Subjectivity

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (220)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.34

   The Subject of Freedom

   Theoretical move: The subject of Kantian practical reason is constituted by a division not between the pathological and the pure/moral, but between the pathological subject and the divided subject itself — with freedom/autonomy as the true alternative to pathological subjectivity, not an ascetic negation of pathos.

   The alternative to pathological subjectivity is not pure or immaculate ethical subjectivity, but freedom or autonomy.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.123

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the literary case of Valmont and Merteuil in *Les Liaisons dangereuses* to dramatize the Lacanian thesis that there is no sexual relation — that love (identification, the formula of One) and jouissance (always partial, never whole) are fundamentally incompatible — while also arguing that the path to autonomous subjectivity, in eighteenth-century ethical thought, runs through Evil as a deliberate project rather than mere knowledge.

   it is not only knowledge that separates the autonomous subjects from the automatons and pleasure machines... the path to autonomy leads through Evil

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > In letter 70, he puts it like this:

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's trajectory enacts a structural shift from the moral law (constitutive of subjective desire) to the superego, such that his acts become perpetually incomplete — each sacrifice only tightens the superego's snare rather than accomplishing anything — while Merteuil alone remains loyal to her desire, refusing to "give up on" it.

   the law linked to the position he adopts as his principle, which determines his subjectivity

4. #04

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.91

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The biggest non-Marxism is the biggest theory: Auteurism then and now**

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

   Auteurism is the idea that film can be understood as the work of an author, a creative subject expressing himself.

5. #05

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.120

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **This is it, the beginning (again)**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club*'s plot structure—its flashback temporality, omissions, and reflexive form—instantiates a Marxist materialist epistemology (the present is intelligible only through historical process), and that according theoretical agency to the film is itself an exercise in dialectics and mediation, Marxism's central aesthetic contribution.

   not just the mode of production, but subjectivity itself, including the technological mediation of subjectivity in closeups, shot/reverse-shot, and point-of-view shots, are implicated

6. #06

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.142

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Mode of production in Fight Club** > **Creative destruction**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* theorizes the structural entwinement of destruction and production under capitalism, advancing the thesis that psychic self-destruction is a necessary precondition for politico-economic revolution — that any change in the mode of production must simultaneously be a change in the mode of subjectivization.

   Film as a medium can show us that the economic mode of production also works as a psychological mode of production... any change in the mode of production must also be a change in the mode of subjectivization.

7. #07

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.173

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Narration**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's formal system—voice-over narration, second-person address, fourth-wall breaks, and multi-narrator rivalry—enacts the ideological contradiction between the imaginary and the symbolic, modeling both interpellation and its potential undoing through medium-consciousness and situated subjectivity.

   Subjectivity, the voice-over choice suggests, is situated at the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic, an ideological interpellation that can also become the site of new relations.

8. #08

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.179

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Unending**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club*'s refusal of conventional Hollywood closure—its open, ongoing ending—is theoretically consonant with a Marxist materialist approach to history as contingent and the present as in-process, such that contradictions remain in motion rather than resolved at psychic, interpersonal, and political levels simultaneously.

   juxtaposing a radical social event, the demolition of the financial center, with the more intimate and banal events of psychic reintegration and romantic connection

9. #09

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.67

   Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

   Theoretical move: Capitalism systematically inverts the actual ontological priority of the public over the private: the subject is constituted through its encounter with the desire of the Other (a public process), yet capitalism produces the ideological fantasy that the subject is primordially private—thereby structuring an obstacle to the very satisfaction it promises.

   Th e contemporary turn away from public space is simultaneously a turn away from our own subjectivity and from the disturbing satisfaction that accompanies this subjectivity.

10. #10

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

    Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's ideological power lies not in its cynical realism about human nature but in its flattering misrepresentation of the psyche: it conceals from subjects that their satisfaction is structured around the pursuit of failure (the death drive / jouissance logic), not successful accumulation, thereby shielding them from the trauma constitutive of subjectivity itself.

    the trauma of our own subjectivity that refuses to allow us to pursue our self-interest

11. #11

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.86

    THE IM AGE OF NEU TR ALIT Y

    Theoretical move: Capitalism sustains itself not by hiding its existence (like the Devil) but by presenting itself as natural and self-grounding, thereby concealing the political decision that constitutes it; Freud's discovery that subjects consistently act against self-interest demolishes capitalism's foundational claim to accord with human nature, revealing capitalism as a political construction rather than a natural order.

    Subjectivity entails responsibility, but capitalist subjects evade any sense of responsibility because the system obscures their role in what transpires.

12. #12

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.88

    LIFE DUR IN G WARTIME

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism's ideological power rests on naturalizing itself as coincident with being itself, and that this error is shared not only by capitalism's champions (Rand, Smith) but even by its communist critics (Badiou), who by equating capitalism with 'economy as such' and animality concede capitalism's fundamental ideological contention — that it exists as nature — thereby fighting on capitalist terrain.

    Her blindness to the distortion of subjectivity finds its crowning avowal in the name that she gives to her philosophy objectivism.

13. #13

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.108

    EV IL , BE THOU M Y G O OD

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that sacrifice—not self-interest—is the structural motor of capitalism, and that the consumer's enjoyment of commodified labour depends on fetishistic disavowal: the co-existence of knowing and not-knowing that conceals the worker's sacrificial surplus value. Surplus-jouissance is thus grounded in a structural obscuring of loss, not mere ideological manipulation.

    If sacrifi ce persisted, it must have appealed to the structure of subjectivity itself.

14. #14

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.164

    FAK IN G THE LIMIT

    Theoretical move: Attempts to set external moral limits on capitalism (Sandel, environmentalism) are structurally self-defeating because capitalism requires a limit to transcend; the only viable alternative is to inhabit the true infinite (Hegel/Lacan's self-limiting structure of subjectivity), which capitalism occludes by substituting the bad infinite and converting the existential burden of eternity into the finite anxiety of death and aging.

    The concept of the true infinite was Hegel's way, given the conceptual tools available to him at the time, of formulating the self-limiting structure of subjectivity.

15. #15

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory in "The Freudian Thing" turns on the distinction between ego and subject (with proper subjectivity as unconscious), the insistence that truth/unconscious always returns despite repression or theoretical falsification, and the defense of a symbolically-mediated body against pseudo-Freudian reductivism to pre-Oedipal objects.

    Lacan's idea of subjectivity-beyond-the-ego is integral to his critique of ego psychology, with him drawing broadly and deeply from the history of modern philosophy in developing this analytic theory of the subject.

16. #16

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.28

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

    Theoretical move: By retranslating Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' against the ego-psychological rendering, Lacan argues that the telos of analysis is not ego-over-id domination but the analysand's de-alienating subjectification toward the unconscious subject ($), grounding his ethics of psychoanalysis and his critique of misreadings of Freud that degrade the primacy of speech and signifiers in clinical practice.

    Lacan introduces as a neologism the reflexive verb 's'être' and associates it with 'the mode of absolute subjectivity, insofar as Freud truly discovered it in its radical eccentricity'

17. #17

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.81

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The symbolic unconscious

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order—structured by the sliding of signifiers over signifieds—is constitutive of the subject, and that both Jungian symbolism and ego-psychological adaptation represent reactionary misreadings of Freud that replace the truth-seeking function of psychoanalysis with domination and narcissistic identification.

    The register of language, like Hegel's force of history, is not dependent upon us, but our kind of subjectivity is grounded in it.

18. #18

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.87

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Neurosis and the imaginary

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) must be understood structurally through the subject's alienation in language and symbolic castration—not through behavioral or biological reductions—and that the neurotic's behavior constitutes a symbolic response to the facticity of the subject's contingent existence within the symbolic order.

    The instance of the letter, or signifier (see 1966/2006c) means that our subjectivity is contingent—at least upon language.

19. #19

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.117

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

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

    Subjectivity is never totalizable; we can never achieve a unified personality.

20. #20

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

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's central thesis in "On a Question" is that psychosis is constituted by the Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which prevents metaphorization of the lack-of-being and produces a fundamental disorder in the subject's relation to the Other, the Symbolic, and the Real—a structural claim that post-Freudian authors systematically miss by failing to distinguish the symbolic father function from its imaginary and real counterparts.

    This has a dramatic effect at the level of subjectivity: without the material support of the signifier, the subject cannot be articulated in relation to the lack-of-being that the real father touches.

21. #21

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

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

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

    some passages from Lagache's essay could serve as excellent illustrations of some key Lacanian ideas, such as his views about the primacy and importance of what Lagache refers to, in Hegelian-Sartrean terminology, as the subject's 'being for others.'

22. #22

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

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

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

    subjectivity (as topological) [36], [288]

23. #23

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.210

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > The Heart of the Matter

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian account of religion grounds the sacred not in wish-fulfilling illusion but in the subject's primordial, ambivalent orientation toward das Ding as the void at the heart of the Other—and further proposes that both religion and science are ultimately forms of devotion to (and defense against) this unknown Thing, thereby dissolving Freud's simple religion/science opposition while aligning Lacan with an "art of unknowing."

    the ineluctable opacity of the unknown Thing is the invisible, ecstatic pole of the entire structure of subjectivity

24. #24

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.40

    I > 1 > Th e Importance of Losing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constituted through a foundational act of self-sacrifice — the ceding of a lost object that was never substantially possessed — which converts animal need into desire and makes loss the irreducible structural condition (rather than a contingent misfortune) of the speaking subject; this grounds a politics of repetition rather than progress.

