account of if you wish to advance in your career. Such a situation, of course, is particularly detrimental from the point of view of the development of scientific thought.
-
#80
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know (who knows signification as such), and that the transference effect—love—is simultaneously its enabling condition and its resistance: love as narcissistic deception closes the subject off from the analytic interpretation it also makes possible, manifesting the alienation effect in the subject-Other relation.
The transference is unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject who is supposed to know.
-
#81
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Subject Supposed to Know cannot be fully dismantled even when the analyst is put in question, because the analysand still credits the analyst with a residual infallibility; and that recognition of the good (Socratic/Platonic tradition) is never sufficient to produce action toward it, since jouissance itself imposes a recoil that splits knowing from wanting.
Even the psycho-analyst put in question is credited at some point with a certain infallibility, which means that certain intentions, betrayed, perhaps, by some chance gesture, will sometimes be attributed even to the analyst put in question
-
#82
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.255
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's "Drives and their Vicissitudes" to argue that the emergence of the psychical apparatus is built on a two-stage schema in which an initial homeostatic Ich, defined by indifference to an outside, is subsequently fractured by the distinction between Lust and Unlust—a movement that lays the groundwork for the objet a as the remainder that exceeds equilibrium.
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD
-
#83
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7
CONTENTS
Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive organisational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.
i8 Of the Subject who is Supposed to Know, of the first Dyad and of the Good
-
#84
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.26
The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalysis from both hermeneutics and alchemy by arguing that its scientific status hinges on the structural role of the analyst's desire and on the foundational conceptual status of Freud's four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive), which have been systematically distorted in the analytic literature; the passage thereby frames the central theoretical question of Seminar XI.
The symptom is first of all the silence in the supposed speaking subject.
-
#85
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61
OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION
Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively reads Freud's Wahrnehmungszeichen as signifiers, arguing that the synchronic network of the unconscious is grounded in a structurally orientated diachrony (metaphor/metonymy), and that the entire Freudian field presupposes the Cartesian subject—making psychoanalytic 'recollection' a structural necessity, not Platonic reminiscence.
Freud is certainly a master. But if everything that is written as analytic literature is not mere buffoonery, it always functions as such—which poses the question as to whether this pedicle might, one day, be reduced.
-
#86
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.139
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques received notions of positive/negative transference and the ambivalence concept as theoretically insufficient, then pivots to the properly conceptual question: transference must be understood through the function it performs in analytic praxis, and even if it is a product of that situation, the situation alone cannot generate it ex nihilo — something outside must be presupposed.
his entire mode of apperception has been restructured around the dominant centre of the transference
-
#87
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.142
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian field is constitutively marked by loss, and that the analyst's presence is irreducible precisely as witness to this loss — a structural loss inscribed in the oblique stroke dividing the concepts of unconscious, repetition, and transference — while diagnosing Ego Psychology as a symptomatic obscurantism that betrays the field.
tracing in the real a new furrow in relation to the knowledge that might from all eternity be attributed to God.
-
#88
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.147
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Szasz's ego-psychological account of transference — which reduces it to a defence mechanism analysable only through the "healthy part of the ego" — exposing the theoretical blind alley this creates: if transference is merely illusion to be corrected by reality-testing, the analyst becomes an unappealable judge and analysis collapses into "pure, uncontrolled hazard."
the analyst is a judge against whom there is neither appeal nor recourse
-
#89
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.152
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic relation is structurally asymmetric and irreducibly oriented toward truth: the analyst is posited as the one who knows (Subject Supposed to Know), while the analysand is constitutively situated in the dimension of self-deception (se tromper), making truth — not reciprocity or integrity — the proper frame for understanding the transference.
in this relation of the one with the other, there is established a search for truth in which the one is supposed to know, or at least to know more than the other.
-
#90
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the formula "transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious," using it to stage a tension between the structural-linguistic definition of the unconscious and its irreducibly real (sexual) dimension — thereby positioning the teacher's speech itself as participating in, not merely describing, the transferential relation to the unconscious.
the very handling of the concept must, depending on the level at which the teacher's speech is placed, take into account the effects of the formulation on the listener
-
#91
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.172
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: By deploying the cross-cap topology, Lacan argues that the apparent overlap between the field of the unconscious and sexual reality is not an intersection but a void, and that desire names the line of junction between demand and sexuality—a topology that reframes transference not around the patient's desire but around the desire of the analyst. The passage also uses the Breuer/Anna O. case to sharpen the distinction between sign (symptom, body, sexuality) and signifier (representing a subject for another signifier).
Breuer was quite delighted with the smooth way the operation was going… No sexuality, either under the microscope or in the distance. Yet sexuality was nevertheless introduced by Breuer.
-
#92
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on Freud's concept of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as a site of repression, and uses the master/slave dialectic's vel-structure to articulate how alienation operates through a necessary condition that causes the loss of the original requirement — linking Freudian repression to the logic of alienation.
Scepticism, certaint) and the subject who is supposed to know
-
#93
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.239
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Descartes's passage through doubt to map the structure of alienation: the Cartesian cogito arrives at a point of subjective fading rather than knowledge, and the reintroduction of God as guarantor of the eternal verities installs the 'subject supposed to know' as the structural support for certainty—a move that prefigures the Lacanian vel of alienation and the path of desire.
He puts the field of this knowledge at the level of this vaster subject, the subject who is supposed to know, God.
-
#94
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.240
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS
Theoretical move: Lacan leverages the Cartesian problem of the subject supposed to know (God as guarantor of scientific truth) to introduce the analytic function of transference, then pivots to the vel of alienation as an illustration of how simple addition cannot be taken for granted — the infinite regress of 1+1+1+... undermines Cartesian clarity about eternal truths.
the subject who is supposed to know, in analysis, is the analyst.
-
#95
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.242
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Theoretical move: Lacan locates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz at the precise point where the vel between signifier and subject is enacted, distinguishing it from the mirror-relation and the Subject Supposed to Know, and uses this to demarcate the psychosomatic as a signifying induction that bypasses aphanisis—thus limiting but not eliminating analytic interpretation.
the relation between the subject and the mirror, insofar as this relation refers the subject to the subject who is supposed to know, who is in the mirror
-
#96
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.245
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD
Theoretical move: The training of analysts requires that the analyst know what structures the movement of trust in the clinical relationship — identified as transference — which turns on the figure of the Subject Supposed to Know; without adequate criteria, this training degenerates into mere ceremony or simulation.
As soon as there is a subject who is supposed to know, there is transference
-
#97
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.246
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan situates psychoanalysis in relation to modern Science (La science) by grounding it in a revision of the Cartesian subject articulated through the unconscious, and reframes transference not as a technical split between transference/counter-transference but as an essential, indivisible phenomenon bound up with desire — tracing its rigorous articulation back to Plato's Symposium.
it is what I designate under the term the desire of the psycho-analyst.
-
#98
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is constitutively tied to the position of the Subject Supposed to Know, and uses Freud's unique historical status as the one analyst who *actually* knew (rather than merely being supposed to know) to clarify both the function of that position and the institutional drama it generates within analytic communities.
As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere—I have abbreviated it for you today at the top of the blackboard as S.s.S. (sujet suppose savoir) there is transference.
-
#99
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: The passage argues that transference is constituted by the subject's attribution of the place of the Subject Supposed to Know to some individual, and that the initial analytic situation is complicated not by the patient's fear of being deceived by the analyst, but rather by the patient's fear that the analyst will be deceived *by them* — a structural reversal that limits the analysand's openness to the analytic rule.
where he takes his bearings from when applying to the subject who is supposed to know. Whenever this function may be, for the subject, embodied in some individual, whether or not an analyst, the transference, according to the definition I have given you of it, is established.
-
#100
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: The passage argues that even when the analyst is put in question or suspected of being a lure, something stops at the limit—an irreducible credit of infallibility is granted to the analyst—and this paradox of trust is used to contest the Socratic/Platonist thesis that recognition of the good is irresistible for man, precisely because jouissance as such provokes a constitutive recoil.
this trust placed in the analyst? How are we to know that he wishes this good, let alone for another?
-
#101
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire's defensive structure ("not wanting to desire" = "wanting not to desire") is structurally identical to desire itself, forming a Möbius-like loop; and that the analyst's desire functions as the pivotal axis that transforms the patient's demand into transference, while "man's desire is the desire of the Other" entails an irreducible alienation that constitutively prevents the subject's desire from ever being fully recognized.
In so far as the analyst is supposed to know, he is also supposed to set out in search of unconscious desire.
-
#102
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.252
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Pavlovian conditioned reflex experiment articulates not a sign-thing association but a signifier-cut-of-desire structure, and uses the concept of "holophrase" (solidification of the first dyad S1-S2) to model psychosomatic effects and cases where the subject is foreclosed from the interval between signifiers.
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD
-
#103
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets the fort-da game not as an exercise in mastery but as the very mechanism of alienation, arguing that the bobbin (objet a) mediates a repetition that reveals the radical vacillation of the subject — thus displacing phenomenological (Daseinsanalysis) readings that centre presence/absence on Dasein.
To say that it is simply a question for the subject of instituting himself in a function of mastery is idiotic.
-
#104
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ethics fails when grounded in pleasure, and that the Kantian critique of the sovereign good points instead to the Law and desire; it is the recognition of the drive—and specifically of objet petit a as objects that serve no function—that grounds the dialectic of the divided/alienated subject of the unconscious.
Next time, I shall continue to develop the theme of the subject of the transference.
-
#105
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.268
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know—the analysand's attribution of knowledge about signification to the analyst—and that the transference effect manifests as love, which simultaneously enables and resists interpretation by closing the subject off through an alienation effect.
The transference is unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject who is supposed to know.
-
#106
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.275
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the institutional politics of psychoanalytic qualification as a symptomatic illustration of the unconscious at work within analysts themselves, arguing that the attempt to reproduce university-style hierarchies of titles and authorization inside the analytic field is a structural contradiction that reveals the gap between the analytic field and the university field.
When they have found their way, their mode of thinking, their very way of moving in the analytic field, on the basis of the teaching of a certain individual, it is through others, whom they regard as fools, that they will try to find the authorization
-
#107
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the "liquidation of the transference" not as dissolving the unconscious but as permanently liquidating the deception by which transference closes the unconscious — the deception being the narcissistic mirage in which the subject attempts to constitute itself as an object worthy of love for the Subject Supposed to Know, whose natural culmination Freud identifies as identification.
is it, to take up what I said before, the subject who is supposed to know who must be liquidated as such?
-
#108
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Through the fable of the Chinese restaurant menu, Lacan illustrates how the analysand's Demand addressed to the analyst (as Subject Supposed to Know) inevitably fails to reach its object, because the objet petit a — rediscovered always and everywhere in the transference — cannot be reduced to any signifiable need or satisfied demand; the translation of the menu (signifiers) only defers the question of what the subject truly desires.
the analyst, that is to say, to the subject who is supposed to know, but of whom it is certain that he still knows nothing
-
#109
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of a surface folding back on itself (the cross-cap/Möbius-type structure) to argue that the line of self-intersection symbolises identification, and then moves to critique analyses that define their termination as identification with the analyst, insisting there is a "beyond" to identification that constitutes the true motive force of analysis.
the subject, realizing himself in his speech, is instituted at the level of the subject who is supposed to know.
-
#110
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.289
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the training analysis is the only genuine analysis because it requires traversing the full loop of analytic experience (durcharbeiten), and that the analyst's desire—as an unknown x oriented against identification—is what enables the crossing of identification through the separation of the subject, ultimately making the drive present at the level of the unconscious; he further situates voice and gaze as the two privileged objects (objet a) whose modern technological proliferation illuminates the contemporary relation to science.
the analyst's desire, which remains an x, tends in a direction that is the exact opposite of identification
-
#111
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.304
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index for Seminar XI, listing key concepts and page references; it is non-substantive for theoretical extraction purposes, functioning purely as a navigational apparatus.
subject who is supposed to know, 224—5, 227, 230—43, 253, 256—7, 259
-
#112
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.234
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.
the psychoanalyst is first introduced, by introducing himself as a subject who is supposed to know, is himself, himself receives, himself supports the status of the symptom.
-
#113
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.98
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the optical model of the inverted bouquet to distinguish the non-specularisable status of objet petit a from the body-image and ideal ego, arguing that the impasses of identification at the end of analysis can only be resolved by orienting the work around the o-object rather than settling for identification to the analyst as a rectification of the ego ideal.
the question is whether we ought to consider that the end of analysis can be satisfied with a just one of the two dimensions... identification to the analyst.
-
#114
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.150
**Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is not a code transmitting information between emitter and receiver, but rather a structure that constitutes — rather than merely designates — the traversal of opposites (good/bad, beautiful/ugly), and that even the most reduced linguistic unit (the interjection) is always situated in the cut between Subject and the big Other, making Demand irreducible to Need or to expressive sincerity.
shall we begin from the formula around which we have tried up to the present to centre the attachment, the approach of analytic activity, namely: the subject who is supposed to know
-
#115
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire is theorized not as a counterforce to the patient's defensiveness but as a ruse that inhabits the patient's own defensive structure—occupying the pole of sexual reality's impossibility—so that what constitutes the analysand's original fantasy can be separated out and the objet petit a revealed as the substitute for the missing sexual relationship; this operation is articulated through the Möbius strip topology of the unexpected.
an identification of the indeterminate subject with the subject who is supposed to know, namely, with the subject of deception
-
#116
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position as "subject supposed to know" is structurally paradoxical—Freudian discovery itself forecloses the possibility of a complete knowledge-subject—and grounds the subject's existence not in a harmonious closure of signifiers but precisely in the *lack* of a signifier, which is further illustrated by contrasting the God-like Newtonian subject of absolute knowledge (who "is nothing" because he lacks nothing) with the subject that only emerges where knowledge is incomplete.
can the analyst be, quite simply, the subject who is supposed to know?
-
#117
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.271
**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**
Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Sophist* through the lens of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (*fantasma*), Lacan argues that the subject is constituted as a gap (*écart*) rather than as a knowing reference—and that this gap-structure makes the analyst homologous to the Sophist, just as the Subject Supposed to Know is revealed to be a phantasy.
What is the subject who is supposed to know if not the wise man himself. To know what? That he always knew precisely what was necessary to know.
-
#118
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.61
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological surface (specifically the Klein bottle) provides the most adequate schema for the divided subject constituted under language, and maps the three dimensions of Logical Time (instant of seeing, time to comprehend, moment to conclude) onto the subject's experience at the locus of the Other, showing how Demand circulates on this surface and requires an additional dimension—time as three-dimensional space—to escape indefinite self-enclosure.
I indicated last year the sense in which, with respect to what we can call the totality of the figure, there was essentially inscribed the function of the transference and of the 'subject supposed to know.'
-
#119
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to triangulate the voice as objet petit a, the structure of desire (including its link to the impossible), and the syllogism's topological deception, thereby re-framing the death drive not as a wish for death but as the structural condition that articulates desire, identification, demand, and transference around an irreducible gap.
Socrates, it is legitimate to say, whether he is or is not mortal... he told us that he knew nothing. He knew nothing about anything except about desire and that as regards desire, he knew something about it.
-
#120
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165
**Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**
Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium—specifically Alcibiades's pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates—Lacan establishes the dialectical structure of transference as desire for a concealed object that the Other does not possess, and concludes that the analyst's own identificatory position must be suspended within transference, collapsing the distinction between transference and counter-transference.
what is the agalma that is involved and which is here the centre of the captivation of Alcibiades by the figure of Socrates?
-
#121
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.254
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses game theory (Pascal, Von Neumann) as a structural analogy for the analytic situation: the 'saddle point' of game theory models the convergence of analyst and analysand as potentially the 'same person' sharing a common interest (the cure), while the stake of every game is identified with objet petit a — the divided subject's being — and the game itself is theorized as fantasy rendered inoffensive and desire made isolable.
from the place that one of these players occupies, the other, who is the subject, is the subject who is supposed to know, while if you trust my schematic articulation, the subject, if we can speak about this pole in its pure constitution, the subject is only isolated by withdrawing himself from any suspicion of knowing.
-
#122
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.304
**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the asymmetry of sexual difference — irreducible to any symmetrical dyadic opposition — is precisely what the subject encounters as the Objet petit a: every time the subject reaches toward truth, what is found is transformed into the o-object, which stands as the veiled third term linking subject to knowledge through the symptom rather than through certainty.
what is beyond knowledge, what is involved with respect to the subject, in terms of a truth
-
#123
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.22
All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility of metalanguage (demonstrated through Russell's own reductio) grounds the irreducibly precarious position of the subject in language, and that this same impossibility produces the structural incommunicability of psychoanalytic experience—communicable only through non-sense rather than master-words or codified sense.
the role of the one who assumes, not at all that of the subject who is presumed to know but of risking himself at the place where he is lacking, is a privileged place
-
#124
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.231
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position is defined by a "logic of desire" grounded in singularity, lack, and the signifier's structure (representing a subject for another signifier), and that the Subject Supposed to Know is not a classificatory knower of universals but one who guides the analysand to the moment of emergence where an unknown signifier retroactively constitutes the subject — demonstrated clinically through Dora's symptoms.
the psychoanalyst is summoned, in the situation, as being the subject who is supposed to know... What he has to know is not a classificatory knowledge, is not knowledge of the general
-
#125
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**
Theoretical move: The passage deploys the analysis of Philip's proper name and fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) to articulate the interweaving of transference, the unconscious, drive, repetition, and the incestuous encounter as the conditions under which a desiring subject emerges from the analytic situation—turning the phonematic transcription of the fantasy into a site where metaphor, metonymy, castration, and the analyst's desire converge.
the encounter of the desire of the analyst, and the becoming of the subject, on the track of the proper name... to interrogate the desire of the analyst. A difficult position if there ever was one where one risks surprising one's own gaze on the invisible.