    Th e subject as such emerges through the experience of loss. It is the loss of a part of the subject — an initial act of sacrifi ce — that creates both subject and object.

25. #25

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.48

    I > 1 > Suff ering as Ideology

    Theoretical move: Ideology is defined by its promise to render loss productive (redeemable through future gain), whereas psychoanalysis — and Hegel's Phenomenology read against the grain — insists on the absolute, unproductive character of founding loss; the death drive is therefore the engine of genuine ideological critique, since it is precisely what no ideology can acknowledge.

    in both cases, loss becomes a contingent fact that one might overcome rather than the foundation of one's subjectivity

26. #26

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.135

    I > Changing the World > Th e Modern Critique of Normality

    Theoretical move: Against the modern critical tradition that treats normality as the hegemonic suppressor of difference and subversion as the path to resistance, the passage argues that psychoanalysis inverts this logic: the norm dominates *through* transgression, not despite it, and genuine ethical subjectivity requires recognising that abnormality—not normality—perpetuates capitalist ideology.

    If an ethical subjectivity is possible, it would seem that this subjectivity would have positioned itself outside the straitjacket of normality.

27. #27

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.158

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > A Shared Absence

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis uniquely resolves the liberal/Marxist impasse on individual vs. society by showing that neither exists independently but each emerges from the other's incompleteness (constitutive lack/failure), and that the subject's foundational loss and frustrated jouissance are precisely what motivate entry into the social bond.

    the subject exists at the point of the social order's failure to become a closed structure, and the subject enters into social arrangements as a result of its own failure to achieve self-identity.

28. #28

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.181

    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.

    Psychoanalytic thought provides a way of understanding the role that enjoyment plays in structuring individual subjectivity and the social order.

29. #29

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.226

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Making the Impossible Possible

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not merely as ideological compensation for lack but as a genuinely subversive political force: by directing desire toward impossibilities that the symbolic order cannot contain, fantasy opens subjects to possibilities that ideology forecloses, thereby serving as the weak point of ideological closure rather than simply its accomplice.

    gender becomes not simply arbitrary but unattached to subjectivity, and this works to reveal its contingent and ultimately insignificant status.

30. #30

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.255

    I > 9 > Death in Life

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity emerges through a constitutive break introduced by the death drive — a gap that was already present in the evolutionary process — and that recognizing death's excess within life would transform the social order by re-situating loss as the very site of enjoyment rather than something to be overcome.

    Subjectivity emerges through a break, through a moment in which death is injected into life and thereby throws life off its course.

31. #31

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.315

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 3. Class Status and Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: These endnotes develop the theoretical argument that enjoyment, class status, subjectivity, and emancipation are structurally interlinked: the master's power is constituted through the renunciation of jouissance, anarchism fails by positing a subject outside social restriction, and the capitalist infinite of enjoyment corresponds to Hegel's true infinity (circular) rather than the bad infinite (linear).

    anarchism in all its forms relies on a romantic conception of subjectivity: it imagines that subjectivity can emerge outside of social restriction altogether, when it is social restriction that provides the subject with all the coordinates of its being

32. #32

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

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

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

    Lacan turns to a form of psychoanalysis that no longer seeks to escape destructiveness but to find a way to integrate it into subjectivity.

33. #33

    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_178"></span>**Science**

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

    he criticises modern science for ignoring the symbolic dimension of human existence and thus encouraging modern man 'to forget his subjectivity'

34. #34

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

    <span id="Chapter1.htm_page14"></span>‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

    Theoretical move: Fisher distinguishes hauntological melancholia—a refusal to yield desire for lost futures—from both left melancholy (disavowed attachment to failure) and postcolonial melancholia (disavowed fantasy of omnipotence), arguing that what haunts us is not a lost past but the 'not yet' of futures that popular modernism promised but never delivered, a spectrality that reproaches capitalist realism's foreclosure of possibility.

    popular music culture has been reduced to being a mirror held up to late capitalist subjectivity.

35. #35

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

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

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

    subjectivity as self [soi-même] 66 ... as structure 2, 65-6, 79

36. #36

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **OVERTURE TO THE SEMINAR**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's opening move in Seminar I is to frame psychoanalysis as a recovery of meaning and reason within a structure of subjectivity, distinguishing Freud's dialectical method from both scientistic reductionism and systematised dogma, while positioning the analytic situation as a structural formation irreducible to a dyadic encounter.

    It is another structure, that of subjectivity, which gives human beings the idea that they are comprehensible to themselves.

37. #37

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.277

    xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: He** *said it explicitly.*

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes active, symbolic love (directed at the being and particularity of the other, beyond imaginary captivation) from mere Verliebtheit, and constructs a parallel structure for hate—both are unlimited careers oriented toward the being of the other, the one toward its unfolding, the other toward its annihilation—while diagnosing modern civilisation as itself constituted by diffuse, objectifying hatred that corresponds structurally to the ego's hate-pole.

    these days subjects do not have to shoulder the burden of the experience of hatred in its most consuming forms.

38. #38

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

    Theoretical move: The scopic field is constituted by an antinomy between seeing and being-seen (the gaze), such that painting functions as a site where this tension is managed—either by "taming" the gaze (dompte-regard) or, in expressionism, by making a direct appeal to it; this frames a structural account of pictorial practice rather than art criticism or psychobiography.

    If one considers all the modulations imposed on painting by the variations of the subjectifijing structure that have occurred in history

39. #39

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

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

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

    It is holding the subjective position that one can know nothing.

40. #40

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: By mapping the Cartesian cogito onto the distinction between enunciation and statement, Lacan argues that the analyst's position—returning the subject's message in inverted (true) form—reveals that the 'I think' acquires its certainty only at the level of enunciation, yet is as minimally punctual and potentially meaningless as the 'I am lying,' thus grounding analytic interpretation in the dimension of truth.

    it is by taking its place at the level of the enunciation that the cogito acquires its certainty. But the status of the I think is as reduced, as minimal, as punctual

41. #41

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.124

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

    Theoretical move: The passage develops the antinomy of the scopic field—the split between seeing and being seen/looked-at—and extends it into painting, arguing that painting variably functions either to tame the gaze (dompte-regard) or, in expressionism, to directly solicit it, resisting any single formula.

    all the modulations imposed on painting by the variations of the subjectifijing structure that have occurred in history

42. #42

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.141

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan restores the Freudian unconscious to its proper place by defining it as the sum of the effects of speech on a subject constituted by the signifier, thereby distinguishing it from all pre-Freudian notions (instinct, archaic function, metaphysical unconscious) and identifying its subject with a widened but more elusive version of the Cartesian subject.

    these effects are so radically primary that they are properly what determine the status of the subject as subject

43. #43

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.261

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes between two fields of analytic experience — the field of the ego (Ith) and the field of the Other — and argues that the subject is constituted by the circulating structures of the Other that precede it; alienation and separation are the two essential articulations of this Other field, preparing the ground for an account of "subjective positions."

    It is a question of something that ought to be entitled the subjective positions.

44. #44

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.326

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Marguerite Duras's *Lol V. Stein* as a literary incarnation of the Lacanian object-gaze (*objet petit a*) as the novel's true subject — a detached, exiled, fallen object that sustains all other subjectivity — while Jacques-Alain Miller's summary of Zinberg on American psychoanalysis diagnoses the latter's decline through its reduction of psychoanalysis to an Adaptation-theory and its spread of an "ethical illness" into the social body.

    it is precisely in the measure that this is done that it allows there to be presentified somewhere the object in the form of an object, of a fallen object, of a detached object, of a waste scrap, to be that which is the essential being...in the most intense form, what deserves to be called a subjectivity

45. #45

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

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

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

    was enough to make there appear in subjectivity, in this case, obviously in mine, a not to be neglected form of the powerful adherence of these elements

46. #46

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.326

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* to demonstrate how the subject can be constituted as a pure object-gaze (objet petit a), an exiled remainder that paradoxically becomes the novel's only true subject; this is then counterposed to the critique of American ego-psychology's reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptation theory, which Lacan frames as an "ethical illness" spreading through the social body.

    it allows there to be presentified somewhere the object in the form of an object, of a fallen object, of a detached object, of a waste scrap, to be that which is the essential being... in the most intense form, what deserves to be called a subjectivity

47. #47

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.217

    **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan corrects Audouard's misreading of his topology of the scopic drive by insisting that the "plane of the look" cannot project onto the picture plane in a geometrically reciprocal (intersubjective) way, and uses this correction to clarify that the drive's structure is a topological circuit around the o-object (objet petit a), not an optical reciprocity between subject and image.

    it is a kind of strictly reciprocal representation that is involved in which there is marked, as one might say, the permanent vertigo of intersubjectivity.

48. #48

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* — read in parallel with Foucault's analysis — as a topological support for articulating the structure of representation, the gaze, and the narcissism of the mirror, with Green's intervention yoking the picture's spatial planes to fantasy, the primal scene, and the "bar of repression," thereby making the painting do theoretical work on the intersection of vision, subjectivity, and projective geometry.

    what one can call the subjectivity of vision

49. #49

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.4

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

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

    a singular laxity, properly speaking the one that could be qualified from the outside... as subjectivism. Namely, that each one in turn... people have successively used as a reference point for the position they take in psychoanalytic activity

50. #50

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage stages an intersection between Lacan's ongoing seminar work on projective geometry, the mirror, and subjectivity of vision, and Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas, using the painting as a shared object that allows Lacan to articulate how the structure of representation in the picture illuminates narcissism, the gaze, and fantasy—culminating in Green's suggestion that the picture's fascination-effect is tied to the primal scene and the structure of fantasy.

    the precision that projective geometry may allow us to put into what one can call the subjectivity of vision

51. #51

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

    **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.

    around what the subjectivity of the analyst must take its bearings, and in taking his bearings never forget even when the second vanishing point... tends to be forgotten

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates how the "signifier too many" (the barred signifier outside the chain) operates as the structural condition for interpretation, whose effect is properly a "truth-effect" rather than a mere meaning-effect; he then uses the Cartesian cogito and Benveniste's active/middle voice distinction to argue that the subject is constituted not through intuition of being-who-thinks but through the very structure of language and the act of speaking.

    the veritable status of the subject and not on his intuition of being the one-who-thinks. An intuition justified by what, if not by something that at this moment is profoundly hidden from him

53. #53

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.24

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of 'the act' is constitutively signifying (not merely motor), that its meaning is always retroactively constituted (Nachträglich), and uses a critical reading of a contemporary report on transference and acting-out to distinguish his own theoretical position—that the act is new and unheard-of in its psychoanalytic formulation—from both ego-psychological reductions of transference and naive intersubjective readings of his own Rome Discourse.

    Everyone knows that if you read the Rome Discourse quickly you may think that this is what I am talking about. You can discover the dimension of the intersubjective relation through intermediaries other than me

54. #54

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.72

    **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.

    it is starting from the subversion of the subject that we have already for some ten years sufficiently articulated, so that people can conceive of the sense that this term takes on, when we say that it is from the subversion of the subject that we have to take up again the function of the act.

55. #55

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    **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 rewrites Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as "Wo $ tat... muss Ich (o) werden" — the analyst must become the waste product (objet a) of the new order they introduce — positing the psychoanalytic act as a saying (dire) that supersedes prior normative frameworks (Aristotle, Kant, religious intention, Hegel's law of the heart, the political act) by making the subject's own dissolution the condition of the act.

    in the first rank of which is the Cartesian cogito, in as much as the psychoanalytic act permits the question to be posed again.

56. #56

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.144

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex establishes the Law by constituting enjoyment-of-the-mother as primordially forbidden, and that the Name of the Father - whose authority rests on the irreducible unknowability of biological paternity - is the purely symbolic pivot around which subjectivity and the transmission of castration turn.

    it is here, at the point where it is precisely only by maintaining oneself in the symbolic, that there is the pivot around which turns a whole field of subjectivity.

57. #57

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental contribution is the decentring of the subject from the individual—the subject is ex-centric to the ego and to consciousness—and reads this discovery as the culmination of a moralist tradition (La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche) that exposes the deceptive, inauthentic hedonism of the ego, thereby grounding the necessity of Freud's post-1920 metapsychological revision.

    With Freud, a new perspective suddenly appears, revolutionising the study of subjectivity and showing precisely that the subject cannot be confused with the individual.

58. #58

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.51

    II > A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego is not the subject but a particular imaginary object within experience, and that the core of analytic technique requires intervening at the decentred, symbolic level of the subject's history/destiny rather than at the level of the ego — thereby distinguishing genuine analysis from suggestion and from Ego Psychology's reduction of the Freudian discovery.

    Freud discovered in man the substance and the axis of a subjectivity surpassing the individual organisation considered as the sum of individual experiences... I am giving you a possible definition of subjectivity, by formulating it as an organised system of symbols.

59. #59

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that cybernetics—grounded in the binary scansion of presence/absence—demonstrates that the symbolic order operates as a trans-subjective syntax independent of any subject, thereby establishing that language's structure (syntax) precedes and grounds semantics, and raising the question of what desire and the unconscious add to this purely combinatory order.

    Through cybernetics, the symbol is embodied in an apparatus—with which it is not to be confused, the apparatus being just its support. And it is embodied in it in a literally trans-subjective way.

60. #60

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.23

    THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Ego Psychology's restoration of the "autonomous ego" as a central given represents a systematic betrayal of Freud's post-1920 metapsychological move, which was designed precisely to maintain the decentring of the subject; reading *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* as the pivotal, primary text of this last metapsychological period is thus indispensable for understanding the death drive and resisting the regression to general psychology.

    the existence of subjectivity as such, and its modifications in the course of time, in accordance with a specific causality, a specific dialectic, which moves from subjectivity to subjectivity

61. #61

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego psychology represents a regression to pre-analytical, substantialist notions of the ego, betraying Freud's Copernican decentring of the subject; the Freudian discovery's radical move — that "I is an other," that the subject cannot be equated with the ego — is grounded in the gap between consciousness, the I, and the unconscious.

    at the very moment when Socrates inaugurates this new being-in-the-world which here I call subjectivity, he realises that science will not be able to transmit the means to achieve the most precious thing, the arete

62. #62

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.229

    J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious against the Aristotelian premise that "being thinks," positing instead that being-in-speaking *enjoys* and wants to know nothing about it — thereby making jouissance, not knowledge-drive, the motor of the unconscious — and then traces how this claim restructures the relation between truth, science, Christianity, and the barred subject.

    Who can fail to see that the soul, is nothing other than its supposed identity to itself? With everything that is thought up to explain it.

63. #63

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    **XIV** > **1**

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

    There's no other scientific definition of subjectivity than one that proceeds from the possibility of handling the signifier for purely signifying, not significant ends, that is, expressing no direct relation of the order of appetite.

64. #64

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.300

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a grammatical analysis of the French construction "Tu es celui qui..." to demonstrate that the subject of enunciation (the I/ego) is essentially fleeting and can never fully sustain the address to the Other (thou), and then extends this insight to argue that the Judaeo-Christian tradition's founding figure of "I am the one who am" installs an always-elusive, unsustainable Other at the heart of Western subjectivity and science, distinguishing it from the Aristotelian relation to a graded world of entities.

    the coloration of guilt is so fundamental in our psychological experience of the neuroses... This coloration is even so fundamental that it was by its means that we explored the neuroses and noticed that they were structured in a subjective and intersubjective mode.

65. #65

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism (Witz) operates by traversing the tension between two structural poles: the 'bit-of-sense' (peu-de-sens), the levelling effect of metonymic displacement, and the 'step-of-sense' (pas-de-sens), the surplus introduced by metaphoric substitution. The joke's completion requires the big Other to authenticate the step-of-sense, revealing that desire is structurally conditioned by the signifier's ambiguity and that subjectivity is only constituted through this triangular social process.

    'Subjectivity' - that's the word I come to now... what is more essential to the dimension of jokes than subjectivity?

66. #66

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.102

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other is not merely an intersubjective correlate but the structural locus where the "bit-of-sense" is transformed into the "step-of-sense" through a signifying chain that introduces an irreducible remainder (heterogeneity), thereby displacing the Cartesian cogito and grounding the unconscious as the signifier-in-action that thinks in the subject according to its own laws.

    Subjectivity cannot be eliminated from our experience as analysts. The concept is confirmed in a way that completely bypasses the ways in which one could object to it.

67. #67

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.23

    CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

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

    the law of subjectivity that psychoanalysis forcefully brings out - namely, the fundamental dependence of subjectivity on language - is so essential that all of psychology literally hinges on it.

68. #68

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.488

    TOWARD SUBLIMATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has deviated from Freud by subordinating desire to object-relations and moralizing normalization; against this, he insists that desire must be theorized as irreducible subjectivity constituted through the signifying chain, whereby drives are decomposed and separated from their sources — making desire a mapping of the subject with respect to the Other's desire, not a vital impulse.

    My theorization of desire is designed to foreground - in a way that is not ambiguous, but truly crucial - the notion that what we are dealing with is a subjectivity.

69. #69

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.49

    **Ill**

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' closely, Lacan argues that the apparatus described there is fundamentally a topology of subjectivity, and that the principle of repetition is grounded in the constitutive gap between desire's articulation and its satisfaction — the 'refound object' is always missed, rendering specific action structurally incomplete.

    this apparatus is a topology of subjectivity, of subjectivity insofar as it arises and is constructed on the surface of an organism.

70. #70

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural parallel between Socrates and Freud as figures who "served Eros in order to make use of him," arguing that this shared practice — and the radical atopia it produces with respect to the social order — is the true precondition of transference and the analytic encounter, which necessarily suspends intersubjectivity rather than deepening it.

    Isn't intersubjectivity what is most foreign to the analytic encounter? Would it resurface if we were to flee from it, convinced that it must be avoided? Freudian practice congeals as soon as intersubjectivity appears on the scene.

71. #71

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.224

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.

    To subjectivize the praying mantis in this case is to make an assumption which is not excessive - that it has sexual jouissance... in what nature presents us with here, there is - from the [sexual] act to its excess... something that signals to us that another structure, an instinctual structure, is being exemplified.