-
#126
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.102
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire, understood topologically through the Klein bottle as a cut that reveals an a-cosmic surface, exposes the fundamental inadequacy of ego-psychological and developmental object-relations approaches to transference: the analyst risks being "deceived" (not merely deceiving) by reducing the structure of the subject to a normative developmental history of needs and traumatic incidence, thereby foreclosing the properly Freudian dimension of desire and the unconscious.
whether he is not a deceiver, but what Descartes does not bring up, whether he is not deceived
-
#127
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.250
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious, the subject, and sex form a triadic system of "rotating dominance" (analogous to scissors-stone-paper) in which knowledge is unconscious and indeterminate with respect to the subject, the subject finds his certainty only in the "pure default of sex," and sex itself remains the impossible-to-know pole that any game (including analysis) converts into a manageable stake—thereby grounding the analytic operation as a game whose rule excludes the Real as impossible.
we do not know at what point of the signifier there is lodged this subject who is supposed to know
-
#128
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological phenomenon of meiosis and the expulsion of polar globules as a speculative material analogue for the lost object in fantasy, then turns this into a critique of psychoanalysts' systematic avoidance of biological discoveries about sex—arguing that this avoidance is symptomatic of the analyst's own structural exclusion from knowledge of the sexual relation, which aligns the analytic position with the subject defined only by the missing signifier rather than by any positive knowledge.
the subject who is supposed to know qua subject of the unconscious, namely, the subject who is supposed to know what must in no case be known.
-
#129
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282
**PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**
Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a general structural category—not reducible to the analyst's clinical non-suturing practice—by arguing that a sutured discourse is constituted by an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain whose occultation is the condition of discourse, while the signifier is identical to itself precisely insofar as it is constituted at its root by the non-identical to itself (the barred subject/lack).
he is the subject who is supposed to know and because he holds himself in this position and because he speaks from this position... if he becomes... a subject who supposes himself to know... he makes himself, in that way, supposedly adequate to the real
-
#130
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.104
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) is the hiding place of the Other's desire, not merely a register of demand or transference identification, and that failing to distinguish desire from demand leads to a clinical impasse — illustrated through a case where the analyst remains captive to a decade-long identificatory grip because she reduces the symptom to oral demand rather than grasping the dimension of desire.
she says that undoubtedly they had perhaps gone astray for ten years, by allowing the whole emphasis to be put on the side of the ravages caused by these bad parents
-
#131
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus) as the necessary formal apparatus for grasping the subject as a surface, aligning this with Hegel's Phenomenology and its loop of Absolute Knowing, and connecting both to the analytic concept of the Subject Supposed to Know as the structural foundation of transference.
by pushing with the little finger, by pushing by one notch the sense of this 'subject supposed to know', of which I often speak to you here and which you understand correctly as the 'subject supposed to know' for the patient
-
#132
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282
**PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**
Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a structural (not merely psychoanalytic) category that describes how a subject is produced in discourse through the articulation of an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain, arguing against Leclaire's reduction of his theoretical discourse to the position of an analysand's speech, and insisting that the signifier's identity is constituted at its root by the non-identical-to-itself, i.e., by lack.
The analyst for his part does not suture. It is true because he is the subject who is supposed to know and because he holds himself in this position.
-
#133
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.57
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his use of topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap) as theoretically necessary — not merely illustrative — by arguing that the subject must be conceived as a surface, and that this topological thinking finds its philosophical parallel in Hegel's Phenomenology, whose loop of absolute knowledge illuminates the analytic concept of the subject supposed to know and transference.
pushing by one notch the sense of this 'subject supposed to know', of which I often speak to you here and which you understand correctly as the 'subject supposed to know' for the patient - he who expects, he who puts into the other... who as I told you is already the whole of the transference
-
#134
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.23
All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Russell's *Principia Mathematica* and the theory of metalanguages as a foil to assert the foundational thesis that there is no metalanguage—every logical or structural discourse presupposes the primary use of language—and situates this thesis as the precondition for psychoanalytic practice, positioning the analyst not as a subject supposed to know but as one who risks themselves at the place of the subject's lack.
the role of the one who assumes, not at all that of the subject who is presumed to know but of risking himself at the place where he is lacking
-
#135
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan articulates a triadic "rotating dominance" between Subject, Knowledge (unconscious), and Sex, arguing that the unconscious is a knowledge whose subject remains undetermined precisely because Sex marks the impossible-to-know point around which this economy turns; the game (as formal structure) is then introduced as the reduction of this triadic dialectic to the dyadic tension of subject-waiting-for-knowledge, with the impossible (sex/the real) converted into the stake.
we do not know at what point of the signifier there is lodged this subject who is supposed to know
-
#136
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological figure of meiosis and polar body expulsion as a speculative metaphor for the lost object, then pivots to argue that the analyst's position is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject — and that psychoanalytic knowledge must be sharply distinguished from 'oriental' (e.g. Taoist) traditions that begin from the male/female signifying opposition, since analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier.
the subject who is supposed to know qua subject of the unconscious, namely, the subject who is supposed to know what must in no case be known.
-
#137
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that subjective structure is best apprehended topologically—via surfaces (Klein bottle, torus) rather than volume—and maps the three moments of Logical Time (instant of seeing, time to comprehend, moment to conclude) onto a three-dimensional temporal field structured by the Other, through which demand, transference, and identification are articulated as inscriptions on that surface.
I indicated last year the sense in which, with respect to what we can call the totality of the figure, there was essentially inscribed the function of the transference and of the 'subject supposed to know.'
-
#138
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.151
**Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Language is not a code transmitting information between emitter and receiver; rather, the subject is always already present in every enunciation, even the most reduced form (the interjection), which is situated precisely in the cut between subject and the locus of the Other — a structural argument that grounds the density of analytic speech against communication-theory reductionism and sets up the function of the Subject Supposed to Know in the analyst's position.
shall we begin from the formula around which we have tried up to the present to centre the attachment, the approach of analytic activity, namely: the subject who is supposed to know
-
#139
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.238
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Subject Supposed to Know functions as a structural necessity for analytic engagement, yet the very foundations of psychoanalysis—grounded in the lack of a signifier—preclude any closed, totalizing knowledge; the subject is constituted not as the support of a harmonious signifying system but precisely through the gap where a signifier is missing, and this is illustrated through the contrast between Newtonian "absolute knowledge" (where the subject vanishes into God) and the Freudian discovery that grounds subjectivity in lack.
can the analyst be, quite simply, the subject who is supposed to know?... everything that the foundations of psychoanalysis involves, precisely in terms of knowledge, affirms to us that there cannot be this subject who is supposed to know
-
#140
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.234
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.
in this register the psychoanalyst is first introduced, by introducing himself as a subject who is supposed to know, is himself, himself receives, himself supports the status of the symptom.
-
#141
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.255
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses game theory (Pascal, Von Neumann) as a structural analogy to articulate the analytic relationship: the divided subject stakes himself as objet petit a in the game of analysis, desire is the appearance of this stake in the interval between lack and knowledge, and the analytic dyad functions not as opposing players but as a convergent structure aimed at a Pascal-style "distribution of bets" — the cure.
from the place that one of these players occupies, the other, who is the subject, is the subject who is supposed to know, while if you trust my schematic articulation, the subject, if we can speak about this pole in its pure constitution, the subject is only isolated by withdrawing himself from any suspicion of knowing.
-
#142
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's position is defined by a logic of desire structured around lack and the singular (not the universal), and that the formula "the signifier represents a subject for another signifier" grounds the analyst's function as Subject Supposed to Know—demonstrated concretely through the symptom-as-signifier in Freud's case of Dora.
the psychoanalyst is summoned, in the situation, as being the subject who is supposed to know
-
#143
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.
which would allow the analyst to end up with something other than an identification of the indeterminate subject with the subject who is supposed to know, namely, with the subject of deception
-
#144
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165
**Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**
Theoretical move: By reading Alcibiades's encounter with Socrates in Plato's *Symposium* as the structural prototype of analytic transference, Lacan argues that the *agalma* (hidden treasure) organises desire-as-lack and that what analysts call 'counter-transference' is properly a moment of unwarranted identification internal to transference itself, thereby collapsing the counter-transference/transference distinction into a single analytic field.
what is the secret of Socrates is about, as I might say, of what was he not capable? What does he tell us he was capable of, of nothing less than of lying... because moreover everything that he depicts for us about his behaviour... is something that he presents to us as being entirely directed towards obtaining... this mysterious, enigmatic, profound science
-
#145
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.271
**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**
Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the problem of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (fantasma), Lacan argues that the gap (écart) constitutive of the simulacrum is also constitutive of the subject, and that the Sophist—precisely as the one who lacks a sure reference and operates through this gap—figures the analyst himself, who likewise occupies a place of non-knowledge in relation to the analysand.
What is the subject who is supposed to know if not the wise man himself. To know what? That he always knew precisely what was necessary to know.
-
#146
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's Las Meninas as a structural demonstration of the Gaze and the Objet petit a: the Infanta figures the central 'slit' (phallus-as-object) around which the picture's whole economy of vision is organised, and the Cross-cap topology is invoked to show how the fall of the object (the painter's look) simultaneously produces the barred subject and installs the empty Other as the support of truth.
Is this God able to believe in God, or does this God know that he is God?
-
#147
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118
**Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan positions the analytic experience as requiring the analyst to occupy a Pyrrhonian/sceptical stance toward truth, introduces the Subject Supposed to Know as the patient's trap for the analyst's epistemological drive, and pivots toward Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject's relationship to infinity, the real, and the impossibility of enjoying truth.
The analyst is in effect the subject who is supposed to know, supposed to know everything except what is involved in the truth of the patient.
-
#148
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.108
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage stages a methodological debate about the analyst's position as predicating subject: it distinguishes narcissistic phantasy (unconscious) from narcissistic myth (conscious/preconscious), argues that the analyst's interpretive word operates from a place irreducible to the transference position attributed to him, and pivots on whether the analyst's word constitutes a Verneinung (negation/denial) or Bejahung (affirmation) — ultimately framing interpretation as a cut that denies narcissistic omnipotence and is constitutive of desire.
The analyst who is thus supposed to speak occupies the place of the subject of the myth of narcissistic accomplishment. He is supposed to be at the origin of all things.
-
#149
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.154
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a condensed summary of his previous seminar's work to argue that the being of the subject is constituted through a suture of lack—grounded in Frege's arithmetic, the Cartesian cogito's torsion, and the signifier's relation to negativity—and that only psychoanalysis, by engaging the symptom as a being of truth rather than bandaging the wound of the subject's split, can genuinely confront what science, philosophy, and social critique merely suture over.
the difficulty of the being of the analyst comes from the fact that he encounters, as being of the subject, namely the symptom, that the symptom is a being of truth
-
#150
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.51
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical confrontation between a framework centred on frustration, narcissism, and the pleasure/reality principle duality (Stein's position) and Lacan's alternative, which reorders the analytic situation around lack, the subject supposed to know, and the signifier/signified distinction—arguing that frustration is not the terminal category of analysis and that the symbolic dimension is being systematically underweighted in current analytic theory.
the transference is essentially founded on the fact that for the one who enters into analysis, the analyst is the subject who is supposed to know. Which is strictly of a different order
-
#151
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's subjectivity is constitutively split, and that the institutional stabilisation of the "knower's" status (whether teacher, doctor, or analyst) tends to occlude this division through specular misrecognition; the analyst must maintain the divided position as a living practice rather than merely as theoretical knowledge, and perspective geometry is invoked to illustrate how the scopic drive and the objet petit a structure this irreducible split.
The relationship of the psychoanalyst to the question of his status takes up again here, in the form of a sharpness that has been increased tenfold, the one which has always been posed concerning the status of the one who possesses knowledge
-
#152
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that predication is not a logical act but an expression of desire's particular forcing, and that the analytic relationship cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronoun-equivalence; the remainder that escapes specularisation is what distinguishes the big Other from the barred Other, and it is precisely this remainder that structures both transference (the subject supposed to know) and the analyst's relationship to truth.
we have all the same to return to a formula proposed by Lacan as specifying the transference, namely, that the transference is addressed to a subject who is supposed to know, supposed to know what? That is the whole question. What does the psychoanalyst know?
-
#153
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78
**Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the objet petit a—hidden in the 'suture of the subject' within modern logic—is what classical and modern logic fails to articulate when it reduces truth to bivalent truth-value; the Möbius strip and projective plane topology are introduced as the structural alternative to the spherical cosmology underpinning both idealism and naïve realism in theories of knowledge.
the Fregian concept entirely centred on that to which one can give a proper name. Which means for us, with the critique that we made of it last year... what characterises as such the object of science
-
#154
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.13
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both the scientific object and the psychoanalytic object (objet petit a) are structurally constituted as lack/hole, and that the subject of science is defined by a cut homologous to Dedekind's cut; the antinomy between "saving truth" (science) and "enjoying truth" (epistemological drive/jouissance) is structured by the same alienation schema as "your money or your life," such that the objet petit a is always the excluded intersection-term of this forced choice.
Knowledge as *jouissance* with the opacity that it brings with it in the scientific approach to the object, this is the other term of the antinomy.
-
#155
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.103
Example
Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication operates across three registers (second-person, reflected first-person, first-person), and that Foreclosure of the Name of the Father is precisely the condition in which predication fails to break up the imaginary "it speaks" register—thereby abolishing Transference and constituting the clinical boundary between psychosis/narcissistic neurosis and analysability.
the register of the designation of the subject in the reflected first person...the patient speaking about himself designating himself by means of the supposed statement of his psychoanalyst which constitutes the predicate.
-
#156
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes to reframe Melman's reading of Stein's article: the analyst's word cannot be situated at a place of narcissistic fusion or primitive Bejahung (affirmation), but must instead be aligned with Verneinung (negation/denial) — since truth serves itself and cannot be "served," the analyst's position is defined by a structural cut rather than by fulfillment or lure.
How can the analyst make of his word the guarantee of truth when the patient in transference attributes to him a power that he does not have
-
#157
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.137
**Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager as a topological model of the fantasy structure: the infinite field of the big Other, barred and reduced to pure alternation of existence/non-existence, is what causes the Objet petit a to 'fall' as the real cause of desire—and this structural logic defines the analyst's position as the partner who 'knows he is nothing', enabling the object to fall from the opaque field of belief/dream.
the one who is not the one whose place we are occupying but with whom we have to engage ourselves in a threesided game with the analysand and even with a fourth, the Other knows that he is nothing
-
#158
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.156
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's implication in the symptom is not a relativist epistemological problem solvable by expanding the subject's knowledge; instead, a radical topological recasting is required—one that replaces the sphere-topology of classical knowledge (Plato's cave/sun) with an encounter with what language produces as a real, corporeal effect (the o-object), irreducible to any imaginary mirage or metalanguage.
the drama of the analyst, is that necessarily, his being of knowledge is inflected, is implicated in this confrontation, that Oedipus, whatever he does gives his hand, at least for a while, to the Sphinx
-
#159
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the picture from the mirror by theorising the picture as the "representative of the representation" (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz): the scopic field of the picture inscribes both the Objet petit a and the division of the subject through projective topology, where the subject's "there" (Dasein) is not a presence but the gap/interval between two parallel planes — the picture-plane and the fantasy-window — in which the object a falls.
a self-criticism which is directed at the risk attached to his own subjectification, if he wants to respond honestly, even simply to the demand.
-
#160
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical dispute between Stein/Conté/Melman and Lacan over the status of narcissism, the analyst's word, and the place of predication, arguing that the analyst's interpretive position is structurally distinct from the narcissistic/transference position (Bejahung) and operates instead as a cut—a denial of narcissistic omnipotence correlative to repression and desire.
The analyst who is thus supposed to speak occupies the place of the subject of the myth of narcissistic accomplishment. He is supposed to be at the origin of all things.
-
#161
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.51
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: The passage stages a debate between a frustration-based model of analytic treatment (Stein's) and Lacan's structural alternative, pivoting on the claim that 'lack' is more fundamental than 'frustration', and that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know rather than in the analyst's representative function of reality — while Melman's intervention presses toward the primacy of the signifier/signified distinction over mere content of speech.
the transference is essentially founded on the fact that for the one who enters into analysis, the analyst is the subject who is supposed to know
-
#162
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.136
**Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager through the topology of the cross-cap and the barred Other to argue that the wager's stake is precisely the Objet petit a as cause of desire: wagering on God's existence installs the big Other under the bar (marking its non-existence as condition), and this structural move—not religious faith—is what psychoanalysis must reckon with to define the analyst's position relative to the subject's fantasy.
the position of the analyst is to be defined; the partner, the respondent, the one starting from whom there is inaugurated the possibility of there entering into the world a golden order … the other, that this partner … the Other knows that he is nothing.
-
#163
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural homology between the scientific object (defined as lack/hole, measurable only through the cut) and the objet petit a in psychoanalysis, showing that both the subject of science and the o-object are constituted through alienation—a forced choice in which something is always lost, either truth-as-jouissance or science-as-knowledge.
It is between these two terms that we have to grasp what is involved in the subject of science.