72. #72

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.19

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the classical philosophical tradition falls into idealism by substituting the ego-ideal for the subject, and proposes instead to ground the subject's unknowing perspective rigorously in the inaugural identification to a single, concrete signifying trait — the unary trait — rather than any Plotinian ideal unity.

    this almost necessarily idealistic slope that every articulation about the subject has in the classical tradition, of substituting for it this function of idealisation

73. #73

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 8*: *Wednesday 17 January 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close analysis of French negation (ne/pas) and Aristotelian propositional logic (AEIO) to argue that the grammatical subject is constitutively tied to the logic of negation, and that the classical categories of privation, frustration, and castration are the psychoanalytic 'matrix entries' that enrich the philosophical treatment of negation—pointing toward a theory of the subject as defined through its position in affirmation/negation rather than through extension or collection.

    it is not by chance that it is at the level of a "je ne sais", of a "je ne puis", of a certain category which is that of verbs that there is situated, inscribed the subjective position itself as such

74. #74

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.5

    *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

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

    it should have been in French, I mean in Descartes, that being was able to be thought of as inherent in the subject... one might say that a good share of the efforts of philosophy consists in trying to extricate oneself from it.

75. #75

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan positions desire as an unsurpassable "truth function" at the heart of analytic practice, articulates the Death Drive and Life Drive (Eros/libido) as structured around the signifier and the phallus, and uses the Kantian critique of pure reason—especially its categories, pure intuition, and the synthetic function—as an analogy to illuminate the relationship between subjectivity, the body, and desire, while invoking the Kant/Sade parallel to show that desire exceeds all pathological (comfort/need) determinations.

    the subjective organisation that is designated by the primary process, what it means as regards what is and what is not its relationship to the body

76. #76

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.34

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > Destructive Plasticity

    Theoretical move: Malabou's concept of 'destructive plasticity' is introduced as a 'beyond of the beyond' of the pleasure principle, correcting both Freud's death drive and neuroscience's exclusively positive plasticity by theorising form-generating destructiveness as irreducible to any logic of cure, compensation, or symbolic mediation.

    It denotes psychic and corporeal destitution of subjectivity, the process of the formation through internal cracks and ruptures.

77. #77

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.77

    <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society > Negative Social Cognitive Neuroscience

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical pivot: it mobilises social cognitive neuroscience (Bowlby, Winnicott, Lieberman) to displace individualism and then radicalises those findings through a psychoanalytic-pessimist lens, arguing that what neuroscience calls "social need" is better understood as constitutive, unfillable lack—a traumatic social pain that is not a need to be satisfied but the very substance of subjectivity and sociality.

    The only real stuff is pain. It is our suffering that both brings us together and rips us apart. It creates the illusion of subjectivity as the instance of pain and the illusion of connectedness for which this pain laments.

78. #78

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.84

    <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society > The Negative and the Political

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology and politics are constitutively unable to acknowledge the death drive and structural lack, whereas a negatively-oriented psychoanalysis (drawing on the later Freud) resists all positive programmes of salvation — a divergence that both disqualifies psychoanalysis from conventional politics and radicalises it as a form of 'negative dialectics' of subject and society.

    negative psychoanalysis denounces the separateness of a subject as an illusion and emphasises subjectivity as a historical and profoundly collective formation

79. #79

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.130

    <span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the human animal's constitutive lack is not a deviation from a complete Nature but the very proof that Nature (with a capital N, as harmonious totality) does not exist; the subject emerges as the point where nature's own inconsistency becomes 'for itself', and lack and surplus-jouissance are topologically inseparable rather than opposites.

    Human animal is a point when the inconsistency in nature obtains an existence of its own, called 'subject'.

80. #80

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

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

    if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear

81. #81

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

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

    I am so constituted that I can think this representation as so connected, and not otherwise

82. #82

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.28

    2 The Orthopsychic Subj ect: Film Theory and the Reception o£Lacan > The Screen as Miror

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory effected a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into a panoptic structure of total visibility, thereby reducing the subject to a fully determined, knowable position and eliminating the radical Lacanian insight that signifying systems never produce determinate identity—a move that makes resistance theoretically impossible.

    The very condition and substance of the subject's subjectivity is his or her subjectivation by the law of the society that produces that subject.

83. #83

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.217

    LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

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

    To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding.

84. #84

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Truth as soteriological event*

    Theoretical move: Rollins distinguishes metaphysical Truth (the Real, God as ungraspable) from empirical truth (descriptions of reality) and then displaces both with a third, specifically Judeo-Christian register: truth as soteriological event — a transformative encounter with the Real that short-circuits the subjective/objective debate and redefines knowledge as relational liberation rather than propositional accuracy.

    Truth is the ungraspable Real (objective) that transforms the individual (subjective).

85. #85

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

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

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

    The comic thus appears to be inscribed into the very kernel of subjectivity. Therefore modern comedies depict not only the necessity of contingency... but also the contingency of necessity

86. #86

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.134

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > First as Fatalism of Substance, Then as Fatalism of the Subject

    Theoretical move: Hegel's "absolute fatalism" is not resignation but the paradoxical precondition of genuine freedom and subjectivity: only by assuming that everything is always already lost—the apocalypse has already happened—can the subject emerge through the act of *Entlassen* (release), making fatalism and subjectivity structurally identical rather than opposed.

    the fatalist gesture is the subject; it is the gesture of subjectivization. There is no subject without fatalism, and there is no fatalism without subjectivity.

87. #87

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

    5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

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

    he stays resistant to interpretative avenues that have enormous implications for our understanding of subjectivity, politics, and ethics alike.

88. #88

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.170

    7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Symbolic "Dispossession"*

    Theoretical move: The passage critiques Butler's theory of "dispossession" as premised on a covert nostalgia for self-possession, arguing that the Lacanian insight that the subject is constituted through the Other's language need not entail a disempowered or persecuted subjectivity; sublimation and the point de capiton demonstrate that symbolic insertion can be enabling rather than merely tyrannical.

    Though Butler admits that there are context-specific (historical and cultural) forms of persecution whose insidiousness is on a completely different scale from our constitutive dispossession, her theory assumes that the constellations of sociality into which we are born are invariably hostile or at the very least indifferent.

89. #89

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.81

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

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

    the dissolution of social subjectivity that the act brings about is potentially a gateway to some new (presumably more worthwhile) way of interacting with the world

90. #90

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

    1. *The Singularity of Being*

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

    a layered psychic landscape wherein sediments of injury gradually accumulate to engender a highly personalized tapestry of pain

91. #91

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.57

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

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

    what Lacan describes as a kind of loss of subjectivity: 'The subject outlines himself as a-subject; he is an a-subject because he . . . senses himself as profoundly subjected [assujetti] to the caprice of the one he depends on'

92. #92

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.141

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

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

    Our ability to fill the void of the lost Thing with an almost endless array of (either tangible or purely mental) surrogates is therefore what founds human subjectivity.

93. #93

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.171

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

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

    if there is no subjectivity without the Other (or others), it is a little disingenuous to lament that 'my' account of myself is somehow brutally 'exported and expropriated' from me by the very entity that makes it possible for me to give it in the first place.

94. #94

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.131

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

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

    those interpreters of Lacan who ignore this component of his theory end up producing overly dispirited theories of subjectivity as well as of (the impossibility of) social change.

95. #95

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.208

    **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex must be understood as the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the Real failure of language with itself—rather than as an incomplete or unstable signification (Butler), and that only this Kantian/psychoanalytic definition of sex as radically unknowable preserves the subject's sovereignty and protects against the voluntarism and calculability that underwrite racism and homogenization.

    It is only when we begin to define the subject as self-governing, as subject to its own laws, that we cease to consider her as calculable, as subject to laws already known and thus manipulable.

96. #96

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.18

    **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Screen as Mirror**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory committed a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into the panoptic apparatus, thereby substituting a logic of total visibility and determinate subject-positions for Lacan's more radical thesis that signifying systems never produce determinate identities—a substitution that renders the theory structurally resistant to resistance.

    conflict in this case does not result from the clash between two different positions but from the fact that no position defines a resolute identity

97. #97

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought

    Theoretical move: The passage stakes out a methodological position: rather than accepting the meaning of Freud's doctrine as already settled and moving to its philosophical implications, it proposes a re-reading oriented toward determining the meaning of Freudian metapsychology by constructing a fresh conceptual frame drawn from phenomenology and philosophy of life.

    its bearing on problems of truth, subjectivity, ethical responsibility, etc.

98. #98

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > The World of the Water Lilies

    Theoretical move: By reading Monet's Water Lilies and Series paintings as disclosing an ontological "dispositional field" that is structurally unconscious yet constitutive of all perception, the passage establishes a proto-psychoanalytic epistemology in which the ground of appearance always withdraws from explicit awareness — a theoretical platform from which to later reintroduce Freudian metapsychology.

    the surface of the lily pond readily offers itself as a metaphor of the knowing and perceiving subject. The water's surface at once reflects what is above it, supports what floats upon it, and also betrays something of what lies beneath it.

99. #99

    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 > Divorce of knowledge from practice

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that treating religious truth as propositional information (on the model of scientific knowledge) severs the intrinsic link between knowledge and moral/existential practice, whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition holds that genuine knowledge of God is constitutively inseparable from one's mode of life.

    The knowledge of religious truth can thus be gained and maintained outside of a transfigured life.

100. #100

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.150

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter008.html_page_145"></span>Deeper than magic and reason

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Christian concept of miracle must be relocated from the domain of supernatural physical intervention (which remains epistemically contestable) to the domain of an interior, subjective transformation — an event that reconfigures one's entire relation to past, present, and future without registering as a natural object — thereby distinguishing the truly 'supernatural' from the merely spectacular.

     the miracle is signaled by the fact that the entire landscape of our being is transformed and transfigured… everything changes in the life of the individual—not only the present and the future, but also the past.