-
#164
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118
**Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analytic situation — where every demand is necessarily disappointed — to critique masochism as a hasty diagnostic label, introduces the analyst as Subject Supposed to Know whose epistemological drive toward truth is itself caught in the law of disappointed demand, and pivots to Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject who must wager on truth while initially renouncing access to it in a Pyrrhonian suspension.
The analyst is in effect the subject who is supposed to know, supposed to know everything except what is involved in the truth of the patient.
-
#165
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication is not a logical act but an act of desire's forcing, and that the analytic relation cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronouns (I/you equivalence); the remainder that escapes specularisation is what opens the dialectic between the barred Other and truth, and the transference's misunderstanding consists in the analysand supposing the analyst knows everything except the truth.
the transference is addressed to a subject who is supposed to know, supposed to know what? That is the whole question. What does the psychoanalyst know?
-
#166
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the symbolic order in the primacy of the hole (lack/void) over presence, arguing that the object of science, the vase as symbolic creation, and energetics all converge on the same structural point: what matters is not what fills the void but the void itself — a thesis that links the subject of science (Descartes/Frege) to the functioning of the signifier and forecloses any meta-language.
starting from the subject, from the subject of science as we were able to highlight it in this experiment of Descartes, the sign of a fainting point, but also indeed in the logical effort of Frege
-
#167
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the analyst's subjective division (the split between 'I think' and 'I am') is not merely a piece of knowledge but a structural position that must be inhabited in practice, and that the scopic perspective construction—particularly the horizon line and the dual vanishing points—serves as a geometric illustration of how the objet petit a functions within the divided subject's visual relationship to the world.
This is the subject whom there is charged to represent the one who, directing the analytic experience, and being called the psychoanalyst, sees there being posed again for him what is involved in the question of the knower.
-
#168
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88
Madame le Docteur Parisot
Theoretical move: Reading Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso through a Lacanian lens, Lacan argues that shame, reflection, and the gaze stage the fundamental impotence of reason to recover truth by itself—and that the structure of Paradise (mirror as pure transparency, Beatrice as the mark of God) reframes Narcissus's error not as individual pathology but as the structural position of the subject before the gaze of the Other, culminating in the provocative reversal: it is not Dante's narcissism but God's narcissism that is at stake.
Perhaps one could link the place that Virgil occupies to that of the analyst.
-
#169
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.154
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads a condensed summary of Seminar XIII, arguing that the being of the subject is constituted as the suture of a lack grounded in the Fregean one/zero relation and the cogito's torsion, and that psychoanalysis alone—unlike philosophy or social critique—can genuinely confront the wound of this lack, precisely because the analyst's being is implicated in it as a being of knowledge encountering the symptom as a being of truth.
the being of knowledge, by recognising the fortunate forms of what he, for his part, only engages with under the sign of unhappiness, the unhappiness of his patient, that this being of knowledge - that of the psychoanalyst - must reduce himself to being only the complement of the symptom
-
#170
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.97
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.
That to know how he assumes it, is something which is still rather distant from the consideration that we can bring to it here.
-
#171
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation cannot be reduced to mere "discourse-effect" (suggestion) without a constitutive relation to truth; and that desire, being a sub-product of demand and essentially lack, must be rigorously distinguished from jouissance (erection/auto-erotic jouissance) in order to correctly situate unconscious desire's relation to the sexual act and to feminine desire.
He is placed in the position of a subject who is supposed to know, and he knows very well that this only works because he holds that position, because it is there that the very effects of transference are produced
-
#172
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.145
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and creation are structurally tied to identification with the feminine position—specifically to the logic of the "gift of what one does not have"—while masculine jouissance is defined by the fainting/aphanisis of the subject at the phallic moment, which in turn grounds the illusory "pure subjectivity" of the knowing subject and the denial of castration that constitutes idealist thinking.
The imagination of the subject of knowledge, whether it is before or after the scientific era, is a male forgery.
-
#173
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.107
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the formula *cogito ergo Es* to reframe the Freudian *Es* (Id) not as a variant ego but as a function grounded in the barred Other, arguing that the real Freudian discovery is an *object* (not a thought-system) whose status is identical with structure insofar as structure is real — illustrated topologically by the Möbius strip transforming into a torus.
what authorises me to take the floor as if addressing myself to these still non-existing subjects?
-
#174
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.135
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio) as the mathematical model for the structure of the sexual relation, arguing that subjective satisfaction in the sexual act cannot be grounded in homeostatic/pleasure-principle models nor in complementarity (key-and-lock), but requires a third term (phallus/castration, child-phallus equivalence) whose structural logic is captured by this uniquely determined, incommensurable proportion—linking repetition, the division of the Other, and the problem of the object.
Know Freud before translating him… this stupidity of knowing him before having read him.
-
#175
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.268
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic interpretation is only non-suggestive insofar as it maintains a relation to truth, and that this same truth-structure reveals desire as constitutively unsatisfied — a subproduct of demand rather than a physiological phenomenon — while distinguishing desire from jouissance (erection as auto-erotic jouissance) to clarify the asymmetry between masculine and feminine sexual positions.
He is placed in the position of a subject who is supposed to know, and he knows very well that this only works because he holds that position, because it is there that the very effects of transference are produced.
-
#176
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.268
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic interpretation is only non-suggestive insofar as it maintains a relation to truth, and that this same truth-structure reveals desire as constitutively unsatisfied — a subproduct of demand rather than a physiological phenomenon — while distinguishing desire from jouissance (erection as auto-erotic jouissance) to clarify the asymmetry between masculine and feminine sexual positions.
Between the false position, of being the subject supposed to know (which he knows well he is not) and that of having to rectify the effects of this supposition on the part of the subject, and this in the name of the truth.
-
#177
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.107
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses an interrupted seminar session (deferred by a strike and Jakobson's presence) to sketch the theoretical stakes of the year's work on the *Logic of the Fantasy*: the Es/Unconscious cannot be substantified as an "outlaw ego"; its proper status must be derived from the barred Other as locus of speech, while topology (Möbius strip → torus) is introduced as a demonstration that structure is real, not metaphorical—culminating in the question of what authorises a teaching addressed to analysts who do not yet exist.
What authorises me to take the floor as if addressing myself to these still non-existing subjects?
-
#178
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199
**Annex 3**
Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.
the gap revealed here between the act and the dignity of its purpose, is only to be taken to instruct us about what makes of it a scandal: the fault perceived in the subject supposed to know.
-
#179
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.69
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: At the culmination of a training analysis ("the pass"), the analysand discovers that the subject supposed to know has been reduced to the objet petit a (the analyst as residue/rubbish), and that the subject of every act is constitutively absent from the act itself — a subject without essence, mirroring the o-object's lack of essence, which is the structural truth that the unconscious shares with the end of analysis.
the subject supposed to know, is reduced to this term that the one who up to then guarantees it there by his act, namely, the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst for his part has become this residue, this object.
-
#180
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.88
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the tetrahedron of alienation (the "either/or," "I am not/I do not think," etc.) to articulate the structure of the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the analyst's unique advantage is knowing from experience what is involved in the Subject Supposed to Know, and that the telos of the analytic act is to reduce that subject to the function of the objet petit a.
the psychoanalyst in so far as he establishes the psychoanalytic act, namely, gives his guarantee to the transference, namely, to the subject supposed to know.
-
#181
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.156
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act produces the divided subject ($) as its truth-effect, with the analyst serving as support for the objet petit a that causes this division; Lacan then pivots to argue that the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is itself grounded in — and displaced from — the objet petit a, making undecidability (Gödel-style incompleteness) a structural consequence of the subject's relation to the not-all, rather than a technical curiosity.
There exists something that functions so that every subject believes himself to be all, so that every subject believes himself to be all subject, and through that very fact the subject of all (tout), from this very fact having a right to speak about everything.
-
#182
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205
**Annex 3**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the events of May 1968 and the institutional crisis of his École as the occasion to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively determined by jouissance while simultaneously requiring protection from it, and to formulate the key lemma that "there is no transference of transference" — a claim whose misreading by contemporaries demonstrates both the necessity of his strategic unreadability and the gap between the act and its subsequent theoretical appropriation.
knowledge whose proprietorial aspect is properly what precipitates a precise social fault
-
#183
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.49
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the triad "I read / I write / I lose" to differentiate three levels of knowing and to position the psychoanalytic act as structured around failure and parapraxis, arguing that the analyst's act is irreducible to teaching (thesis) or doing (faire), and that the passage from analysand to analyst marks the critical, untheorised limit at which the act encounters its own obstacle.
From this point of being, he is supposed to be the Archimedes capable of making turn everything that develops in this structure first evoked
-
#184
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "events" of May '68 as occasion to articulate the structural relation between the Other as locus of knowledge, truth as what is refused from the symbolic and returns in the real as symptom, and the subject's secondary determination by knowledge — positioning psychoanalysis as a radical modification of the subject-Other relation that goes beyond mere discovery.
For a time this Other who was a philosopher, forged for his part, the subject supposed to know: It was already a deception as can be seen by simply opening Plato.
-
#185
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.106
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalyst operates *as* the objet petit a rather than *being* it, and the psychoanalytic act constitutes a paradoxical act of faith precisely insofar as it puts in question the very support (the subject supposed to know) that makes the analytic work possible—this structural paradox is then leveraged to re-read the Marxist critique of alienation, suggesting that capitalist production of the worker-as-subject mirrors the analyst's production of the psychoanalysand.
The subject supposed to know is precisely what the transference considered as a gift from heaven, depended on.
-
#186
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.113
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: By re-reading the founding scene of transference (the hysteric throwing her arms around Freud's neck after hypnosis), Lacan argues that the subject supposed to know is the indispensable structural hinge of transference, and that the psychoanalytic act consists precisely in putting that presupposition in question — thereby distinguishing transference from mere love and revealing the objet petit a as the object at the heart of love's apparatus.
if one does not introduce into it the subject supposed to know, transference maintains all its opaqueness. But once the notion of the subject supposed to know is fundamental and the fracture that it undergoes in psychoanalysis is brought to light, transference is singularly illuminated.
-
#187
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.
it is he, the analyst, who embodies what the subject becomes in the form of the little o-object. So then, as is to be expected, it is in conformity with every notion of structure that the function of alienation which was at the start… finds itself at the end equal to itself
-
#188
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.196
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is grounded in the analyst's fantasy, which is the opaque source from which interpretation "unfreezes" the analysand's word; the gap between the "subject supposed to know" and a proposed "subject supposed to demand" names the true site of analytic intervention, reducible finally to the objet petit a as lack and distance rather than mediation, and establishing that the subject-Other relation is irreducibly asymmetrical — there is no dialogue.
the subject supposed to know, where it truly is. namely, not us. the analyst, but in effect what we suppose this subject knows.
-
#189
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.111
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act has a two-stage language-effect structure culminating in the analyst's self-institution as the rejected object (objet petit a), and that the leap from analysand to analyst (la passe) is systematically concealed by the institutional organisation of psychoanalysis, which preserves an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know in place of genuine interrogation.
An act of faith, I said, in the subject supposed to know and precisely by a subject who has just learned what is involved in the subject supposed to know, at least in an exemplary operation, which is that of psychoanalysis.
-
#190
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.135
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that his formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" is not a claim to knowledge but a structural claim: the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates psychoanalytic discourse, with the Subject Supposed to Know standing in as a placeholder for the unknowable, and the logic of fantasy grounded in a cogito-like logical asceticism that resists any domestication as mere "new negation."
One, the subject supposed to know, the one who must always be there to make us comfortable.
-
#191
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.122
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logic's defining function is precisely to resorb (conjure away) the problem of the subject supposed to know, and it is this structural feature that makes modern logic a privileged reference point for psychoanalysis — allowing it to pose the question of the analyst's existence in terms of quantification where the subject supposed to know is reduced to nothing.
logic is defined as this something that properly has as end to resorb the problem of the subject supposed to know.
-
#192
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.39
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Platonic dialogue *Meno* — specifically its theory of reminiscence and the figure of the slave who 'rediscovers' knowledge — to isolate the function he calls the "subject supposed to know" as a structural presupposition of every question about knowledge, linking this to the problem of the analytic act and the unthought end of the training analysis.
what is meant by the fact which had not been isolated before I did so, properly in connection with transference, the function... of every question about knowledge, by what I call the subject supposed to know
-
#193
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.89
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around the analyst's refusal to act, which makes transference possible, and that the Objet petit a is the horizon-terminus toward which every act tends — a claim illustrated via the asymmetry Clausewitz introduces into war-discourse as a structural analogue to the analytic situation.
the psychoanalysand picks up his staff and puts on knapsack, to go to meet the subject supposed to know at the rendezvous.
-
#194
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139
**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.
Is this how it is? It is true that in presiding, as I might say, over this task, the psychoanalyst learns a lot about it. Does this mean that in any way he is the one in the operation who, in a way, can pride himself on being the authentic subject of a realised knowledge?
-
#195
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.42
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic act is constituted by a structural feint: the analyst must pretend (while knowing otherwise from their own analysis) that the Subject Supposed to Know is tenable, in order to set the process in motion—but the act itself exceeds doing (faire) and produces a renewal of the subject's presence precisely by excluding the analyst-as-subject from its agency.
The transference is set up in function of the subject supposed to know, exactly in the same way that was always inherent in every questioning about knowledge.
-
#196
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan defends the asymmetry of "the unconscious is structured like a language" against its inversion, grounding the formula in a logic of consequence that ties signifying articulation to the analysable field, while distinguishing the Subject Supposed to Know from the teaching position of the analyst.
There is a subject supposed to know. I am saying that we can, in effect, advance into this teaching and in as much, very precisely, as it has as a start this formula without it implying that we also put ourselves in this position that I called properly professorial.
-
#197
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.15
**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.
someone can ground an experience, can ground an experience on presuppositions that are profoundly unknown to himself. And what does it mean that they are unknown to him?
-
#198
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.160
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the not-all logic of the unconscious prevents any totalisation of psychoanalytic knowledge, and that the psychoanalyst's proper position is defined not by mastery-knowledge but by occupying the place of the objet petit a — cause of desire and object of demand — a position exemplified through the Gaze as the most occluded partial drive in clinical practice.
what is involved in the illusion of the subject supposed to know is always around what is admitted so easily by the whole field of vision.
-
#199
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.176
**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 the analyst's proper function is not mastery of knowledge about sexuality but rather occupancy of the place of the objet petit a—the structural void that conditions desire—and that the analyst's inability to sustain this position drives the institutional fiction of "private life," which insulates analytic hierarchy from the truth of the analyst's own structural impotence.
it is absolutely clear that we are lost if we start from the idea that the psychoanalyst is the one who knows better than anyone else
-
#200
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*
Theoretical move: Lacan reflects ceremonially on the interrupted Seminar on the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the act's constitutive paradox—that the analyst must operate from a position that gives the lie to their own position—requires the concept of Verleugnung (fetishistic disavowal) rather than Verwerfung (foreclosure), while also registering the political events of May 1968 as an index of a structural gap in the universe of knowledge.
I had come to the moment when I was going to show you what is involved in having to take up one's place in the register of the subject supposed to know, and this precisely when one is a psychoanalyst.
-
#201
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.56
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's concepts of true/false self and therapeutic regression as a symptomatic case study to argue that any miscognition of the analytic act inevitably leads—however gifted the analyst—to a negation of the analytic position, thereby confirming the necessity of a theoretical critique of the psychoanalytic act.
there is no other true-self behind this situation than Mr Winnicott himself, who places himself here as the presence of the truth.
-
#202
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.68
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of an analysis (which belongs to the analysand as task) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and its replacement by the objet petit a as cause of the subject's division constitutes the act that makes one a psychoanalyst — thereby grounding the logic of the phantasy in the structure of alienation, desire, castration, and the lost object.
The transference that I restored in a complete fashion, by relating it to the subject supposed to know ... The term of analysis consists in the fall of the subject supposed to know.
-
#203
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.94
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the act from the doing in order to locate the analyst's position as a specific structural function: psychoanalytic practice, as a doing of pure speech, approaches the act through the 'signifier in act', and the analyst must occupy this corner of the barred subject supposed to know precisely by absenting himself from the doing—a structural self-effacement that risks collapsing into a 'hypochondriacal jouissance' if theorised away as mere equidistance from all schools.
what is going to happen in the corner of the \$ of the subject supposed to know which has been removed from the map
-
#204
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical frame that psychoanalysis uses to contain and regulate the irreducible gap between male and female jouissance, while the 'o-object' (objet petit a) — not castration itself — is the structural operator through which subjectification of sex is accomplished, with castration being merely the elegant sign of a remaining outside jouissance that psychoanalysis cannot access.
a certain Jupiter, for example, this subject supposed to know, well then, he did not know that, he asked Tiresias.
-
#205
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorized as the analyst's acceptance of the transference structured around the Subject Supposed to Know, which is constitutively doomed to 'désêtre' — a fall into the Objet petit a — while the end of analysis realizes the subject precisely as lack, culminating in castration as the subjective experience of the absence of unifying jouissance.
this transference which would be a pure and simple obscenity... if we did not restore to it its true core, in the function of the subject supposed to know.
-
#206
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.106
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively paradoxical: the analyst operates *as* the objet petit a (not *being* it fully) while simultaneously being the only one capable of putting in question the Subject Supposed to Know on which transference—and the very possibility of the analytic act—depends; this produces the analysand as a kind of manufactured product, linking psychoanalytic alienation to the Marxist problematic of alienated labour.
The subject supposed to know is precisely what the transference considered as a gift from heaven, depended on.
-
#207
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.189
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*
Theoretical move: In this closing ceremonial address, Lacan reflects on the interrupted transmission of his theory of the psychoanalytic act, identifying Verleugnung (disavowal) as the concept he had reserved to articulate the analyst's position in relation to the Subject Supposed to Know, and situates the May '68 events as an unexpected enactment of the 'act' dimension his seminar had been developing.
I had come to the moment when I was going to show you what is involved in having to take up one's place in the register of the subject supposed to know, and this precisely when one is a psychoanalyst
-
#208
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.165
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan defends the asymmetry of "the unconscious is structured like a language" against its inversion, grounding analytic experience in signifying consequence and logical articulation rather than dynamic causality, while insisting that analytic teaching proceeds without positing a subject supposed to know who already holds the truth.
There is a subject supposed to know. I am saying that we can, in effect, advance into this teaching ... without it implying that we also put ourselves in this position that I called properly professorial
-
#209
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.196
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation works not through dialogue or mediation but through the asymmetrical relation between the Subject Supposed to Know and a newly posited 'subject supposed demand,' mediated by the objet petit a as lack and distance — and that truth reaches the analysand from the analyst's own fantasy, through the gap (Möbius strip) that constitutes the Other.
the subject supposed to know, where it truly is. namely, not us. the analyst, but in effect what we suppose this subject knows.
-
#210
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.76
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.
it is he, the analyst, who embodies what the subject becomes in the form of the little o-object. So then, as is to be expected, it is in conformity with every notion of structure that the function of alienation which was at the start... finds itself at the end equal to itself
-
#211
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.159
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "not-all" logic of quantification—applied to the proposition "not all knowledge is conscious"—does not entail the existence of a positive unconscious knowledge; instead, the analyst's proper position is determined by their identification with the objet petit a (as cause of desire and object of demand), and each register of this object (gaze, voice, breast, anal) carries an immunity to negation that grounds the psychoanalytic act.
the illusion of the subject supposed to know is always around what is admitted so easily by the whole field of vision.
-
#212
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.68
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of analysis (on the side of the analysand) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know gives way to the Objet petit a as cause of the subject's division — and it is this terminal act that grounds the analyst's capacity to begin each new analysis.
The term of analysis consists in the fall of the subject supposed to know and his reduction to the arrival of this o-object, as cause of the division of the subject which comes in its place.
-
#213
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.88
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is structurally defined through the tetrahedron of alienation (the forced choice between "I do not think" and "I am not"), and the analyst's function is to reduce the Subject Supposed to Know to the objet petit a — a move that distinguishes genuine analytic structure from mere discourse and rehabilitates resistance as a structural necessity rather than a defect of the analysand.
the psychoanalyst... gives his guarantee to the transference, namely, to the subject supposed to know... for him who knows what is involved in the psychoanalytic act, the outline, the vector, the operation of the psychoanalytic act ought to reduce this subject to the function of the little o-object.
-
#214
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.69
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that at the conclusion of a training analysis, the analyst is reduced to the objet petit a (a residue without essence), and the subject supposed to know is simultaneously subverted — a moment Lacan calls "the pass" — such that the analysand-becoming-analyst installs the o-object at the place of the subject supposed to know, discovering that the subject of every act is a subject not-present-in-the-act, and that all o-objects are without essence.
The putting in question of the subject supposed to know, the subversion of what, I would say, the whole functioning of knowledge implies
-
#215
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.119
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical framework that contains and limits psychoanalytic operations rather than explaining masculine enjoyment, and that the structural logic of the analytic act culminates in the relation $◇a — where castration is the sign of an irreducible gap between male and feminine enjoyment that psychoanalysis cannot close.
There was already a certain Jupiter, for example, this subject supposed to know, well then, he did not know that, he asked Tiresias.
-
#216
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.111
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as a double language-effect in which the analysand's completion of analysis and the analyst's self-institution as psychoanalyst (the "pass") are structurally inseparable; the act's strangest consequence is that the subject who takes the analyst's position recognises himself as caused—in his division—by the rejected object (objet a), and the uninterrogated leap of this consecration is systematically concealed by analytic institutions that preserve an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know.
An act of faith, I said, in the subject supposed to know and precisely by a subject who has just learned what is involved in the subject supposed to know, at least in an exemplary operation, which is that of psychoanalysis.
-
#217
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.176
**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 the analyst's proper function is not to be a subject of knowledge but to occupy the structural place of the objet petit a — the third term that conditions desire and determines what is at stake in the sexual act — and that the analyst's failure to sustain this position drives him to substitute fictional knowledge, institutional hierarchy, and the fiction of "private life" for genuine analytic discourse.
it is absolutely clear that we are lost if we start from the idea that the psychoanalyst is the one who knows better than anyone else
-
#218
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.42
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the Subject Supposed to Know is constitutive of the analytic situation from its very inception, and that the psychoanalytic act is defined precisely by the analyst's feigned (and potentially forgotten) displacement of that function—a displacement that is the condition of truth, not of knowledge.
The transference is set up in function of the subject supposed to know, exactly in the same way that was always inherent in every questioning about knowledge.
-
#219
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.135
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" is not a claim to knowledge but rather a structural claim: his discourse *organises* the unconscious, and the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates Freud—not meaning/sense alone. This grounds the logic of fantasy on a logical asceticism (the cogito's cleavage) and warns against domesticating the radical gap at stake by labelling it a "new negation."
One, the subject supposed to know, the one who must always be there to make us comfortable.
-
#220
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.199
**Annex 3**
Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.
the gap revealed here between the act and the dignity of its purpose, is only to be taken to instruct us about what makes of it a scandal: the fault perceived in the subject supposed to know.
-
#221
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.122
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that modern logic is defined by its function of dissolving the problem of the Subject Supposed to Know, and that psychoanalysis can leverage logical quantification precisely because logic operates in a field where that subject is reduced to nothing — enabling analytical progress where institutional qualification has failed.
logic is defined as this something that properly has as end to resorb the problem of the subject supposed to know.
-
#222
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.73
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is defined as the analyst's acceptance of supporting the transference — specifically, sustaining the function of the Subject Supposed to Know while knowing it is destined to fall — such that the analytic process culminates not in knowledge but in castration as subjective experience: the subject's realisation of itself exclusively as lack, figured by (-φ) and the incommensurability of Objet petit a to 1.
We posit the psychoanalytic act as consisting in the fact of supporting the transference... if we did not restore to it its true core, in the function of the subject supposed to know.
-
#223
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.205
**Annex 3**
Theoretical move: Lacan defends the strategic obscurity of his texts as a protection against ideological capture, while articulating that the psychoanalytic act is determined by its relation to jouissance (from which it must simultaneously protect itself), and advancing the lemma that "there is no transference of transference" as a key formula distinguishing the psychoanalytic act from ordinary clinical transference.
knowledge whose proprietorial aspect is properly what precipitates a precise social fault
-
#224
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.16
**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.
there results from the proper nature of this act a field which…there results from the position that must be held, if one is skilled in exercising it
-
#225
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.39
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Meno* alongside the analytic act, Lacan argues that the theory of reminiscence — knowledge already in the soul, recoverable through questioning — is the archaic, mythical form of the function he calls the 'subject supposed to know,' which underpins every question about knowledge and is inseparable from the structure of transference and the unformulated end of the training analysis.
what is meant by the fact which had not been isolated before I did so, properly in connection with transference, the function... of the subject supposed to know. Questions are posed starting from the fact that there is somewhere this function... that there is somewhere something which plays this function of the subject supposed to know.
-
#226
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.89
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constituted by the analyst's refusal to act, which structurally opens the space for transference and the Subject Supposed to Know; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the necessity of signifying sequence for any 'consequence' to be conceivable, and maps the objet petit a as the horizon-end of every act, not just the analytic one.
the psychoanalysand picks up his staff and puts on knapsack, to go to meet the subject supposed to know at the rendezvous.
-
#227
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.56
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's true/false self distinction as a symptomatic case of misrecognition of the analytic act: the analyst who posits a "true self" waiting behind a "false self" covertly installs himself as the locus of Truth, thereby negating the properly analytic position—an error all the more consequential in a capable analyst.
there is no other true-self behind this situation than Mr Winnicott himself, who places himself here as the presence of the truth.
-
#228
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.113
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper concept of transference is only fully illuminated once the 'subject supposed to know' is introduced and its fracture in the analytic act is understood; the originary scene of Freud's patient embracing him out of hypnosis reveals that what the hysteric seizes is the objet petit a—not love as sentiment—thereby grounding the entire structure of the analytic operation in the subject's relation to this object rather than in narcissistic identification.
if one does not introduce into it the subject supposed to know, transference maintains all its opaqueness. But once the notion of the subject supposed to know is fundamental and the fracture that it undergoes in psychoanalysis is brought to light, transference is singularly illuminated.
-
#229
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.22
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the act (as distinct from mere motor activity) is constitutively signifying and only achieves its full status nachträglich, while simultaneously critiquing the reduction of transference to an intersubjective relation or a mere defensive concept by ego-psychological and American analytic orthodoxy.
In truth you can find there in chapter 3, page 102, 'Where have we got to with transference', the questions which are posed here.
-
#230
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.139
**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.
Does this mean that in any way he is the one in the operation who, in a way, can pride himself on being the authentic subject of a realised knowledge?
-
#231
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.194
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language such that truth is produced at the precise point where the subject refuses to know—what is rejected from the Symbolic reappears in the Real as symptom—and that psychoanalysis contributes a radical new dimension to the subject-Other relation by showing that knowledge is only constituted through recognition by the Other, while scientific knowledge, purified of this relation, functions as a complement to (rather than identity with) the Real.
For a time this Other who was a philosopher, forged for his part, the subject supposed to know: It was already a deception as can be seen by simply opening Plato.
-
#232
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.94
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between 'the act' and 'the doing' is the central problem of psychoanalytic practice, distinguishing the analyst's peculiar position—a doing of pure speech in which the subject absents itself so the signifier may operate—from mere activity, and linking this to the question of the Subject Supposed to Know, the logic of quantifiers, and the impossibility of meta-language.
what is going to happen in the corner of the $ of the subject supposed to know which has been removed from the map
-
#233
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.80
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that the inconsistency of the Other is what converts all stating into demand, situating the subject's division on the Graph of Desire; he then mobilises Gödel's incompleteness theorems as the logical analogue of castration, and closes by arguing that meaning is a lure veiling language's essential meaninglessness, with surplus-jouissance as the remainder that articulates the subject's relation to castration and enjoyment.
It is indeed what in transference I called the subject supposed to know. Namely, this prime conjunction, S1 linked to S2, in so far, as I recalled the last time, in the ordered pair, it is it, it is this conjunction, this knot that grounds what knowledge is.
-
#234
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.383
Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969
Theoretical move: The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand because she already embodies the 'subject supposed to know' in her flesh, making the cut that separates this supposition from the unconscious structure (master/woman) the pivotal operation of analytic treatment; in parallel, the obsessional's relation to the master reveals that his desire is constitutively impossible.
in what she refers herself to she implies the subject supposed to know, and that is why she encounters contradiction.
-
#235
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.239
Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a semi-autobiographical digression on surrealism, Sartre, and student militancy to frame a critique of ideology-critique as self-defeating repetition, then pivots to position sublimation—especially courtly love—as the more productive terrain before gesturing toward the drive-level account of sublimation (the bell/grelot figure) and the broader subversion of the function of knowledge that psychoanalysis enables.
I am doing, in short, what the psychoanalysand does... this strange terrain, closely linked in its crucial points, about what is involved in this subversion of the function of knowledge.
-
#236
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.353
Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally linked to the field of the big Other as the locus of knowledge, and that the objet petit a — as cause of desire and division of the subject — is what psychoanalysis reveals within that field; he further advances that there is no sexual relationship (logically definable), only the sexual act, which alone produces what would otherwise be an impossible relation.
we have no trouble in encouraging him, in short to have faith in this Other as a locus where knowledge is established, in the subject supposed to know.
-
#237
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.230
Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes his seminar as a form of productive work whose meaning escapes most observers, using the university crisis of May '68 and the rise of capitalism/science as the context to argue that genuine subversion lies not in political agitation but in the function of knowledge at its most subversive mode — a function that power (whether capitalist or revolutionary) cannot master.
this gives a rather obscene dimension to the thing. Naturally, it is not true for everyone. There are those who know well of what use it is.
-
#238
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.278
Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unquestioned presupposition of the Subject Supposed to Know—the assumption that knowledge is already organized somewhere—is the hidden theological core of idealism, and that psychoanalytic practice remains trapped in this idealism so long as it uncritically employs spatial metaphors (inside/outside, projection/introjection) derived from the camera-obscura model of representation.
It is the question that I posed under the terms of subject supposed to know.
-
#239
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.356
Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure: the objet petit a emerges as a substitute for the gap left by castration (the impasse of the sexual relationship), the analyst incarnates the 'subject supposed to know' only to evacuate the o-object at analysis's end, and transference is properly defined not through repetition alone but through its structural relation to the subject supposed to know as the illusory One of the Other—while the analyst occupies the paradoxical position of a scapegoat who bears the o-object so the subject can be reprieved from it.
the psychoanalyst is the one that... finds himself taking on the charge of what is truly the support of this subject supposed to know... this Other, this unique locus where knowledge is supposed to connect up, does not exist.
-
#240
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.65
**Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the truth "speaks I" (rather than being spoken by a subject), and formalises this through the ordered pair of signifiers to show that the subject is constituted as infinite repetition within—and thus excluded from—absolute knowledge; this logical structure grounds both the analytic rule of free association and the link between the subject supposed to know, transference, and objet petit a.
the link of maintaining the reference to absolute knowledge, to the subject supposed to know, as we call it in the transference
-
#241
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.140
**Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**
Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads Pascal's wager through the lens of the objet petit a as the real stake, arguing that the asymmetry of the wager only becomes legible once the 'falling effect' of the signifying conjunction — which produces the divided subject and surplus-jouissance — is distinguished from the fiction of a neutral zero; the wager thus becomes a figure for the subject's irreducible implication in the desire of the Other.
God exists. For the subject supposed to know it, we will then write the couple zero*©, in one of the squares of the matrix. I am supposed to know it but something has to be added, that I am for it.
-
#242
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363
Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.
playing the one that guarantees the subject supposed to know... For the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know.
-
#243
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.378
Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.
it is only from the moment that we presuppose somewhere the subject supposed to know that in effect, with this horizon and with good reason, just like the rabbit in the hat, it is put in at the start, we can see there progressing then in a dialectic what is stated about the relationships of the master and the slave.
-
#244
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.165
Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances a distinction between truth-as-cause (which speaks but does not "tell the truth") and knowledge, anchoring this in a re-reading of Pascal's wager as a structural problem about the existence of the Other and the Real, while drawing an analogy between Marxist surplus-value and surplus-jouissance to illuminate the political stakes of psychoanalytic theory.
He is no longer a proletarian, as I might say an sich, he is no longer pure and simple truth, he is fur sich; he is what is called class consciousness. And he can even at the same time become the class-consciousness of the party in which people no longer speak the truth.
-
#245
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.177
Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the objet petit a (o) is not merely a remainder or lost object within the field of the Other, but the very cause of thinking itself — its shadow and ground — such that the supposed unity of the One (the field of discourse, the Other) is always already constituted by an arbitrary act of positing, and desire's lack is redefined through the mathematical structure of the Fibonacci series and the o-function rather than through the traditional ontological appeal to the infinite.
What is the logical consequence of it, questioned in the way in which I did it at the level of progressive differences? This is what will perhaps allow us to clarify more radically what is involved in the function of o.
-
#246
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.392
Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the subject's constitution through the fantasy ($◇a) and the Four Discourses schema, arguing that knowledge born from the slave serves the master, that the objet petit a as surplus-jouissance is the structural stake in the Master/Slave dialectic, and that the Discourse of the University is the hommelle (alma mater) whose subjection effects on students mirror the hysteric's truth-telling function—making the political question of revolution inseparable from the psychoanalytic question of knowledge and the subject.
What are the subjecting or subjection effects of knowledge? Students have no vocation for revolution.
-
#247
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206
Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > (16) That's fine.
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a scholarly exchange on Sellin's biblical exegesis and Freud's reliance on it to probe the structural problem of textual latency and unconscious inscription, while the discussion of Hosea's conjugal metaphor (Yahweh as spouse/Baal) is positioned as an archaic precursor to the logic of the Other's desire and the formation of a community through symbolic substitution.
I really wonder if Freud was not the victim of the academic prestige of Sellin
-
#248
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.50
*[A porter appears]*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric underlies both philosophical discourse (Hegel as "the most sublime of hysterics") and analytic experience, and that the structure of psychoanalytic interpretation operates through a logic of the "half-said" — figured as either a riddle (stating without statement) or a quotation (statement invoking authorial authority) — with the analyst functioning as Objet petit a and cause of desire rather than Subject Supposed to Know.
it is not, as certain people have believed they heard from me, that it is the analyst who is placed in function of the supposed subject of knowledge
-
#249
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.127
Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Discourse of the Analyst is structurally derived from—and is the inversion of—the Discourse of the Master: where the Master's discourse masks the divided subject at the place of truth, the analyst's discourse installs the objet petit a in the commanding place, thereby liberating the Splitting of the Subject and the half-said truth it conceals. This structural comparison also diagnoses the Discourse of the University as science's imperative ("Keep on knowing"), driven by the Master Signifier concealed at the place of truth.
the subject of science did not exist. And at the vital point at which they thought they had made it emerge, namely, in the relationship of zero to one in the discourse of Frege, it was pointed out to them that the progress of mathematical logic had allowed the subject of science to be completely reduced, not by suturing it but by vaporising it.