101. #101

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.118

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Conversion as birth

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious truth (specifically Christian conversion) operates at the level of subjective transformation rather than objective propositional content, such that God is encountered not as a present object but as an immanent-yet-absent source that can only be 'experienced' as absence by those already transformed — making truth irreducibly tied to the subject rather than reducible to verifiable claims.

     Christian faith as radically subjective... it is so intimately tied up with the transformation of the subject that it cannot be rendered into an object of contemplation. This truth is of such a nature that it transforms a person's subjectivity.

102. #102

     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 > A system against systems

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

     the miracle of faith as that which transforms our subjectivity to such an extent that we do not need the law (which causes us to move toward sin), but which overcomes the law with love.

103. #103

     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 Witness of the Jesus of the Gospels

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious truth (as witnessed in the Gospel of John's "life" language) operates not as an object of experience but as a "counter-experience" — a transformative event that changes one's entire mode of being in the world without introducing any new empirical object, structurally analogous to Lacanian notions of the Real as that which transforms without being seen or touched.

     But in its aftermath the person is never the same again, for everything has changed.

104. #104

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.108

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Pascal and the critique of Descartes’ God

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Pascal's critique of Descartes to argue that the concept of God's infinity collapses into a description of finite human limits rather than any positive content about God, positioning faith as grounded in a truth that exceeds and escapes rational-epistemic capture.

     it is a description of our own limits... a veiled means of commenting upon the finitude of the one who speaks

105. #105

     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="chapter031.html_page_170"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological pivot distinguishing a "miracle of faith" as an inner, subjective transformation — irreducible to empirical verification or physical spectacle — from miracle as an observable event in the physical world, thereby grounding the miraculous in a change in the subject's mode of existence rather than in the external Real.

     it relates to a happening that cannot be reduced to sight, touch, or experience... the miracle of faith is not manifest in the external world. Rather it refers to a transformation in our inner, subjective world.

106. #106

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.186

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **"Opening One's Eyes"** > **Hidden Kings and Medicine Men**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Heidegger's 1924 Aristotle lectures onto a tripartite typology (aletheutikos / eiron / alazon) to argue that Heidegger's critique of "medicine men" in academic philosophy—particularly Husserl—is the practical enactment of his philosophical distinction between unconcealed truth-telling and self-aggrandizing boastfulness, with Heidegger himself embodying the mock-modest "hidden king" and Husserl cast as the braggart-in-chief.

     philosophical inquiry also cultivates a specific subject position and, with it, a characteristic way of speaking.

107. #107

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.217

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Babbling** *Bathos*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Heidegger's communicative spectrum from authentic Rede through Gerede to Geschwätz, arguing that the fall into babbling pseudo-communication produces not mere incomprehensibility but a "sham clarity" (bathos/Trivialität) that dissolves authentic selfhood into the anonymous they-self (das Man-selbst), where standing-apart-from-others (Abständigkeit) paradoxically intensifies dependence on the very others from whom one is estranged.

     the authentic Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way [eigens ergriffenen]. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the 'they'

108. #108

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.62

     Fuzzy Math > **A Lost Count**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's degradation of collective music—from orchestrated revolutionary harmony to mechanical beat-counting—to establish 'chatter' (snak) as the linguistic medium of modernity's 'lost count': a mode of telling that accompanies automated tallying, mistaking mechanical noise for social harmony and thereby rendering the disappearance of genuine communal bonds imperceptible.

     'The age of revolution is essentially passionate and therefore essentially has culture,' and the strongest testament to the essential culture of the revolutionary spirit is 'the tension and resilience of the inner being' of those who advance its cause.

109. #109

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.203

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Modes of Concealment** > **Talking Through**

     Theoretical move: McCormick maps Heidegger's hierarchical typology of linguistic practices onto a spectrum from Truth (Aletheia) to Falsehood (Pseudos), arguing that Platonic dialectic (Durchsprechen/dialegesthai) occupies a middle position — a preparatory 'speaking-through' that cultivates seeing in one's interlocutor — which Heidegger recovers as the essential counter-move to idle talk.

     What begins when we open our own eyes ends when it opens the eyes of another as well. Where der Jasager was, another aletheutikos must become.

110. #110

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.148

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **The Crisis of Learning** > **Wringing Necks**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the pre-history of Heidegger's concept of Gerede (idle talk) through his early Freiburg lectures and his break with Husserl, arguing that his critique of worldview philosophy, popular scholarship, and university reform rhetoric anticipates the ontological-existential analysis of fallen public discourse in Being and Time.

     By privileging the self-experience of the absolute subject over the lived experience of its mortal coil, Husserl could not help but lose sight of life itself as a concrete, historical mode of existence.

111. #111

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.108

     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.

     What the former have, the latter lack: time to quietly determine something meaningful to discuss... The only thing premise-authors have time to discuss is their pressing need of something to discuss.

112. #112

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.40

     Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies: > **Traveler's Logorrhea**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's analysis of 'traveler's logorrhea' — the talkative barber Gert Westphaler as a figure of *alazoneia* (false pretension through excessive talk) — functions as a pointed critique of speculative idealist thought: the systematic thinker's intellectual restlessness and abstract omniscience are structurally analogous to the charlatan's garrulous self-ignorance, both constituting a flight from existential inwardness into distraction.

     the 'existence-tasks' of inwardness teach all who undertake them, 'change in the external is only the diversion that world-weariness and life-emptiness clutches at.'

113. #113

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

     Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity**

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

     he does not know himself with certainty … he must understand himself in this, that it has happened to him, that it is the most certain of all that it has happened to him

114. #114

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.144

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **The Crisis of Learning**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Heidegger's early theorization of idle talk (*Gerede*) and babble (*Geschwätz*) as a critique of Weimar-era university reform discourse, establishing phenomenology as the antithesis of worldview philosophy precisely because it refuses to freeze lived experience into static, aconceptual language.

     philosophy as a 'primordial science' whose basic medium is 'personal existence' and whose prime objective is 'scientific consciousness'

115. #115

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.308

     A Play of Props > **A Sociology of Associations**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that actor-network theory dissolves the modern self/society dichotomy by reconceiving individuality as assembled from 'extra-psychic' associations rather than atomic interiority, and then positions the conceptual history of chatter/idle talk/empty speech (from Kierkegaard through Heidegger to Lacan) as a pre-history of the communicative 'modes of circulation' that actor-network theory needs but has not yet theorized.

     You need to subscribe to a lot of subjectifiers to become a subject and you need to download a lot of individualizers to become an individual. Attachments are first, actors are second.

116. #116

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.21

     Abbreviations in Text Citations > **A Usable Past** > **The Challenge of Attunement**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all treat everyday talk not merely as alienation or inauthenticity but as the very condition of possibility for more genuine modes of subjectivity and speech — with Lacan's concept of full speech as the dialectical inversion of empty speech being the key theoretical pivot.

     ordinary language use was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity.

117. #117

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.160

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

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

     philosophers purport to overcome all subjectivity in hopes of providing an objective account of all beings (universalism)

118. #118

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.338

     A Play of Props > Index

     Theoretical move: This is a book index (non-substantive back-matter) listing key terms, persons, and concepts from a study of everyday talk; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     subjectivity, 8, 148, 220, 293

119. #119

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.168

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

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

     Like so many of the key terms in his early thought— Dasein, das Man, averageness, interpretedness, publicness, curiosity, idle talk, resoluteness, and the like— keeping silent did not begin as an abstract philosophical concept but, instead, emerged from a unique set of concrete historical circumstances

120. #120

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.163

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **More Impulses from Kier ke gaard**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's critique of modern public busyness (*Betriebsamkeit*) and idle talk (*Gerede*) is inseparable from his assault on the institutionalized "business" of academic philosophy—particularly phenomenology—showing that existential analysis of modernity's chatter originates in a polemical diagnosis of intellectual life in Weimar Germany, with Kierkegaard as a precursor who coined "bustling loquacity" to name the same confluence of tumult and chatter.

     What was basically in question for him was nothing but the kind of personal reflection he pursued [betrieb]

121. #121

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.176

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Rhetorical Hermeneutics**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's 1924 reading of Aristotle's *Rhetoric* recasts rhetoric not as a technical art of persuasion but as the hermeneutic of Dasein's everyday being-with-one-another, grounded in *doxa* (unreflective communal "view") as the basic phenomenon of everydayness — making rhetoric the self-interpretation of being-there itself.

     we always already find ourselves in certain circumstances

122. #122

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.43

     part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Hegel, that comedy is not the opposition of the concrete to the universal but the universal's own self-alienation and self-actualization as subject; true comedy produces a "short circuit" in which the ego-ideal is revealed as the comic partial object itself, enacting disidentification rather than identification.

     a true comedy about aristocracy has to play its cards in such a way that the very universal aspect of this concept produces its own humanity, corporeality, subjectivity

123. #123

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.228

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy is essentially the "genre of the copula" — the signifying articulation of the missing link between life and the Symbolic — and that the phallus, appearing in comedy as a partial object rather than merely a signifier, materialises this constitutive contradiction; comedy's "realism" is thus the realism of the Real of desire and drive, not the reality principle.