-
#250
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231
X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and its limiting proportion (the golden number) as a mathematical formalization of the structure of affect, cause, and the repetition of the unary trait, arguing that science—grounded in symbolic/combinatorial proof rather than perception—produces an "unsubstance" that dissolves the male/female forming principles, and that each subject is ultimately determined as objet petit a, the cause of desire.
the artifice of remitting the guarantee of truth to God: If there is a truth, let Him take responsibility for it. We take it at face value.
-
#251
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.67
*[A porter appears]*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is constitutively grounded in loss/entropy, and that this structural gap—formalized as surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust)—is what drives knowledge as a means of enjoyment, necessitating the Four Discourses as its articulation; simultaneously, truth is identified not with full-saying but with half-saying, its essence being the concealed fact of castration/impotence, which redefines the analyst's position and the analytic act.
What is asked of the analyst... is certainly not something that falls under the jurisdiction of this subject supposed to know... He is the one that the analyst establishes as subject supposed to know.
-
#252
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.261
**ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic as a foil to show that the Master Signifier is constitutively tied to the impossibility of mastery, and that the Real—defined as the impossible—cannot be reached through truth alone; this structural impossibility is what the discourse of the master conceals and what analytic discourse uniquely allows us to articulate.
the analytic relation ought to be founded, gegründet, on the love of truth. Freud really was a charming chap... if there is anything that ought to inspire you with the truth if you want to sustain the Analysieren, it is certainly not love.
-
#253
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.275
Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970
Theoretical move: The passage argues that "dying of shame" is the only affect that registers the Real as such — shame is the genealogically certain sign of a failed signifier, and this logic is used to diagnose University discourse as a perverted Master's discourse that evades the Real. The passage then deploys the Subject Supposed to Know as the mechanism by which the psychoanalysand constructs transference, explicitly warning that identifying the analyst with knowledge of truth would be fatal to that transference.
here then, and even though it can be quite well said in this room, I am saying how remarkable it is that there has not been noticed my formula of the supposed subject of knowledge, which is put at the source of transference.
-
#254
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.63
**Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**
Theoretical move: Writing is theorized as the necessary condition for logic and for questioning the symbolic order, while the Phallus is recast not as a missing signifier but as an obstacle to the sexual relationship—what establishes jouissance as the condition of truth in analytic discourse.
it was an unsustainable wager for her to ground transference on the subject supposed to know...The subject supposed to know what, then?
-
#255
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.42
**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.
only I know that I do not know it. And I am not the first to say something in these conditions.
-
#256
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.174
J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972
Theoretical move: In this closing session of Seminar XIX, Lacan condenses the year's argument: the *Yadl'un* (the One makes Being) is not ontology but the structural ground of analytic discourse, and Freud's essential contribution—overdetermination—is precisely the irreducible relation of the signifying chain to the body as the site of jouissance, a jouissance that is always "hand to hand" and never attributable to a single body.
it is the analyst who is there and who seems to be acting as a relay. People talk about sickness, we do not know, at the same time people say that there is no such thing...it is the doctor who was supposed to know it.
-
#257
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.124
Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the unary trait (support of imaginary identification via the mirror stage) from the *Yad'lun* (there-is-One), while arguing that the Not-all grounds both the crowd and the question of Woman; he then re-situates the Subject Supposed to Know as a pleonasm pointing to the analyst's legitimate occupation of the position of semblance with respect to jouissance.
What is the formula by which I one day articulated transference? My artefacts of writing demonstrate in this now famous subject-supposed-to-know a pleonasm. In it one can write subject as $, which recalls that a subject is never anything but supposed
-
#258
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.19
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "incomprehension of Lacan" is not a symptom, using this occasion to distinguish the symptom-as-truth-value (a one-directional equivalence introduced by Marxist thinking and refined by psychoanalysis) from mere misunderstanding or resistance, while also clarifying the structure of the Subject Supposed to Know as the ground of transference independently of any certainty about the analyst's actual knowledge.
What I emphasised about 'the subject supposed to know' as grounding the phenomena of transference, I always underlined that this does not imply any certainty in the analysand subject that his analyst knows very much.
-
#259
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.14
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that there is no sexual relationship in the speaking being—not as mere wordplay, but as a structural impossibility grounded in the constitutive failure of jouissance and the irreducibility of lack at the centre of sexuality—while positioning the psychoanalyst's knowledge as the knowledge of impotence, distinct from both scientific and religious discourses.
The question of the knowledge of the psychoanalyst is not at all that that it should be articulated or not the question is of knowing what place one must be at to sustain it.
-
#260
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.128
The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**
Theoretical move: Lacan situates the psychoanalyst's complex, horror-laden relationship to knowledge as the central theoretical problem, arguing that the discourse of the analyst places its practitioner in a structurally difficult position where knowledge about truth—mapped onto the four-discourse schema—is simultaneously perceived and repudiated, with foreclosure (Verwerfung) operating not only in psychosis but as a rationally legitimated social force.
is it knowledge that cures, whether it is that of the subject or the one supposed in the transference
-
#261
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.70
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's knowledge is constituted by a "scrap of knowledge" drawn from the subject's own jouissance—unconscious knowledge that is not "supposed" but emerges from slips, dreams, and the analysand's work—and locates this within the Four Discourses structure where S2 occupies the place of truth and $ occupies the place of enjoyment, distinguishing scientific (mathematical/topological) writing from the zone of discourse where meaning is always partial and borrowed from another discourse.
there is a knowledge that is drawn from the subject himself... this knowledge that, for its part, is not supposed.
-
#262
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.77
**II** > God and Woman's jouissance
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the ground from which its supplements (love, phallic jouissance, courtly love) must be theorised, and uses the distinction between reading and understanding—illustrated by commentary on *Le titre de la lettre*—to reframe the Subject Supposed to Know as the very structure of love/transference.
I felt I needed to base transference on, insofar as it is not distinguished from love, that is, on the formulation 'the subject supposed to know.'
-
#263
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.142
**<sup>107</sup>x** > Rings of string > Answers 119
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology founded on the Borromean knot and rings of string — rather than on dimensional cuts — provides a more fundamental approach to space, ultimately identifying the "inner eight" produced by reducing the Borromean knot as the symbol of the subject, and the simple ring as object a, thus grounding the cause of desire in topological structure rather than intuitive spatial intuition.
convey to the subject supposed by language the notion of right and left
-
#264
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.11
On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Seminar XX's inquiry by defining jouissance as "what serves no purpose," distinguishing it from love (which is always mutual and demands more), positioning the superego as the imperative of jouissance ("Enjoy!"), and asserting that jouissance of the Other's body is not the sign of love — thereby opening the problem of what, beyond necessity or sufficiency, can answer with jouissance.
it is precisely because you suppose that I begin from a different place than you in this 'I don't want to know anything about it' that you find yourselves attached (liés) to me.
-
#265
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.153
**<sup>107</sup>x** > The rat in the maze
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted as fleeting and vanishing through its dependence on the signifier, that love is grounded in the encounter between unconscious knowledges rather than in any sexual harmony, and that love's drama consists in the modal shift from contingency ("stops not being written") to necessity ("doesn't stop being written") — a shift that is always illusory because the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.
If I have enunciated that the subject supposed to know is what motivates transference, that is but a particular, specific application of what we find in our experience.
-
#266
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.272
Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted by the signifier (as hypothesis necessary to lalangue), that love is grounded in a subject-to-subject relation of unconscious knowledges, and that the sexual non-relation is modalized through the logic of necessity/contingency (ceasing/not ceasing to be written), with love as the illusory passage from contingency to necessity.
If I stated that it is the subject supposed to know that motivates the transference, this is only a quite particular, specific application point of what comes from our experience
-
#267
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.267
Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973
Theoretical move: Knowledge is not primarily communication but an enigma constituted by lalangue, which operates in the unconscious as a knowing-how-to-act that exceeds any stated knowledge; scientific discourse misrecognises this by reducing knowledge to learning (as in behaviourist rat experiments), thereby failing to grasp that the experimenter's own relation to lalangue is the hidden condition of the montage.
it is the experimenter is quite obviously the one in this business who knows something; it is even with what he knows that he invents the montage of the maze
-
#268
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.184
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's discourse is uniquely positioned to examine the truth of knowledge by placing the objet petit a in the place of semblance; he then develops a theory of knowledge as grounded in the Other (as locus of the signifier), where knowledge must be 'paid for' through use/enjoyment rather than exchange, and where the Letter reproduces without reproducing the same being—culminating in the claim that the Other's structural not-knowing constitutes the not-all, linking feminine sexuality, unconscious, and castration.
What is new in their knowledge, is that in it there is not supposed what? That the Other knows anything about it.
-
#269
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.4
**Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**
Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XX by grounding the impossibility of the sexual relation in the structural gap between jouissance (phallic enjoyissance) and love: love aims at making One but can only produce narcissistic identification, while enjoyment of the Other's body is neither necessary nor sufficient as a response to love, with the Not-all (pas-toute) marking woman's asymmetrical position relative to phallic jouissance.
it is precisely because you suppose that I start from elsewhere in this I don't want to know anything about it that this supposing binds you to me.
-
#270
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.139
Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that what supplements the absent sexual relationship is not a dyadic fusion but a singular "there is something of the One" — irreducibly solitary — and that love (including transference as love) is the operative name for this supplement; the big Other, far from being abolished, must be reckoned with precisely as the site that mediates between the sexes in the absence of a sexual relationship, a point that also grounds his endorsement of courtly love as a "feint" for the missing relation.
this transference, and specifically in so far as it is not distinguished from love, with the formula: the subject supposed to know.
-
#271
Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.101
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's relationship to madness, faith, and writing as a clinical-theoretical probe to distinguish the true from the Real, locating jouissance (including masochism) in the Real rather than the true; he simultaneously advances a topological argument about the Borromean knot and the torus as the best available "physics" for measuring belief and subjective structure.
they suppose that I know. Well! It is obvious that I do not know everything.
-
#272
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.42
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Knowledge (as unconscious signifier-effects) and Truth have no relation to one another, that the unconscious is structured as signifier-effects rather than philosophy, and that psychoanalysis is a 'scientific delusion' awaiting a science it may never produce — pivoting through the Four Discourses, the Borromean Knot, and the parlêtre to situate the irreducibility of the Real to matter.
To say what is true about knowledge, is not necessarily to ascribe knowledge to the psychoanalyst. As you know, I defined the transference in these terms.
-
#273
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.89
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads "The Purloined Letter" through the figure of Bozef (introduced by Alain Didier Weill) as an incarnation of Absolute Knowledge — knowledge that is in the Real but does not speak — to argue that the Borromean topology of RSI, the structure of the Passe, and the objectification of the unconscious all hinge on the same redoubling of knowledge ("I know that he knows that I know that he knows"), while distinguishing the silent, real truth from the lying Symbolic and the false-but-consistent Imaginary (consciousness).
Are there tongues that are an obstacle to the recognition of the unconscious?... something which would put the toi, which would have it slip into the third person.
-
#274
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.35
What is the way of distinguishing these two cases?
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on two interlocking theoretical moves: Lacan argues for the primacy of topological structure over phenomenal shape (using the torus and Klein bottle), and Alain Didier extends this by mapping the circuit of the invocatory drive onto the logic of separation, proposing that musical jouissance operates as a sublimation that "evaporates" the lost object and thus transmutes lack into nostalgia.
the music becomes a question which assigns me, as subject, to respond myself to this question...the music is constituted as listening to me, as subject finally – let us call it by its name – as subject supposed to hear
-
#275
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.37
So then what is this lack?
Theoretical move: The passage maps a four-moment dialectical circuit of the drive (using music as its privileged illustration) in which the subject's repeated failure to encounter the objet petit a gradually confirms its radical impossibility, ultimately enabling a leap "through the fantasy" toward an ecstatic, desexualised Other jouissance that Lacan identifies with sublimation – and which constitutes the terminal point of the analytic process beyond ordinary surplus-jouissance.
he answers the Other, that his message is this answer where he is assigned by this subject supposed to hear
-
#276
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.71
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**
Theoretical move: Through a game-theoretic allegory (Bozef/king chess positions), the passage argues that the subject's total dispossession before an omniscient Other (Absolute Knowing at R3) forces the emergence of the repressed signifier S2 into the Real—constituting aphanisis/fading—and that the only exit from this petrified position is a single word ("it is you," S(Ø)) which, rather than merely keeping one's word, *sustains* speech as an act anchored in the subject's desire, making the pass (passe) the topological test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating.
the conditions by which an analyst can be worthy of trust? How is he so? Briefly I would say for the moment precisely that his desire should not be placed like the one that I have tried to describe
-
#277
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.119
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates the Real, the Sinthome, and the Unconscious through a meditation on undecidability, negation, and the sign: the Real is defined by what does not cease not to be written (impossibility), the Unconscious is recast as 'bévue' (the structural stumbling of language), and the sinthome is identified with the mental as such — the upshot being that psychoanalysis produces only a 'semblance' of truth, not truth itself, because S1 never fully represents the subject for S2.
positive transference, is what I tried to define under the name of subject supposed to know. Who is supposed to know? It is the analyst. It is an attribution … there is only one problem, which is that it is impossible to give the attribute of knowing to anyone.
-
#278
Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.25
**Two lines of numbers**
Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topology of the Real grounded in writing, arguing that (1) the Real is only accessible through writing as artifice, (2) the torus—unlike the sphere—introduces a structural asymmetry and equivocation between inside/outside and hole/rod that models the living body and sexuality, and (3) the Borromean knot's necessary alternation formalizes the non-relation, with zero as hole and one as consistency providing an arithmetic analogue for chain-topology.
What I say about the transference is that I timidly advanced it as being the subject – a subject always supposed, there is not subject, of course, there is only the supposed – the supposed-to-know. What could that mean? The supposed-to-know-how-to-read-otherwise (autrement).
-
#279
Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.3
**Seminar I: Wednesday 15 November 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan opens his final seminar by positioning psychoanalysis as an irrefutable practice of equivocation (not a science), grounding this in the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the inadequation of the Symbolic to the Real, and the analyst's function as rhetor — then transitions to topological exploration of the Borromean knot and torus as structural models for the RSI (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary) articulation.
The subject supposed to know from which I supported, defined transference, supposed to know what? How to operate? But it would be altogether excessive to say that the analyst knows how to operate.
-
#280
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.269
HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED
Theoretical move: By reading Little Hans's case through Lévi-Strauss's structural method for myth analysis, Lacan argues that the signifying elements of Hans's fantasies cannot be fixed to univocal meanings but function as transforming bundles whose traversal moves from the eruption of the real penis to its symbolic accommodation, with the imaginary father (occupied by Freud himself) remaining distinct from both the real and symbolic father—and this structural incompleteness explains both the cure and its limits.
Freud taking this position… He truly takes what I could call the divine position. He speaks to young Hans from Mount Sinai
-
#281
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.387
XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'
Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.
across from him was someone who had made a new universe of signification loom up
-
#282
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.316
XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Little Hans case to argue that the Oedipus complex requires a tripling of the paternal function—real father, symbolic father (Freud as supra-father), and the Name-of-the-Father—wherein the child's phobia emerges from the mother's constitutive privation and is resolved through symbolic identification with the father, not mere genital maturation; simultaneously, Lacan critiques the psychoanalytic emphasis on 'frustration' as missing the deeper logic of the object as something that must be re-found through symbolic distancing.
little Hans's harkens to this with a sort of amused interest, with an overtone of How can he know all this? The Professor is surely not God's confidant!
-
#283
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.358
XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the castration complex requires an active, imaginary castrating father for the Oedipus complex to function productively; in the case of little Hans, the father's failure to perform this imaginary-castrating role creates a structural shortcoming that forces symptomatic suppletion (phobia), while the Name-of-the-Father as symbolic anchor remains operative but insufficient without the father's real/imaginary intervention.
There is someone who knows everything, and he's found him. It's Professor Freud. What luck! The good Lord is here on earth.
-
#284
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.309
**SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the original Freudian discovery of unconscious desire must be recovered against the distorting backdrop of contemporary psychoanalytic normativization: early Freudian interpretations derived their efficacy precisely from the absence of a pre-formed cultural framework, whereas today the analyst's intervention is weighted by an implicit normative horizon that obscures desire's essential link to its mask (symptom), making desire structurally unarticulable even when articulated.
The analyst seems to be like the possessor of the pathways into and the secrets about what initially presents itself as a network of relations.
-
#285
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.379
THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a) provides desire's minimal supporting structure by articulating, synchronically rather than diachronically, how the subject must pay the price of castration—giving up a real element (objet a) to serve as a signifier—precisely because the subject cannot designate itself within the Other's discourse (the unconscious). This move directly opposes ego-psychology's conflation of object-maturation with drive-maturation, exposing it as a confusion between the object of knowledge and the object of desire.
there are, on the other hand, objects that are inscribed in the relationship between the subject and the object, a relationship that at least latently implies knowledge.
-
#286
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.96
THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire is not the correlate of need but what props the subject up at the moment of his disappearance behind the signifier; deploying the Graph of Desire, Lacan situates 'desire' between the alienating appeal to the Other and the dimension of the unsaid, using Freud's 'dead father' dream to show how statement and enunciation articulate desire's structural role in the subject's existence.