     The zone of subjectivity that comedy might thus help us preserve and sustain is, of course, fundamentally ambivalent.

124. #124

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.207

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič redefines Lacanian castration not as mere lack/amputation but as the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability — and derives from this the comic form as the radicalization of the human norm, where comic characters are not subjects opposed to structure but "subjectivized points of the structure itself" running wild.

     Comic characters, on the other hand, are not subjects as opposed to the structure, they are subjectivized points of the structure itself. They are the sensitive, problematic points of the structure running wild

125. #125

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.80

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_pg_78" class="pagebreak" title="78"></span>**Now a Stomach, Now an Anus . . .**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that political economy's reductive abstraction produces the worker not as a natural animal but as a "surplus abstraction" — an entity fragmented into vanishing particular bodily functions, structurally identified with sense-certainty's contradictions (now a mouth, now an anus), and thereby rendered ontologically inexistent: less than an animal, the shadow of an agent.

     everything that he is, is reduced to the sense of having ... The worker is an animal deprived of its animality. For he never had this animality.

126. #126

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.72

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **In the Cave**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's notion of the worker's "reduction" to an animal under capitalism is not a regression but a productive operation: capitalism generates the very animalized nature it imposes on the worker, making political economy's categories constitutive of social reality rather than merely descriptive of it, and turning the "worker" into a real abstraction shaped by class struggle.

     Is this 'theory of capitalist subjectivity' analogous to the subjectivity of the cave prisoners?

127. #127

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.141

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter03.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx through Hegelian dialectics, Platonic anamnesis, and Lacanian subjectivity reveals: (1) capitalism's internal contradictions become visible only at its full realization; (2) liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such; and (3) Hegel's theory of labor as negativity corrects both workerist and OOO misreadings of the subject.

     the subject is not an agent amongst others, but is crucially a gesture of passivization, and thus escapes the grip of OOO wherein one finds a reversal of one of the crucial legacies of Lacan: of structures with subjectivity, with an element that is constitutive but excluded from the structures.

128. #128

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.96

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Capitalist Nature/Anabasis**

     Theoretical move: By reading Hegel's mechanism/chemism dialectic through Marx's critique of political economy, the passage argues that capitalism naturalizes itself by rendering subjective ends as either externally mechanical or internally chemical necessities, producing a "realm of shadows" in which no genuine subject or world exists — and that the only path out is a materialist appropriation of Hegel's Logic of shadows leading back through abstraction to a Real that is immanent to the shadows themselves.

     The reductive and reproductive movement of capital becomes the internal end of all subjective actions, determining them externally from the inside, driving them to embrace mechanism.

129. #129

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.58

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **The Phenomenal In-Itself**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian/OOO framework for accessing the In-itself remains trapped in a masculine (phallic) logic of exception, while a Hegelian-Lacanian "feminine" (not-all) logic reveals the In-itself not as a transcendent beyond but as the very cuts and inconsistencies within phenomena—cuts that mark the inscription of a desubstantialized, non-actant subject defined as "that which in the Real suffers from the signifier."

     the vision of 'democracy of objects' where all objects occupy the same ontological standing... are only possible from the standpoint of an (empty) subject.

130. #130

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.11

     *Unexpected Reunions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the present historical conjuncture demands a specifically philosophical, inventive reading of Marx—against both orthodox Marxist teleology (capitalism as its own gravedigger) and Althusserian symptomatic/epistemological reading—because capitalism's immanent limit is not socialism but barbarism, rendering any reliance on capitalism's internal logic for emancipation untenable.

     Ruda examines what becomes of Marx's depiction of the very constitution of a paradigm of capitalist subjectivity (the worker)

131. #131

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Žižek's "Sex and the Failed Absolute," listing alphabetical entries with hyperlinks to their textual locations; it contains no theoretical argumentation of its own.

     subjectivity [here](#theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1432)

132. #132

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.292

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ontology requires a pre-ontological register of "less-than-nothing" (den) distinct from both Nothing and Something, and uses the Klein bottle topology and the Higgs field paradox to demonstrate that Void/Nothing is not the ground but itself an achievement requiring energetic expenditure — thereby establishing a materialist distinction between two vacuums (false/true) that is strictly homologous to the Lacanian distinction between the death drive's circular movement and nirvana, and between den and objet a.

     this X is the operator of the passage from LTN to somethings, the passage (constitutive of subjectivity) through the absolute contraction of everything to what mystics called the 'night of the world'

133. #133

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.371

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The Inhuman View](#contents.xhtml_ahd24)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian "bar" is not Butler's liberal-hegemonic bar of contingent social exclusion but the constitutive split that separates the subject as void from all objective content—grounded in primordial repression and the fundamental fantasy—and that emancipatory transformation requires not gradual inclusion but the radical act of traversing the fantasy, which institutes an entirely new mode of historicity rather than extending an existing one.

     it involves what Lacan calls 'subjective destitution' which is not the disappearance of the subject but its reduction to a zero-point, the disintegration of its entire symbolic universe, and then its rebirth.

134. #134

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

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

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

     the disappearance of self-awareness, which is rooted in finitude and failure

135. #135

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.91

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Husserl's phenomenological epoché enacts a "splitting of the Ego" structurally homologous to Buddhist anatman and, paradoxically, to a perverse de-subjectivization — the subject becoming the transparent instrument of the Other's will — thereby exposing the politically dangerous underside of any stance that dissolves subjectivity's constitutive hysteria.

     Insofar as subjectivity as such is hysterical, insofar as it emerges through the questioning of the interpellating call of the Other

136. #136

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.49

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

     Theoretical move: Žižek surveys Western Marxist attempts to break out of the transcendental circle (Lukács, Bloch, Ilyenkov), arguing that each attempt either regresses to naive-realist ontology of levels or returns to premodern cosmology, and that such regressions symptomatize an inability to confront the radical negativity at the core of modern subjectivity.

     every such return has to be interpreted as a symptom of the thought's inability to confront the radical negativity at work in the very core of modern subjectivity

137. #137

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.77

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus*](#contents.xhtml_ahd6)

     Theoretical move: Žižek reconstructs Kant's argument that the *intellectus archetypus* is not merely the logical opposite of finite understanding but functions as its presupposed universal model: our *intellectus ectypus* appears as a particular distortion of that archetype, so the gap between possibility/actuality and Is/Ought is a consequence of finite cognition's limitations, not a feature of reality itself. This asymmetry between universal and particular is the conceptual hinge Žižek will use to pivot toward a Hegelian critique.

     the distinction between possible and actual things holds merely subjectively, for human understanding

138. #138

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Cross-Capping Class Struggle](#contents.xhtml_ahd16)

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

     It is through this self-division that subjectivity proper emerges, and, insofar as, for Marx, the name for this self-division of society is 'class struggle'

139. #139

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.65

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage maps German Idealism's tension between two poles of subjectivity—immediate intellectual intuition versus reflexive mediation—and argues that Hegel resolves this tension by asserting reflexivity itself as absolute power, in contrast to Kant's rejection of intellectual intuition for finite subjects.

     the concept of subjectivity is torn between two extremes: subjectivity as the immediate unity of 'intellectual intuition'… and subjectivity as reflexivity (the power of distance, mediation, tearing apart)

140. #140

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

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

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

     the modern European notion of subjectivity was unknown in ancient India. For this reason, Husserl also does not just praise Buddhism

141. #141

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.15

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage is non-substantive bibliographic and clarificatory content, but note 5 makes a theoretically load-bearing move: it argues that the topological triad of Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle does not map one-to-one onto examples (quilting point, class struggle) but rather that each example instantiates all three figures differently, so the triad illuminates distinct aspects of a single phenomenon.

     the Klein bottle (quilting as the point of subjectivization) … the Klein bottle (the inward-turn of subjectivization)

142. #142

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.37

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement](#contents.xhtml_ahd2)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither evolutionary naturalism, correlationism, object-oriented ontology, New Materialism, nor Derridean deconstruction can account for the 'arche-transcendental' cut through which subjectivity explodes into the Real; the properly Lacanian move is to locate the In-itself not outside the subject but as a split *within* the subject—the subject as impossible object (objet a), the 'fossil directly created as lost.'

     such a naturalist description cannot account for the explosion of subjectivity in the Real: it remains at the level of (transcendentally constituted) positive reality, while the cut (explosion) we are talking designates the arche-transcendental process

143. #143

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

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

     the sadist makes himself into the servant of universal extinction precisely in order to avoid the deadlock of subjectivity, the 'virtual extinction' that splits the life of the subject from within

144. #144

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.394

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

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

     although (human) subjectivity is obviously not the origin of all reality, although it is a contingent local event in the universe, the path to universal truth does not lead through the abstraction from it

145. #145

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.382

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that subjectivity is not an epistemological distortion of an objective order but is structurally inscribed into "objective" reality itself: the Hegelian logic of oppositional determination—whereby a universal genus encounters itself among its particular species—is isomorphic with the Lacanian structure of suture, in which the subject emerges as the reflexive signifier of lack, and this link grounds the thesis that substance must be conceived as subject.

     subjective distortions are inscribed into the very 'objective' order as its immanent distortion. This link between subject and antagonism also enables us to approach in a new way the old question: How can we move beyond appearances and reach the In-itself?