The subject puts it to the test against the backdrop of the idea that the Other knows all about his thoughts... The discovery that the Other knows nothing about his thoughts, which is factually true, inaugurates the pathway
-
#287
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.500
TOWARD SUBLIMATION
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation — defined as the form into which desire flows, reducible to the pure play of the signifier — and perversion together constitute a dialectical circuit that resists social normalization, and that the analyst's function is to occupy the position of desire's midwife by maintaining the "cut" as the privileged mode of psychoanalytic intervention.
We help ripen the subject's desire for someone other than ourselves. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position of being desire's matchmakers, or its midwives - those who preside over its advent.
-
#288
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.461
THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT
Theoretical move: By critically rereading Glover's adaptive theory of perversion and Klein's object-relations theory through the lens of the signifier, Lacan argues that the subject's primary structuring occurs at the level of signifying opposition (good/bad objects), not reality-testing; and that the bad internal object marks the precise point where the être/avoir (to be/to have) split institutes the subject's relation to an undemandable object — from which desire, irreducible to demand or need, emerges.
What all of the subjects who contact us have in common is that they do not trust (in) their desire.
-
#289
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.87
LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM
Theoretical move: The passage develops the distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement as the structural foundation of the Graph of Desire's two lines, arguing that repression is essentially the effacement of the subject at the level of the enunciation process, and that all speech is primordially the Other's discourse — with Foreclosure (Verwerfung) marking the pathological limit of this structure.
Children initially believe that all of their thoughts are known to others... children do not doubt for a single instant that those who represent for them the locus in which this discourse resides - that is, their parents - know their thoughts.
-
#290
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.521
33 1. The way the wager was structured
Theoretical move: The passage uses Kojève's reading of Hegel's Absolute Knowing—and Queneau's novelistic satirization of it—as a foil to articulate Lacan's fundamental theoretical commitment to the divided subject: wisdom's 'perfect satisfaction' and absence of division is precisely what Lacanian theory refuses, and Hamlet (bustling, uncertain, linguistic) is posed against the Kojevian Sage as the proper figure of the subject.
the notion of wisdom - promoted by Kojeve in 'Les Romans de la sagesse' as a state of 'perfect satisfaction [...] accompanied by a fullness of self-consciousness' - could not but repulse him.
-
#291
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221
**XIV** > **XVI**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's cosmological argument for crime and a reading of Freud's death drive to establish that the drive is not a natural instinct toward equilibrium (entropy) but a historically articulated, signifier-dependent will to destruction and creation ex nihilo — a "creationist sublimation" that points to Das Ding as the foundational beyond of the signifying chain, and that sublimation (exemplified by courtly love) locates its object in this same place of being-as-signifier.
it amounts in the end to substituting a subject for Nature - and that is how I read Beyond the Pleasure Principle. However we construct this subject, it turns out to have as its support a subject who knows, or Freud, in effect
-
#292
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.16
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ethics of psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to psychogenesis, sociogenesis, or any of the three dominant analytical ideals (genital love, authenticity, non-dependence), but must be grounded in the autonomy of the signifier and the law of discourse—most sharply condensed in Freud's 'Wo es war, soll Ich werden'—and measured against the full tradition of ethical thought, including Aristotle's ethics of habit.
in the hope that through understanding the subject will be freed not only from his ignorance, but also from suffering itself.
-
#293
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.53
**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*
Theoretical move: Lacan establishes love as a Metaphor (signifier substitution) by articulating the structural non-coincidence between what the lover (erastès) lacks and what the beloved (erômenos) unknowingly has, grounding transference in this same gap and positioning the trajectory of analysis as the revelation of the unconscious Other through an analogous structure.
the *eromenos* or loved object always been situated as the one who knows not what he has, what he has that is hidden, and which makes him appealing
-
#294
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.195
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is first encountered as the Other's unconscious, which reframes the countertransference debate: analytic apathy is not grounded in the analyst's thorough self-analysis (reduction of unconscious blind spots) but in the analyst being possessed by a desire stronger than other desires—a transformed economy of desire specific to the analytic position.
it is not owing as much to one's long experience as an analyst, or to extensive knowledge of what one is likely to encounter in patients' structures, that we could expect the most relevant interventions ... no, it would be owing to the communication of unconsciouses.
-
#295
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.207
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what Object Relations analysts call "countertransference" is actually an irreducible structural effect of transference itself: by virtue of the analytic situation, the analyst is necessarily positioned as the container of *agalma* (objet petit a), and this positioning—not the analyst's personal psychology—explains phenomena like projective identification, transference love, and the analyst's affective responses; the categories of desire, fantasy, and topology are required to articulate this adequately.
The analyst is there for him... But there is a latent effect, which is related to his non-science or inscience.
-
#296
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.98
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium to locate the origin of a specifically modern, narcissistic conception of love—the fantasy of fusion with a lost half—distinguishing it from both Christian mystical love and Socratic/Platonic eros, while also theorizing transference as the structural effect of Plato's own fantasy asserting itself across historical contexts.
Socrates, who was merely a man who claimed to know something about love
-
#297
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.192
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, and uses this to reread Socrates' role in the Symposium as an unwitting analyst who redirects Alcibiades' transference love toward his true desire — thereby grounding the analytic situation in the structural relation between two desires rather than in object-relations theory.
Socrates - who is knowledgeable or learned in matters of love - designates to Alcibiades where his desire lies
-
#298
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.42
**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structural features of the Symposium's narrative transmission—its layered oral "brain recording," the repeated scholarly evasion of the Alcibiades scene, and Socrates' self-claimed expertise solely in love—to position the dialogue as an analogue of psychoanalytic sessions, thereby establishing that the relationship between love and transference is the real theoretical stake of his seminar.
Socrates, in a sense, calibrates or adjusts the level at which things must be taken up and, in the final analysis, he does not rate love as highly as all that compared to the others present... If Socrates tells us something, it is assuredly that love is not divine.
-
#299
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.399
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**
Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural function of objet petit a as the remainder that animates desire: the partial object is constituted by the elision of the phallus from the narcissistic image, such that libidinal cathexis (Besetzung) circulates around a central blank, and the object of desire is precisely what is 'saved from the waves' of narcissistic love — establishing the dialectic between being and having through the oral, anal, and phallic stages of demand.
the analyst must abstain from having any notion of an ideal analyst in the very place that is his
-
#300
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.128
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*
Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Symposium's shift from Agathon to Diotima not as Socrates' tact toward a humiliated interlocutor, but as a structural necessity: once the function of lack is installed as constitutive of desire/love, Socrates cannot continue in his own name because the substitution of *epithumei* (desire) for *era* (love) is a move that exceeds what Socratic dialectical knowledge can formally authorize.
This is precisely the ambiguity of Socrates as a questioner - he is always the master, even when this may in many cases seem to us, his readers, to be an easy way out.
-
#301
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.135
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*
Theoretical move: By reading Diotima's myth of Love's parentage (Poros/Aporia) through the formula "love is giving what you don't have," Lacan argues that Love belongs to the intermediate domain of doxa rather than episteme, and that the demonic/daemonic order is the precursor to the symbolic register of the unconscious—what was once attributed to gods is now reclaimed as the subject's own messages authenticated through the symbolic.
Diotima is led to say what love belongs to... those are the translations we provide for the term doxa - that are true without the subject being able to know it.
-
#302
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.355
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the ideal ego (imaginary, narcissistic image of self-display) from the ego-ideal (the introjected paternal signifier that organizes narcissistic benefit from a specific point), arguing that the imaginary phallus (lowercase phi) slips between the two terms [S and a] in fantasy, and that the analyst occupies the place of the ego-ideal for the patient — a structural position that must remain morally intact precisely to make the patient's libidinal disorder possible.
What was I for this patient for quite some time? The authors of the article I mentioned earlier will give us the answer: I was her ego-ideal, inasmuch as I was the ideal point at which order was maintained, and in a way that was all the more necessary since it was on this basis that all disorder was rendered possible.
-
#303
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.88
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ERYXIM ACHUS*
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Eryximachus' speech in Plato's Symposium as staging the foundational antinomy between concord-from-similarity and concord-from-dissimilarity/conflict, using it to illuminate topology's "full and empty," the pre-Socratic logic of contraries (Heraclitus), and—obliquely—the definition of psychoanalysis as "the science of the erotics of bodies." The comic register of the Symposium is foregrounded as philosophically significant, not merely ornamental.
Asking the gods to take the stand and give testimony about what is at stake in love seems to me, in any case, not to be discordant with what follows in Plato's discourse.
-
#304
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.37
**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**
Theoretical move: Lacan frames the *Symposium* as the privileged textual introduction to his seminar on transference, using the scandalous encounter between Alcibiades and Socrates—and the broader figure of Alcibiades as an exemplar of seduction, fascination, and the limits of love—to set the scene for a psychoanalytic investigation of what is at stake in transference.
Socrates was not exactly a teacher, but he was one all the same, a rather unusual one at that.
-
#305
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.29
**Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic relationship is not reducible to a neutral "situation" but is constituted by a high-degree sublimation of libidinal investment, making love — not well-being — the proper telos of analysis; he thus announces a return to the philosophical tradition on love (via Plato's Symposium) to supply what psychoanalytic literature has entirely neglected.
I must at least, like Socrates, be able to credit myself with knowing something about it.
-
#306
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.176
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**
Theoretical move: By reading the scandalous comportment of the gods of Antiquity through the concept of âgalma, Lacan argues that divine love (eros/agape) structures the deceptive, mutually-luring relation between Socrates and Alcibiades, and that this same structure—from the unconscious toward the subject ascending to the core object—governs the psychoanalytic dialectic of love.
Alcibiades demonstrates the presence of love, but only insofar as Socrates, who knows, can be mistaken about its presence, and only accompanies him in being mistaken.
-
#307
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.78
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ERYXIM ACHUS*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Eryximachus' medical speech in the Symposium to argue that transference reformulates the Platonic search for 'a good' (ktésis) into the emergence of desire as such — and that medicine's self-conception as scientific rests on an unexamined notion of harmony (harmonia) that exposes the irreducible gap at the heart of any normative ideal of health.
Here is a man, a psychoanalyst, from whom people seek knowledge [science] of what is most intimate about them... what we encounter at the beginning of an analysis is that he is assumed to have this knowledge [science]
-
#308
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.143
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's discourse is structurally conditioned by a founding "he did not know" (the position of the erastés before the erômenon), and that Alcibiades' entrance into the Symposium introduces the objet petit a (the agalma) as the object of unique covetousness that disrupts the harmonious ascent toward beauty and reveals love's fundamentally non-harmonious, scandalous dimension.
he can only speak of them by remaining in the zone of the 'he did not know.' Even when knowledgeable, he himself cannot speak of what he knows and must have someone else speak who speaks without knowing.
-
#309
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.21
**Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**
Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.
Socrates claims to know nothing, except how to recognize what love is, how to infallibly recognize... when he meets a couple, who is the lover and who is the beloved.
-
#310
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.166
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Socrates' refusal to enter the erotic exchange with Alcibiades is structurally determined by his knowledge of love: because Socrates knows (the truth of love), he cannot love—he refuses to become the eromenos/beloved, thereby refusing the metaphor of love that would complete the transference dynamic.
Alcibiades already knows that he is Socrates' beloved, eromenos, so why does he need to have Socrates give him a sign of his desire?
-
#311
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.189
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is irreducible to mere repetition compulsion because it contains a constitutively creative and fictional element addressed to the big Other; drawing on the Symposium's Alcibiades scene, he shows that the true object of transference is the agalma (objet petit a) hidden in the analyst, and that Socratic interpretation reveals a further displacement of desire onto a third party — structurally distinguishing transference from repetition while grounding it in the subject's address to the Other.
He attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him... into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades' desire - àgalma, the good object.
-
#312
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.327
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > **STRUCTURAL DECOM POSITION**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the question of transference from countertransference to the analyst's ontological participation ('our being'), then uses this reframing to adjudicate the Kleinian (analyst as object) versus Anna Freudian/ego-psychological (analyst as subject, therapeutic alliance) poles, before pivoting to myth as the structural category that underlies psychoanalytic fate—the analysand's quest for what he calls his 'destiny'—and links it to the matheme of fantasy ($ ◇ a).
the analyst plays his transferential role precisely to the degree to which he is, for his patient, what he is not at the level of what one might call 'reality.'
-
#313
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.282
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must be understood not as natural harmony or ethical perfection but as occupying the empty place of the missing signifier (Φ), being the barred subject in the very locus where the patient expects knowledge — so that fantasy, as the final register of transference, can be entered and the object *a* discerned.
we are summoned into being - into being nothing but real presence, and precisely inasmuch as it is unconscious - in the very place where we are supposed to know.
-
#314
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.10
*Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entire philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes's cogito rests on a single structural prejudice — the Subject Supposed to Know — and that psychoanalysis radically subverts this prejudice by demonstrating that the Other (as locus, not subject) is merely the depository of the supposition of knowledge, which returns to the subject as the unconscious.
there has never been but a single subject which I would pinpoint, to terminate, under this form: the subject who is supposed to know (le sujet supposé savoir).
-
#315
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.17
*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*
Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as producing not a stable subject but a vanishing subject ("I think and I am not"), whose constitutive vacillation demands a structural guarantor—the Master Signifier as unique, absolutely depersonalised trait (einziger Zug)—which grounds the signifying chain and points toward the Subject Supposed to Know.
it is the subject who is supposed to know that he is dealing with
-
#316
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.101
*Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.
if Socrates responds to him 'I know nothing, except, perhaps about the nature of Eros', it is indeed because the outstanding function of Socrates was to have been the first to have conceived what the true nature of desire was
-
#317
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.145
*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "reality of desire" is constituted through the dimension of the hidden and the structural weakness of the Other as guarantor of truth; this dialectic is traced through hysteric and obsessional modes of evading capture, and culminates in the claim that ethical behaviour—and the irreducibility of the castration complex at analysis's end—can only be understood by mapping desire's function in relation to the Other.
the keenest philosopher cannot sustain the very dimension of the truth, except by supposing that it is this science of the one who knows everything which allows him to sustain it.
-
#318
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.
We must learn at every moment to dispense with this subject who is supposed to know. We cannot at any moment have recourse to it, this is excluded
-
#319
Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.14
<span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychotherapeutic "positive orientation" of contemporary society constitutes a collective disavowal of a foundational inner negativity or deadness, and that psychoanalysis — despite Freud's self-distinction from religion's consolation function — largely replicates religion's salvational logic by promising deliverance from suffering rather than confronting the constitutive negativity of existence.
Today, psychologists are our main guide to a better world… The apparatus of psychotherapy is led by its inherent positive dynamic.
-
#320
Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.143
<span id="page-138-0"></span>Epilogue: No Salvation
Theoretical move: The epilogue proposes "negative psychoanalysis" as a practice that refuses salvation, expertise, and positive consolation, remaining faithful to the negative insight that nothing can save us—a self-cancelling praxis that mirrors the constitutive rupture of the subject and the social bond itself.
This constitutes a hierarchical structure between people and maintains the illusion of knowledge and the hope of salvation.
-
#321
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental object (noumenon) marks only the limit of sensuous intuition — a structurally empty space that neither experience nor pure understanding can fill — and that misapplying the understanding beyond its proper field (making objects conform to concepts rather than concepts to intuitions) is the root error of transcendental illusion; the passage closes by systematically dividing the concept of 'nothing' according to the categories.
apperception, and with it thought, antecedes all possible determinate arrangement of representations
-
#322
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon Trancendentale).
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Transcendental Ideal (ens realissimum) arises from a dialectical illusion in which the distributive unity of empirical reality is illegitimately converted into a collective whole, which is then hypostatized and personified — a move Lacan will later theorize as the production of the big Other or the Subject Supposed to Know as a guarantee of completeness.
the unity of the supreme reality and the complete determinability of all things, seem to reside in a supreme understanding, and, consequently, in a conscious intelligence
-
#323
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > APPENDIX.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental ideas of pure reason (psychological, cosmological, theological) cannot be constitutive principles extending cognition beyond experience, but function legitimately as regulative/heuristic principles that guide the understanding toward systematic unity—their "transcendental deduction" consists precisely in demonstrating this regulative role rather than any ostensive reference to objects.
the conception of a supreme intelligence is a mere idea... it is merely a schema constructed according to the necessary conditions of the unity of reason... useful towards the production of the highest degree of systematic unity in the empirical exercise of reason
-
#324
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.72
chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice
Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice—a voice whose source cannot be seen or located—is shown to structurally produce effects of divinity, authority, and uncanny presence (Unheimlichkeit) by separating the voice from its body, and this mechanism operates through a fantasy-encirclement of the enigmatic object behind the screen, linking the acousmatic to the Voice as Lacanian object.
the wizard can be the wizard only as long as his is a voice whose source is hidden, and once the veil is lifted, once the screen is overturned, he necessarily turns into a ludicrous and powerless old man
-
#325
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.168
Silence
Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.
The initial supposition of the beginning of analysis is placed under the banner of what Lacan called 'the subject supposed to know.'
-
#326
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.77
Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause and the Law
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of cause—tied to failure, the materiality of language, and the equivocations of the signifier—surpasses both the covering-law model and Hart/Honoré's norm/deviation framework, while simultaneously critiquing "historicist" and "psychological" constructions of the subject (illustrated through the Clerambault case) as unable to account for how subjects are overdetermined by meanings they never consciously experience.
its primary target being the supposed subject of knowledge. Against this supposition psychoanalysis argues not that we can ultimately penetrate what had previously seemed the unfathomable secret of the subject but that there is nothing to fathom
-
#327
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.13
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.
the truth of 'plebness' will therefore always be located outside knowledge, anyone's knowledge, including that which is possessed by what we can no longer call 'the' pleb him or herself.