146. #146

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.59

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that radical materialism requires rejecting both "objective reality" and consistent subjectivity, identifying the Real not with nature-in-itself but with the crack/gap in every ontological edifice—a deficiency shared by transcendental reason and reality itself—which Freud/Lacan name 'sexuality,' and whose trans-ontological elaboration requires a concept of 'less than nothing' formalized through the Klein bottle as the minimal definition of the Absolute.

     the blind spot is not objective reality without subject but subject itself as object. Subject never fits reality, it is a crack in every ontological edifice.

147. #147

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries from H–I with page-reference hyperlinks to various chapters; it performs no theoretical argument of its own.

     subjectivity [here](#theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-857), [here](#corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-858)

148. #148

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.23

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p18" class="pagebreak" title="18"></span>Modalities of the Absolute](#contents.xhtml_ahd1)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing is not a revelation of hidden content but a "redoubling of the gap"—the gap separating subject from the Thing is transposed into the Thing itself—and defends this move against Pippin's critique by insisting that unity (the One) is a retroactive effect of division rather than its presupposition, a structure he calls "absolute recoil," which he then differentiates from Meillassoux's speculative-materialist ontologization of contingency.

     how should it be structured so that subjectivity could have emerged in it and out of it? … transcendental subjectivity had to emerge somehow from the ontic process of reality.

149. #149

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.404

     **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: Žižek argues that true ethical universality requires a militant, partisan stance rather than neutral tolerance, and that the excess of subjectivity (Hegel's "night of the world") is the condition of redemption rather than the source of evil — evil properly resides in the "ontologization" of excess into a global cosmic order. This is illustrated through a reading of *The Children's Hour*, where the structure of false appearance reveals that truth has the structure of a fiction, and that an authentic ethical act consists in breaking out of the closed social space rather than seeking reconciliation within it.

     one should assert the excess of subjectivity (what Hegel called the 'night of the world') as the only hope of redemption

150. #150

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.140

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constitutively sexed by mapping the Kantian mathematical/dynamic antinomy onto Hegel's logic of Being/Essence, and then showing that each domain, when carried to its limit (via differential calculus as the paradigm case), self-sublates into a void that constitutes a distinct sexed subject: "feminine" subjectivity emerges from the self-sublation of the mathematical/Being domain, while "masculine" subjectivity emerges from the dynamic/Essence domain.

     A 'quantitative relation solely as qualitatively determined' is one of the most precious determinations of the space of subjectivity

151. #151

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject is constituted as a void—the failure point of symbolic representation—and distinguishes this from post-structuralist subjectivation; it then maps this structure onto the Hegelian 'negation of the negation,' showing that epistemological contradictions (inability to define Society, the Rabinovitch joke) are not obstacles to truth but its very index, so that the antagonistic kernel of a Thing-in-itself is inseparable from our failed access to it.

     The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure.

152. #152

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's critique of Kant's Sublime is not a regression to metaphysics but a radicalization: by subtracting the transcendent presupposition of the Thing-in-itself, Hegel shows that the experience of radical negativity IS the Thing itself, so that the sublime object no longer points beyond representation but fills the void left by the Thing's non-existence - a logic culminating in the 'infinite judgement' ('the Spirit is a bone') where an utterly contingent, miserable object embodies absolute negativity.

     this negativity, this unbearable discord, coincides with subjectivity itself, it is the only way to make present and 'palpable' the utmost - that is, self-referential - negativity which characterizes spiritual

153. #153

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacanian ethics of separation—grounded in the irreducible surplus of the Real over symbolization—represents a more radical break with essentialist logic than either Habermasian universalism, Foucauldian aesthetics of the self, or Althusserian alienation, because it grasps the plurality of social antagonisms as multiple responses to the same impossible-real kernel rather than as reducible to any single founding antagonism.

     Foucault was so fascinated by marginal lifestyles constructing their particular mode of subjectivity (the sadomasochistic homosexual universe)

154. #154

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "speculative proposition" ('The Spirit is a bone', 'Wealth is the Self') structurally mirrors the Lacanian formula of fantasy ($◇a): in both, the subject's impossibility of signifying self-representation finds its positive form in an inert object that fills the void left by the failure of the signifier, and this logic is extended through the dialectic of language, flattery, and alienation in the Phenomenology, culminating in a critique of Kantian external reflection as unable to grasp this immanent reflexive movement.

     what he takes for his innermost conviction is nothing but the narcissistic vanity of his null subjectivity.

155. #155

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "empty gesture" by which substance becomes subject—requiring a point of exception (Monarch, Christ) where free subjectivity is "quilted" into the substance—is the elementary operation of ideology itself: the symbolization of the Real that posits the big Other into existence; conversely, "subjective destitution" in analysis reverses this by accepting the non-existence of the big Other and keeping open the gap between Real and symbolization, at the cost of annulling the subject itself.

     the empty gesture, the act of formal conversion by means of which 'substance becomes subject', is not simply dispersed among the multitude of subjects

156. #156

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

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

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

     subjectivation is the very instance (or 'proof') of an irreducible Real. In this respect, it is no coincidence that in the 'new materialisms,' many of which are based upon Deleuzean foundations, the main philosophical front… usually lies along the line of the question of the subject.

157. #157

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

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

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

     the subject is itself the wound it tries to heal… This 'absolute contradiction,' this radical coincidence of opposites… is what defines subjectivity.

158. #158

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.248

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian *objet petit a* as an extimate object—simultaneously inside and outside the subject—reveals that subjectivity is constitutively split and hystericized, and that this logic of sublimation (where "thing-power" is itself the product of the subject's anamorphic distortion) undermines new materialist "flat ontology" by showing that there is no vibrant matter (*a*) without the subject, just as there is no subject without *a*.

     the subject posited by Kant, Hegel, and Lacan was never self-conscious, self-positing, or autonomous in any common or facile sense of these terms

159. #159

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.135

     Adrian Johnston > Žižek continues:

     Theoretical move: Johnston defends Žižek's materialist position against Harman's idealist misreading by arguing that the denial of the world-as-whole is not anti-realism but a Hegelian move to include subjectivity within substance; simultaneously, Johnston defends his own neuro-psychoanalytic project against critics (Chiesa, Pluth) who wrongly cast interdisciplinary exchange as a zero-sum contest, and clarifies that positing continuity between the barred Real and the barred Symbolic does not collapse their distinction but reflects a dialectical identity-in-difference.

     The incompleteness of this ontology is due precisely to its failure to encompass subjectivity, including the very subject(s) responsible for formulating this (or any other) ontology.

160. #160

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.83

     The Philosopher's Stone

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's insistence on working through idealism to its endpoint produces a more thoroughgoing materialism than Heidegger's detour around subjectivity via *Dasein*: by abandoning subjectivity, Heidegger closes off the very resource that could illuminate the object-world, whereas Hegel's immanent critique of idealism retains that resource.

     he is able to conceive of the human as worldmaking and as inextricably tied to the world … only insofar as he refuses to think about the problem of subjectivity. Turning away from subjectivity helps to narrow the gap between the human and the object world, but at the same time it leaves Heidegger unable to consider how subjectivity might be able to inform us about things.

161. #161

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

     Index > **INDEX**

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

     subjectivity, 3–28, 50–67, 68–81, 89, 90, 103–7, 111, 112–13...

162. #162

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.13

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that both cultural materialism and the new materialisms/realisms target the same Cartesian cogito-subject that German Idealism and psychoanalysis had already decentered; from the Lacano-Hegelian standpoint, the subject at stake is not the ego but the unconscious, making both "deaths of the subject" theoretically belated.

     the primary target of new materialism and object-oriented ontology is subjectivity . . . following Kant philosophy has primarily consisted of trying to think subject.

163. #163

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.60

     Borna Radnik

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that any consistent materialism must openly acknowledge its implicit idealist foundation in conceptual determination, and that Hegel's dialectical logic—specifically the "positing the presupposition" thesis and the absolute recoil—demonstrates that thought and being are inextricably unified, making the idealism/materialism opposition meaningless and grounding a dialectical materialism.

     the dialectical process that generates the Hegelian subject (i.e., subjectivization) emerges from substance, substance itself is contingent upon conceptual presuppositions that are only rendered consistent through a retroactive positing by the subject.

164. #164

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.26

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: This introductory survey passage maps the theoretical terrain of a collection's second section on Lacan and psychoanalytic materialism, demonstrating how each chapter uses Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, death drive, extimacy, sublimation, the barred subject) to critique rival materialisms (Deleuzian, new materialist, object-oriented) and assert the irreducibility of the subject and the Real.

     the issue is not that of overcoming the limitations of intellectus ectypus... rather, Hegel's position is that we should radically shift our perspective on ectypus and conceive (what appears as) its limitations as its positive feature.

165. #165

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.96

     The Materialism of Historical Materialism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's "elemental materialism" — grounded in the concepts of dissolution (Auflösung) and element (stoicheion) — constitutes a counter-ideological, dialectical materialism distinct from both bourgeois philosophical materialism and reductive base/superstructure models; this elemental materialism is shown to be inherently Hegelian, treating the subject not as an identity but as a historically contingent form always at risk of dissolution back into substance.

     his choice term for the various modes and motions of thought, 'Subjektivität,' can just as well apply to what goes by the name of 'Objektivität' each itself the 'one-sidedness' of what is a more complete dialectic.