-
#328
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.165
The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power
Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is fundamentally incomplete because it lacks a psychoanalytic account of jouissance: the "mild and provident" ideal father (Name of the Father) does not simply neutralize power but installs interdiction of jouissance as its operative principle, which drives the escalation of surveillance and ultimately precipitates the return of totalitarianism as the primal father's revenge — a structural trajectory Foucault cannot see because he expelled psychoanalysis from his framework.
He is the place to which all our questions are addressed, the place of knowledge; he is therefore often imagined under the traits of the educator (think for example of Noonan's ideal: America's new 'education president').
-
#329
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.195
Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over
Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.
the noncorporealized voice of the classical documentary... transcending the visible, determined field, the voice maintains its absolute power over the image, its knowledge remains unimpugned.
-
#330
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of the unconscious reveals an irreducible cycle of repetition, submission, and authority-seeking that underlies all politics, love, and therapy, and that the analyst — like Shakespeare's Falstaff — must strategically occupy the position of the primal father/authority in order to work through, rather than merely repeat, these foundational fantasies.
The therapist puts on a disguise which can easily corrupt the wearer, that of omniscience, of the subject who is supposed to know.
-
#331
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: This introductory essay argues that Freud's central theoretical contribution is the concept of erotic and political repetition compulsion — the psyche's conservative drive to re-enact infantile fantasies of perfect love and authority — and that love's pathological character is structurally continuous with transference-love, with the superego's temporary usurpation by the beloved marking the mechanism of falling in love.
in the voice of every plausible purveyor of Truth, each subject (as Lacan has it) who is supposed to know
-
#332
How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins
HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The saying of nothing*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic theological discourse operates as a "powerless" or apophatic speech-act that does not colonize the divine with logos but instead creates a sacred clearing in which the divine can address the subject — inverting the evangelistic model from answer-provision to question-opening, and theorizing language as the medium through which its own limits are enacted.
the job of the Church is not to provide an answer … but rather to help encourage the religious question to arise.
-
#333
How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins
HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Being evangelized*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine theological dialogue requires a posture of receptive powerlessness rather than monological self-assertion, reframing Christian mission as a mutual transformation in which the missionary is evangelized by the Other rather than simply transmitting God to the unreached.
this powerless approach breaks down the 'us' and 'them' dichotomy and provides a space in which we are all less defensive and thus more open
-
#334
How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins
HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *Revelation as concealment*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that revelation structurally contains concealment within itself — God is "known as unknown" — and uses this to displace fundamentalist demands for doctrinal certainty in favour of a transformative, plurally-interpreted encounter with the divine; the theoretical move is from revelation-as-disclosure to revelation-as-excess-of-meaning that resists singular mastery.
various groups and denominations being set up that are founded upon the supposedly 'correct' interpretation of revelation
-
#335
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!
Theoretical move: The passage deploys Luther's doctrine of predestination as a structural analogue to the Freudian unconscious—a knowledge we do not know we have—in order to argue that embracing radical fatalism (the impossibility of self-grounded action or salvation) is the only authentic emancipatory position, one that negates human-reason's Aristotelian teleology and the ideological 'capitalization' of faith.
We do know. But we do not know that we know.
-
#336
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.65
2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's confrontation with its constitutive lack—rather than being a mere heroic sacrifice—is precisely what enables it to reclaim agency over the signifier from the Other, thereby transforming symbolic mortification into a resource for desire, resistance to trauma, and self-directed meaning-production. Psychoanalysis is distinguished from psychology by its orientation toward the signifier as the site where "destiny" can be rewritten.
In analytic practice, mapping the subject in relation to reality . . . and not in relation to the signifier, amounts to falling already into the degradation of the psychological constitution of the subject
-
#337
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.241
8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *4. The Possibility of the Impossible*
Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes) works through the parallels and tensions between Lacanian singularity and Badiou's truth-event, arguing that both posit a subject of truth as a fissure in the symbolic order defined by its radical break with social situatedness, while also examining the paradoxical relationship between the subject's agency and the contingency of the event via Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner.
Something must happen, something beyond one's own control, calculation, and labor, something that comes from the locus of the Other
-
#338
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.68
2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Analyst as Daimon*
Theoretical move: Analysis functions as an "interpellation beyond ideological interpellation" by repositioning the analyst as the enigmatic cause of desire, replacing fantasmatic fixations with a transferential relation that reorganizes the analysand's existential orientation and opens new possibilities of singularity.
It places the analyst in the position of the enigmatic Other who has the power to cathect the subject's drive energies.
-
#339
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.66
**The Sartorial Superego**
Theoretical move: The passage uses the case of Clérambault to distinguish between three epistemological constructions of the subject—psychological, psychoanalytic, and historicist—arguing that psychoanalysis dissolves the fantasy of a subject with secret inner knowledge by replacing "lived experience" with the overdetermination of the subject by the signifier, thus also critiquing historicism's reduction of subjects to pathological experience.
psychoanalysis sets out to disperse, its primary target being the supposed subject of knowledge. Against this supposition psychoanalysis argues not that we can ultimately penetrate what had previously seemed the unfathomable secret of the subject but that there is nothing to fathom
-
#340
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.290
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the limits of knowledge in love and grief are not deficiencies but constitutive dimensions of intimate bonds, and that psychoanalysis teaches not perfect transparency but a tolerant, even productive relation to irreducible unknowing — in others and in oneself.
I entered psychoanalysis in order to understand something about my relation to my son, but he ended up teaching me about psychoanalysis.
-
#341
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.281
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that relinquishing the demand to know—including the unknowable reasons behind a loved one's suicide—paradoxically enables a deeper form of love and presence; the void opened by death becomes the very condition for renewed intimacy, structurally paralleling Lacanian insights about lack as constitutive of desire and the Real as that which always escapes symbolization.
The demand to know... energized my frenzied scavenging through his belongings... It kept me motivated through more than three years on a psychoanalyst's couch.
-
#342
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.141
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The intervention of God
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the most radical form of Christian doubt is not atheism or deism but rather the inversion that retains the reality of divine *intervention* while suspending certainty about God's existence—making the Event/happening primary and theological belief secondary, so that doubt becomes the natural outworking of faith rather than its enemy.
I have been touched by God in a manner that is undeniable to me. However, I am still open and free to wonder, at times, whether this God of which I speak can be explained in natural terms.
-
#343
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.92
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The truth of faith is handed over to the academic
Theoretical move: When Christian truth is treated as a propositional object available for contemplation and testing, it is effectively surrendered to academic specialists (philosophers, historians, sociologists, psychologists, theologians), reducing faith to a domain of scholarly dissection rather than existential engagement.
Christianity is given over to the scholar who sits at her desk, surrounded on all sides by an endless sea of ink, adding her own tiny drops so as to justify her living.
-
#344
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.155
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Beyond believe, behave, belong
Theoretical move: The passage argues for inverting the standard Christian order of belief→behavior→belonging into belonging→behavior→belief, grounding this reversal in a radically subjective, unlocalizable 'miracle' of transformation; it draws on a Hebraic model of communal ritual and interpretive wrestling to contend that authoritative, objectified belief actually undermines truth, and recruits Pascal's Wager to show that entering communal practice is the proper site for the miracle of faith rather than doctrinal assent.
Who are you to tell us what the verse means? You have given us the words, now leave us in peace to wrestle with it.
-
#345
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter005.html_page_90"></span>Creation of distance between believer and the source of the believer’s faith
Theoretical move: The passage argues that treating Christian faith as an externalizable set of objective facts introduces a distorting subject/object distance, and that authentic faith requires existential implication rather than detached reflection — thus the language of traditional theology and philosophy is inadequate to faith's nature.
Persons of faith are not ones who act like rational detached individuals who are coldly assessing the evidence of their faith in the same way that a mathematician considers a formula.
-
#346
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.59
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Indirectly approaching the Word
Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to Scripture demands a "radical hermeneutics" that refuses to reduce the Word to propositional content or factual claims, positing instead that the Word is encountered as a life-transforming event that dwells within but exceeds the words — analogous to subjectivity exceeding the flesh — and that genuine faith requires wrestling with, and even betraying, the literal text to reach a deeper truth.
however interesting the work of the biblical scholars, the theologians, the fundamentalists, or the intellectual skeptics may be, the true depth of the text is not to be discovered by following their exacting methods.
-
#347
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.93
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The introduction of doubt as a corrosive enemy
Theoretical move: Rollins argues that grounding religious truth in verifiable factual claims subjects faith to perpetual rational doubt and provisionality, making unconditional commitment impossible; apologetics thus unwittingly undermines itself by ceding the question of truth to academic-rational adjudication.
the believer would have to bow down before the academic researchers who are able to discuss which biblical texts are authentic, when they were written, by whom, and for what purpose.
-
#348
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The Event of Christianity as miracle
Theoretical move: The passage argues that being, revelation, and event in Christian theology cannot be separated but form a Trinitarian unity exhibiting "minimal difference," and that genuine theological knowledge is a "knowing beyond knowledge" that reconciles radical doubt with absolute certainty—positioning miracle as the irreducible locus of faith rather than a cognitive or metaphysical object.
the seemingly opposite and opposed realms of radical doubt and absolute certainty are reconciled in a knowing beyond knowledge
-
#349
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Toward a religionless Christianity
Theoretical move: The passage argues, via Bonhoeffer's reading of Nietzsche, that authentic Christian faith is not an ideological response to pre-existing need but a retroactive need born only in the encounter with the other — a structural inversion of the bad-news/good-news sequence that points toward a "religionless Christianity" beyond propositional belief systems.
Bonhoeffer wondered whether it is possible to embrace God out of love and lightness of heart, out of a seduction that is caught up in the call of God rather than the need of God.
-
#350
The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.104
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>
Theoretical move: The passage uses two parabolic fictions to argue that apparent betrayal or negation can be acts of fidelity, and that the very concept of God may require its own self-negation — a theological maneuver that structurally parallels the Lacanian logic of the Real as that which escapes every symbolic capture.
he possessed a singular vision that drove him to work each day and long into every night in order to understand the intricacies of every debate, every discussion, and every significant work on the subject.
-
#351
The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter020.html_page_114"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>
Theoretical move: The passage argues, via parable and Biblical exegesis, that genuine fidelity to a teaching requires its betrayal or transgression — pure identification with the Master's words is itself the deepest form of betrayal — and that divine power operates by always siding with the excluded and marginalized, even at the cost of its own defeat.
They think Jesus is on their side, but then they are faced with Jesus himself being beaten. Thus, the message is driven home in the strongest possible way.
-
#352
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.59
Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots** > **The Age of Distinctions**
Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Danish Hegelianism hinges on the classical alazon/eiron distinction: the chattering systematicians embody the alazon's prideful self-ignorance, while Socratic irony (eironeia) marks the eccentric wisdom of those who distinguish between what they understand and what they do not—a distinction that Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung), misapplied by parroting disciples, collapses into mere gossip.
I plead, I plead for an explanation, an explanation, note well, that I can understand... Give me the explanation; I will take it à tout prix.
-
#353
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.110
Fuzzy Math > **Trembling Impatience** > **The Premise- Author**
Theoretical move: The passage deploys Kierkegaard's distinction between 'essential authors' and 'premise-authors' to argue that chatter is structurally constituted by a lack of self-understanding: the premise-author, having no coherent life-view to communicate, uses public discourse as a substitute for the reflexive work of self-determination, thereby allowing language itself—rather than an intending subject—to speak.
If he needs the public in order to find clarity and meaning in the matter, then of course the public knows more than he does, then of course he is a learner.
-
#354
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.250
The Writing on the Wall > **Ludicrous Talk, Encrypted Text**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan reads Freud's Irma dream as a linguistic progression from ludicrous ego-speech to encrypted unconscious text, using the je/moi distinction to show how the acephalic subject (je) annihilates the ego (moi), such that the dream's final Word enacts the dissolution of the speaking self into the unconscious.
Lacan presents himself as the exclusive interpreter of this cryptic text. With characteristic bravado, he identifies himself as the chosen translator of the chosen text in the chosen dream of psychoanalysis
-
#355
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.28
part i
Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's account of comedy in the Phenomenology—specifically the "noumenological" movement whereby Absolute Spirit must come to know itself—to argue that what Hegel and Lacan share is a structural insight: genuine transformation requires not only a change in the subject's consciousness but a shift in the external Symbolic/Other in which the subject's unconscious is materialized, and this "short circuit" between the lack in the subject and the lack in the Other is the properly comic (and analytic) dimension of experience.
transference is ultimately nothing but the subject's trust in her own sameness or identity, functioning outside her, in the Other
-
#356
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.109
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic suspense differs from thriller suspense by beginning *after* the catastrophe (an "overrealization"), and that this structural feature is the mechanism by which comedy suspends the big Other, introducing a surplus-object that irreversibly alters the symbolic coordinates when the Other is reinstated — a thesis illustrated through Molière's *Amphitryon* and Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*, where the restored Other is not the same Master but one stripped of its authority.
He is also the bearer of the knowledge about the identity of all the twins—that is to say, the Other whose disappearance would most probably result in drawing everyone concerned into an irretrievable vortex of chaos.
-
#357
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.98
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic trust (and transference) operates not through knowledge but through a credit extended precisely at the point of the Other's lack, and that the comic suspension of the big Other (as in comedies of mistaken identity) produces a surplus object — "error incorporated" — as a little other that takes the Other's place, revealing that comedy proper pivots not on the Other's failure itself but on the surplus effects that failure generates.
And is this not precisely the comical aspect of transference in psychoanalysis? This peculiar emergence of a 'subject supposed to know,' this presupposition that the Other knows the truth about the subject's unconscious desire, this automatic love for the analyst, is certainly not without its comic dimension.
-
#358
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of group psychology and repetition compulsion reveals all political life—liberal and authoritarian alike—as structured by transference onto leader-figures descended from the primal father, and that the therapeutic response (working-through rather than repeating) mirrors the dynamics staged in Shakespeare's Falstaff/Hal scenes, making literary play a potential rival to psychoanalytic cure.
The therapist puts on a disguise which can easily corrupt the wearer, that of omniscience, of the subject who is supposed to know.
-
#359
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freudian thought centres on erotic and political repetition compulsion rooted in the infantile loss of a fantasised primal plenitude, and that love is structurally pathological insofar as it reactivates infantile fantasies, displaces the superego, and re-enacts a drive toward an unattainable object — a diagnosis that can only be met with irony rather than cure.
In the voice of every plausible purveyor of Truth, each subject (as Lacan has it) who is supposed to know.
-
#360
Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.77
*Unexpected Reunions* > **Surplus Abstraction**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist political economy's reduction of the worker to an animal is structurally produced by a "surplus abstraction" — a redoubled act of abstraction that essentializes a particularized particular into a new genus, generating an ideological-imaginary entity that is neither human nor animal but an "un-animal" (*Untier*). Reduction is thus not a simple operation but the hypostatization of abstraction itself.
The peculiar animal that the worker is for political economy does not exist (there is no 'sujet supposé de l'histoire')
-
#361
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.410
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)
Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic ethical action—whether Karen's autonomous withdrawal, Morck's self-sacrificial compassion, or the post-tribulationist "impure" believer—requires abandoning the safety of a big Other and confronting the Real in its senseless indifference; only a "Christian atheist" who acts without divine guarantee can be truly and unconditionally ethical, with Christianity's core being the only consequent atheism and atheists the only true believers.
it is true that Morck is a true atheist while Johannes continues to rely on a big Other … However, Johannes is wrong when he claims that, when he was drowning the child, god did not show up
-
#362
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.397
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Jumping Here and Jumping There](#contents.xhtml_ahd27)
Theoretical move: Žižek reverses Hegel's "Hic Rhodus hic saltus" into "Ibi Rhodus ibi saltus" to argue that the big Other must be recognized as lacking/non-existent rather than serving as guarantor of action, and develops this through a reading of Luther versus Münzer on divine unknowability, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata, and Hegel's formula of reconciliation as recognizing the decentered Other as constitutive of the self.
Luther warns against such Majestätsspekulation, against trying to discern the will of god, of deus absconditus: one should abandon attempts to know what the Other wants from you
-
#363
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.
he addresses the question concerning his desire to the other - to the one who embodies for him the 'subject presumed to know'
-
#364
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that both descriptivism and antidescriptivism miss the radical contingency of naming: descriptivism misses the big Other (the tautological, self-referential dimension of the master signifier), while antidescriptivism misses the small other (objet petit a as the objectification of a void opened by the signifier), with the identity of an object across all counterfactual situations being a retroactive effect of naming itself rather than a feature found in positive reality.
Why is this myth, this antidescriptivist version of the Lacanian 'subject presumed to know', necessary?
-
#365
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order is constituted around an impossible Real kernel, requiring a contingent element to embody its structural necessity; this logic generates a quartet of "subject presumed to…" figures (know, believe, enjoy, desire) that articulate the unconscious as the gap between form and content—illustrated through Hitchcock and Mozart.
That is the logic of the 'subject presumed to know' which Lacan isolated as the central axis, anchor, of the phenomenon of transference: the analyst is presumed to know in advance - what? - the meaning of the analysand's symptoms.
-
#366
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the authority of the Law rests not on truth but on necessity, and that ideological belief operates through a performative paradox—'belief before belief'—whereby external ritual/custom produces unconscious belief. Transference is identified as the structural mechanism that sustains this illusion by supposing a Truth or Meaning behind the Law's traumatic contingency.
Judd understands Marx because he presupposes in advance that Marx is the bearer of knowledge enabling access to the truth of history
-
#367
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that repetition is not the mechanism by which an objective historical necessity gradually imposes itself on lagging consciousness, but rather the process through which symbolic necessity itself is constituted retroactively via misrecognition: the first event is experienced as contingent trauma (non-symbolized Real), and only through repetition does it receive its symbolic status, its law, anchored by the Name-of-the-Father in place of the murdered father.
the Jew embodies for him the 'subject presumed to know' - to know the secret of extracting money from people.
-
#368
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.
The procedure of incrimination is to put the subject into the position of somebody who is already presumed to know (to use this Lacanian term in another context).
-
#369
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The symptom's 'return of the repressed' operates from the future rather than the past — meaning is retroactively constructed through the symbolic process, not excavated from hidden depths — and this temporal paradox entails that transference is a necessary illusion through which Truth is constituted via misrecognition, a structure equally operative in historical repetition (Luxemburg, Hegel).
what is a 'journey into the future' if not this 'overtaking' by means of which we suppose in advance the presence in the Other of a certain knowledge — knowledge about the meaning of our symptoms — what is it, then, if not the transference itself?
-
#370
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real is a paradoxical entity that does not exist yet produces structural effects (trauma, jouissance, the MacGuffin, class struggle, antagonism), and extends this logic to the 'forced choice of freedom'—the subject is always-already positioned in the symbolic order such that 'free choice' is itself real-impossible, structured retroactively, which Žižek traces from Kant through Schelling to Freud/Lacan.
In this sense, the Lacanian sujet supposé savoir (the subject presumed to know) is also such a real entity: it does not exist, but it produces a decisive shift in the development of the psychoanalytic cure.
-
#371
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.
there is no symptom without transference, without the position of some subject presumed to know its meaning.
-
#372
Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.23
Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek
Theoretical move: The subject is not a substance but a nonsubstantial, purely relational entity—the very wound/cut in the Real it attempts to heal—and any materialism or realism that posits a "democracy of objects" without accounting for this void at the core of subjectivity already relies on an unexamined transcendental constitution of reality; only a dialectical materialism that takes the subject as nothing but its own relationality and division can avoid this obfuscation.
From where does the subject (understood here as the ego or individual) who deploys these object-oriented ontologies… speak? From what standpoint?
-
#373
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.17
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Proximity of David Lynch
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's cinema achieves a theoretically impossible feat: by formally separating the realms of desire and fantasy—rather than blending them as most films and everyday experience do—Lynch's films expose the structural relationship between the two, revealing how fantasy retroactively constitutes desire rather than merely answering it, and thereby producing a "normality" more unsettling than any avant-garde subversion.
through fantasy, we learn how to desire.
-
#374
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.36
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Troumotic Turn to Fontosy**
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *The Elephant Man* stages a structural shift from a world of desire organized around the inaccessible object-cause to a world of fantasy in which the impossible object is apparently integrated into representation—revealing fantasy not as an escape from reality but as its very support.
we can no longer believe that we are neutral observers looking on a preexisting series of images; instead, we are desiring subjects looking on a visual field created specifically for our desire.
-
#375
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.99
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > An Absolute Commitment to Fantasy
Theoretical move: Lynch's *The Straight Story* is not an exception to his fantasmatic method but its purest instance: by presenting the American heartland as mythic fantasy rather than reality, Lynch demonstrates that "straight" reality is itself the product of fantasmatic distortion that fills the gaps of desire, and the film's structure mirrors this by moving the spectator from a world of desire (absence, non-knowledge, lack) into a world of fantasy (fullness, coherence, meaning).
attempting to decipher the desire of the Other (that is, the film itself) that informs the inclusion of the scene.
-
#376
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.86
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation, Separation, and the Traversing of Fantasy in the Analytic Setting**
Theoretical move: The analytic setting operationalizes alienation and separation as clinical techniques: the analyst's enigmatic desire disrupts the analysand's fantasy ($ ◇ a), while the Freudian injunction "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" frames the Lacanian subject as ethically tasked with subjectifying the otherness of primal repression — making the subject appear where the drive/Other once dominated.
a word uttered by the analyst (not by the Other of knowledge to whom that discourse was in some sense addressed)
-
#377
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.63
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Cartesian Subject and Its Inverse**
Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan inverts the Cartesian cogito by demonstrating that the subject cannot simultaneously possess thought and being; instead of the ego's "false being" (conscious rationalization mistaken for true subjectivity), the Lacanian subject is constituted by a forced choice that permanently separates it from being — a structural inversion of Descartes rather than a mere critique.
it is as though such an analysand were saying to his or her analyst, 'I can tell you all about myself because I know. I don't kid myself, I know where I stand.'
-
#378
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.56
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Lacanian Subject Is Not the "Individual" or Conscious Subject of Anglo-American Philosophy**
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the Lacanian subject from both the ego (as theorized in ego psychology) and the conscious subject of analytic philosophy, arguing that the ego is a narcissistic construct of crystallized ideal images whose very nature is distortion and error — making it precisely what the Lacanian subject is NOT.
While the ego or self is what we generally refer to when we say 'I think that...' or 'I'm the kind of person who...,' that 'I' is anything but the Lacanian subject: it is no more than the subject of the statement.
-
#379
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.107
<span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-105-0"></span>*The Other as Object, Symbolic Relations*
Theoretical move: By tracing the analyst's proper position through a critique of both imaginary and symbolic identifications, Fink argues that situating the analyst as the omniscient Other of demand traps the analysand at the level of demand rather than desire, and that only by relinquishing the position of subject supposed to know—redirecting knowledge-authority to the analysand's own unconscious—can analysis constitute the subject as desiring rather than demanding.
Lacan formulates this by saying that the analyst is viewed by the analysand as the subject supposed to know: to know what is the matter when psychological difficulties arise, when symptoms appear, and so on.
-
#380
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.161
<span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Science, the Hysteric's Discourse, and Psychoanalytic Theory**
Theoretical move: Fink argues that psychoanalysis must be disaggregated into distinct facets—practice, theory/teaching, and institutional associations—each of which operates under a different discourse (analytic, hysteric's, master's, or university), and that this plurality of discourses is structurally necessary rather than aberrant, because every praxis deploys different discourses depending on context.
The physicist here might be said to allow him or herself to be duped, to work as something other than the knowing subject.
-
#381
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233
<span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**
Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.
Analyst … subject supposed to know, 87
-
#382
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.60
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Lacanian Subject Appears Nowhere in What Is Said**
Theoretical move: By analysing the expletive *ne* in French and "but" in English as regular, grammatically-embedded signifiers of a "no-saying," Fink argues that the split between the subject of the enunciated (conscious, representable by "I"/shifter) and the subject of enunciation (unconscious, pointing to ambivalence) is inscribed in ordinary language itself—making the Splitting of the Subject a structural feature of speech rather than merely an occasional accident like a slip of the tongue.
The only subject Lacan allots to the statement is the conscious subject of the enunciated, represented here by the personal pronoun 'I.'
-
#383
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.171
<span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States is reduced to a disembodied textual corpus because it lacks the clinical and institutional praxis through which the discourse is transmitted in France; genuine transmission requires subjective experience, not merely publications.
"I love the person I assume to have knowledge," Seminar XX, p. 64
-
#384
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.55
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**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.
the subject is never more than supposed'; in other words, the subject is never more than an assumption on our part.
-
#385
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.98
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that comic naivety (trust in the Other's metonymic object despite its inconsistency) is not mere ignorance but a structural wager on the lack-in-the-Other, and that comedies of mistaken identity function by suspending the symbolic Other, generating a surplus comic object ('error incorporated') that displaces the emphasis from the Other's failure to the productive accidents that failure enables.
This peculiar emergence of a 'subject supposed to know,' this presupposition that the Other knows the truth about the subject's unconscious desire, this automatic love for the analyst, is certainly not without its comic dimension.
-
#386
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.109
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic suspense is structurally distinct from thriller suspense because it begins *after* the catastrophe (an "overrealization"), and that this post-catastrophic surplus-object suspended in the comic action actually transforms the symbolic Other rather than simply restoring it—demonstrated through close readings of Molière's *Amphitryon* and Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*.
He is also the bearer of the knowledge about the identity of all the twins—that is to say, the Other whose disappearance would most probably result in drawing everyone concerned into an irretrievable vortex of chaos.
-
#387
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.80
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kierkegaard's apparent anti-Hegelianism conceals a disavowed proximity to Hegel: both thinkers share a commitment to reopening the past's contingency rather than closing it into necessity, and the genuine Hegelian dialectical move is not to view the present as already-accomplished finality but to restore potentiality to actuality—a gesture that aligns with Kierkegaard's ethico-existential insistence on contingent singular decision over cognitive-objective thought.
At the level of transference, the analyst operates as the 'subject supposed to know,' as the illusory Other Place at which everything is always-already written, at which the (unconscious) meaning of all symptoms is always-already fixed.
-
#388
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.304
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.
Knowledge in the position of 'truth' below the bar under the 'agent,' of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst
-
#389
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.410
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 4The Loop of Freedom
Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus performs multiple theoretical moves simultaneously: it glosses the Lacanian big Other's radical ambiguity (symbolic substance vs. pure appearance), identifies the Master-Signifier as the answer to infinite regress in argumentation, reads anxiety (and, contra Lacan, Badiouian enthusiasm) as the affect that grants access to the Real, and deploys the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' to illuminate the mutual entanglement of sexual and socio-symbolic failure in marriage.
the symbolic 'substance' (the determining order which 'pulls the strings' in the mode of the 'cunning of Reason,' the subject supposed to know) and the pure appearance (the big Other, which 'should not know it'
-
#390
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.241
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > From Physics to Design?
Theoretical move: Žižek uses Dennett's dual-ontology (physics/design) and intentional-stance framework as a foil to argue that consciousness is constitutively negative—its power lies in abstraction, delay, and the ability to veto—thereby mobilising Hegel's infinite negative power of Understanding against eliminativist and adaptationist accounts of mind, while exposing the covert teleology (quasi-Kantian regulative idea, fetishistic disavowal) lurking in Darwinian naturalism.
We are in fact dealing here with supposed knowledge, with a version of what Lacan called the 'subject supposed to know.'
-
#391
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.352
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the true stake of both psychoanalytic treatment and ideological critique is not changing the subject's conscious knowledge but transforming what the subject presupposes the big Other to know — a split that is internal to the subject itself — thereby demonstrating that fetishistic disavowal, commodity fetishism, and ideological belief all operate through displacement of belief onto an Other who is presumed not to know.
in the 'normal' cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto another, onto a 'subject supposed to believe'
-
#392
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.379
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.
the discourse of the analyst who, while occupying this place of supposed knowledge, keeps it empty
-
#393
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.69
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's account of the state reveals an irreducible split in self-consciousness between objective (ritual/institutional) and subjective (monarchical will) aspects—a gap that totalitarianism perversely exploits by inverting the Kantian ethical structure, so that overcoming natural pity becomes the "duty," turning violation of ethical instinct into proof of moral grandeur.
The contrast between the Hegelian Monarch and the 'totalitarian' Leader who is effectively supposed to know cannot be stronger.
-
#394
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.191
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the postideological "desublimated" call of jouissance short-circuits the symbolic mediation constitutive of the Other's jouissance, so that the apparent opposition between pure autistic jouissance (drugs, virtual sex) and the jouissance of the Other (language, narrative, remembrance) secretly converges in the Hegelian infinite judgment: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are two sides of the same phenomenon.
the notion of a full, achieved, unlimited jouissance whose existence is necessarily presupposed by the subject who imputes it to another subject, his or her 'subject supposed to enjoy.'
-
#395
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.93
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.
the difficult thing is not to reject belief in order to shock a believing other, but to be a nonbeliever without the need for another subject supposed to believe on my behalf
-
#396
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.207
**Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Resnais's *L'Année dernière à Marienbad* does not simply thematize the unknowability of the historical object but instead reconfigures our relationship to it: the impossible historical object exists in the present in a fantasmatic form, and its intrusion into the present (via radical cuts) is an extimate disruption that implicates the subject in the constitution of history itself, thereby opening onto an ethical response.
When we invest ourselves in the absolute otherness of the historical object, we implicitly authorize an Other who really knows, who did know, or who might know—a subject supposed to know.
-
#397
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.257
29 > **27. Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**
Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus advances two theoretical moves: (1) it deploys the concepts of fantasy, desire, and the Subject Supposed to Know to analyze Resnais's treatment of historical memory and trauma; and (2) it introduces shame as structurally tied to the concealment-gesture of fantasizing, extending the ethics of fantasy into Wenders's filmmaking.
He introduces the game precisely in order to establish his mastery as a subject supposed to know.
-
#398
Theory Keywords · Various · p.84
**Transference**
Theoretical move: The passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it extends Lacan's reformulation of transference via the 'subject supposed to know' from the clinical dyad to the reader-text relation, arguing that reading is structurally transferential; second, it argues—against a scarcity model of trauma—that psychoanalysis locates the real source of trauma in excess (especially excess jouissance/sexuality), not in physical suffering or deprivation.
The analysand places the analyst in the position of an all-knowing expert who has all the answers and thus idealizes their analyst. The emphasis in Lacan's formulation, however, should be placed not on the 'knowing' but on the 'supposed'
-
#399
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.14
Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Real Communism
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's communism is grounded not in a positive vision of emancipated production but in privileging the encounter with the Real and the commons over capitalist fantasy, and that this political project is underwritten by a Hegelian-Christian logic of divine self-division and a theory of belief-through-the-Other that exposes the disavowed religious investment in liberal ideology.
We believe not directly but through the Other, what Žižek calls a subject supposed to believe.
-
#400
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)
Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)<sup><a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a></sup> > Notes
Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.
we constantly suppose the knowledge of others, and suppose also our knowledge of them, but do so precisely in order to cover over das Ding, as what we don't know about the Other.
-
#401
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)
Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)<sup><a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a></sup>
Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary political crisis—exemplified by the war in Ukraine—is best understood not through Baudrillardian simulacra but through the psychoanalytic lens of "generalized foreclosure": a collapse of the big Other that produces an excess of certainty ("too much reality"), dissolves the social bond, and generates the very wars and communicative breakdowns that define our era.
we have lost the Other, and we have assumed the position of the one who supposes knowledge.
-
#402
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.332
Žižek Responds! > [Response to Boothby](#contents.xhtml_ch14a)
Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Boothby's reversal of the ontic/ontological assignments of *objet a* and *das Ding*: *objet a* is ontological (as object-cause of desire that structures reality through subtraction), while *das Ding* exceeds the entire ontic-ontological distinction as a "trans-ontological" trace of what the ontic was before disclosure — and this logic extends to the subject itself, which is ultimately also a supposition rather than a positive given.
there are not only subjects supposed to … (know, believe, enjoy …), subject as such is a supposition, it is never directly given as a positive fact but is supposed as the bearer of experiences.
-
#403
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.283
Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)
Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.
it can also be supposed to exist in the Other (the subject supposed to enjoy—recall the racist secret mode of enjoyment of the Other)
-
#404
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.103
Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)<sup><a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a></sup> > IV
Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's use of "negation of negation" and "pure drive beyond fantasy" as un-Hegelian residues of positivist metaphysics, arguing through readings of Coetzee's *Disgrace* and Hitchcock's *Vertigo* that genuine Hegelian mediation dissolves the fantasy frame without positing an excess or remainder beyond dialectics, and that ideological distortion (not ontological remainder) explains why subjects cannot traverse their fantasies.
David has seen through the dangerous self-deceit in presuming one is 'he who is supposed to know.'
-
#405
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.176
Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Latching On
Theoretical move: The passage argues that effective ideological critique requires not only a "negative" moment of critical destabilization but also a "positive" moment of "latching on"—an opening toward something new—and that this dialectical structure parallels both the Hegelian movement of self-consciousness and the Lacanian end of analysis, making critique genuinely transformative rather than merely cynical.
it brings the critic closer to the analyst as someone who must be good at solving puzzles, interpreting concrete expressions and significations, and intervening to lead the analysis to its dialectical conclusion without suggesting a commonsensical or moral alternative.
-
#406
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.130
Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Bright Side of Stalinism
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Stalinism's "inner greatness" lies in its formal structure of self-directed violence—power targeting itself rather than external enemies—and proposes this as a template for theorizing emancipatory governance that institutionalizes self-critique, illustrated by the concept of an "Emendation" system that structurally exposes the lack in the Subject Supposed to Know.
Its writers function for the American people as the subjects supposed to know. All legislative and judicial decisions refer back to these subjects and the intentions that interpreters derive from the Constitution itself.
-
#407
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher
‘There’s no central exchange’
Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the centerlessness of global capitalism produces a structural logic of deflection and fetishistic disavowal — blame circulates between impotent governments and immoral individuals, obscuring the impersonal, acephalous nature of Capital itself, which cannot be held responsible because it is not a subject.
This problem is addressed from another angle in a paper by Campbell Jones entitled 'The Subject Supposed To Recycle'.
-
#408
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher
All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production
Theoretical move: Fisher argues that "Really Existing Capitalism," like Really Existing Socialism, depends on the big Other as a structural guarantor of symbolic fiction—not its dissolution—and that post-Fordist bureaucratic audit culture intensifies rather than dissolves this dependency, producing a permanent, Kafkaesque anxiety in which subjects become their own surveyors while the big Other's authority is simultaneously disavowed and re-entrenched.
No-one knew what was required; instead, individuals could only guess what particular gestures or directives meant.