166. #166

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.84

     The Philosopher's Stone > The Stone Breaks

     Theoretical move: By inverting Heidegger's ontological hierarchy, the passage argues that for Hegel it is the *subject* (not the stone) that is worldless, and this alienation from the world is the very condition of subjectivity's freedom and its capacity to enact—rather than merely suffer—contradiction; the stone's total immersion in the world explains both its erosion and its ontological distance from spirit.

     Like Heidegger's stone, Hegel's subject is worldless. We can define subjectivity only by its alienation from the world.

167. #167

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.227

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

     Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's affirmative ontology of Becoming as positive flux without lack, the passage argues—through a Hegelo-Lacanian reading of Woolf's *Mrs Dalloway*—that subjectivity is constituted by an irreducible structural lack, and that this very lack (figured as absence, the void, *das Ding*, *objet a*) is what generates multiplicity, desire, and the intensity of lived experience rather than cancelling them.

     this lost 'content' cannot be retrieved by any subject, since its loss *is* subjectivity.

168. #168

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.110

     Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity from Kant to Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian answer to Schelling's mytho-feminine ontology is not the immediate unity of intellectual intuition (orgasmic One) but minimal reflexivity - the subject's self-distancing gaze that cuts into every immediate enjoyment - thereby framing the chapter's project of tracing reflexivity from Kant through Hegel as the core concept of subjectivity in German Idealism.

     In German Idealism, the concept of subjectivity is torn between two extremes: subjectivity as the immediate unity of 'intellectual intuition'... and subjectivity as reflexivity (the power of distance, mediation, tearing apart).

169. #169

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

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive is indifferent to repression rather than opposed to it, and that only a new signifier (and its subjectivation) — not drive-force — can effect real separation within the drive; this opens the space of a "Lacanian politics" grounded in the reactivation of the gap of the unconscious.

     only a new signifier (and the new subjectivation triggered by it) can effect and sustain the separation at the very heart of the drive

170. #170

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.213

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) unwittingly presupposes the very Lacanian framework it tries to circumvent: the "object-in-itself" it posits is nothing other than the Real of the cut (objet petit a), which functions simultaneously as object-cause and void of desire, thereby demonstrating that a dialectical materialist account of objet a—with its Möbius topology and extimate causality—supersedes OOO's subject-less ontology.

     Sbriglia and Žižek point out the subjectivity that haunts OOO's conception of a purely objective world without subjects by focusing on the Real status of both subject and object.

171. #171

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.86

     The Philosopher's Stone > The Subject Breaks Itself

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's subject distinguishes itself from inert matter not by transcending contradiction but by internalizing and enacting it—thinking is the primary form of self-destruction that constitutes subjectivity, and this is the very move by which idealism becomes materialism.

     The avoidance of subjectivity is the path back to it.

172. #172

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.118

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Going AII the Way in Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy and desire are structurally opposed but mutually sustaining: the subject's retreat from desire into fantasy ultimately opens onto the traumatic Real, and Lynch's *Mulholland Drive* is exemplary precisely because it follows fantasy's logic all the way to this silence, thereby exposing the constitutive loss that generates subjectivity.

     it allows the spectator to experience the moment of loss that generates subjectivity itself and yet which all the actions of the subject attempt to escape.

173. #173

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.102

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Fontosy ond Humiliotion**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's ethical dimension lies not in its retreat from the Other but in the humiliation it compels: by externalizing one's innermost subjectivity, the fantasizing subject is exposed to the Other's look, and fully embracing rather than retreating from this exposure constitutes the genuine ethical act.

     We risk experiencing our subjectivity without its support in the Other, without all the narratives of identity that provide us with a sense of self.

174. #174

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.105

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Private Fantasy as Public Ethic

     Theoretical move: Full commitment to one's own fantasmatic enjoyment transforms the perceived public world from threatening to welcoming, thereby serving as the condition for an ethics that overcomes paranoia; the passage argues that envy of the Other's enjoyment is itself a displaced mode of enjoyment that arises precisely when the subject has abandoned its own fantasy.

     In the act of creating it, one finds the innermost core of one's subjectivity externalized for others to see and to mock.

175. #175

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.216

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

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

     This conception of subjectivity is extremely common and leads to a great deal of confusion among readers of Lacan who think in terms which are perhaps more political than Lacanian.

176. #176

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-60-0"></span>**The Freudian Subject**

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the "Freudian subject" (the unconscious as a second agency or intentional intruder) from the properly Lacanian subject, arguing that attributing subjectivity to the unconscious as mere breach or interruption fails to capture the specificity of Lacan's account, in which the unconscious remains the Other's discourse rather than an agency.

     some sort of alien intention seems to arrive on the scene or break its way in... we attribute some sort of intentionality, agency, or even subjectivity to it

177. #177

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.12

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.

     Lacan the psychoanalyst finds the concept of subjectivity indispensable and explores what it means to be a subject, how one comes to be a subject, the conditions responsible for the failure to become a subject (leading to psychosis)

178. #178

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.136

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that S(A)—the signifier of the lack in the Other—functions as Woman's second "partner" in the sexuation table, and that its meaning has shifted in Lacan's work from a symbolic designator of the Other's desire to a real-register signifier of a primordial loss; this asymmetry grounds two distinct paths beyond neurosis (desire/masculine vs. sublimation/feminine) and implies that feminine subjectivity is constituted through an encounter with jouissance rather than through subjection to a master signifier.

     Feminine structure means feminine subjectivity… The very adoption of a position or stance with respect to (an experience of) jouissance involves and implies subjectivity.

179. #179

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.89

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-87-0"></span>**Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity**

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that the three constitutive moments of subjectivity (alienation, separation, traversal of fantasy) are structurally identical to three substitutional metaphors, and that the subject itself has two faces—as precipitate (sedimented signification) and as breach/precipitation (the creative spark between signifiers)—such that metaphorization and subjectification are strictly co-extensive, with analysis requiring the forging of new metaphors to reconfigure the symptom.

     Every metaphorical effect is then an effect of subjectivity (and vice versa). There is no such thing as a metaphor without subjective participation, and there is no subjectification without metaphorization.

180. #180

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.83

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *Subjectifying the Cause: A Temporal Conundrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that separation and the subjectification of the cause operate under a retroactive temporal logic (future anterior / Nachträglichkeit) that is irreducible to classical linear causality, and that this culminates in the traversal of fantasy as the moment when the Other's desire is fully "signifierized," liberating the subject from the fixity of the Name-of-the-Father and enabling genuine action.

     Lacan never pinpoints the subject's chronological appearance on the scene: he or she is always either about to arrive—is on the verge of arriving—or will have already arrived by some later moment in time.

181. #181

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.66

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Beyond the Split Subject**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the split subject is not Lacan's final word on subjectivity: beyond alienation (the split itself), there is a further movement — separation — in which a subject of the unconscious momentarily arises by assuming responsibility for the unconscious, grounding an ethical dimension in Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden."

     the split subject is by no means Lacan's last word on subjectivity, there being a further aspect to the subject which I will first attempt to illustrate graphically.

182. #182

     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.

     Lacan, while dubbed a 'structuralist' by certain people and a 'poststructuralist' by others, maintains and defends both concepts-structure and subject-in a rigorous theoretical framework.

183. #183

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.14

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic subjectivity resides not in any subject but in the incessant movement of comedy itself, and that this movement—with its cuts and discontinuities—is structurally opposed to the contemporary ideological imperative of happiness, which naturalizes socioeconomic differences into biological 'bare life' and deploys laughter as an internal condition of ideology rather than a resistance to it.

     comic subjectivity proper does not reside in the subject making the comedy, nor in the subjects or egos that appear in it, but in this very incessant and irresistible, all-consuming movement.

184. #184

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.228

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Comedy is theorized as the genre of the copula—the site where the missing link between life and the signifier is made to appear—and the phallus is identified as the privileged signifier of this copula, one that appears in comedy not as signifier but as partial object, materializing the contradictions of the Symbolic. The 'realism' of comedy is then relocated from the reality principle to the Real of desire/drive as an irreducible incongruence within human existence.

     The zone of subjectivity that comedy might thus help us preserve and sustain is, of course, fundamentally ambivalent.

185. #185

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.181

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Resistances to Disenchantment

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither the transcendental-philosophical defense of subjectivity nor the accommodationist strategy of finding neuronal correlates for psychoanalytic concepts constitutes an adequate response to the challenge of brain sciences; instead, psychoanalysis must locate itself within the brain sciences' own inherent silences and impossibilities, identifying the "absent Cause" of cognitivist accounts as the Freudian death drive / German Idealist self-relating negativity. Along the way, he maps four positions on consciousness through a Greimasian square and proposes a Badiouian framing of consciousness-emergence as Event.

     not-being-knowable to others is a crucial feature of subjectivity, of what we mean when we impute to our interlocutors a 'mind': you 'truly have a mind' only insofar as this is opaque to me.

186. #186

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.230

     29 > **Preface** > **Introduction**

     Theoretical move: This endnote passage clarifies key theoretical distinctions—between jouissance and enjoyment, desire and jouissance, gaze and look, cinema and dream—while situating the book's Lacanian framework against phenomenology, neoliberal ideology, and auteur theory.

     confronting the ultimate groundlessness of one's subjectivity, which is the conception of freedom toward which psychoanalysis leads the subject

187. #187

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Nietzschean event has the structure of a "time loop" in which the subject who declares the event is constituted retroactively by it—the event is immanent to its own declaration—and that this constitutive splitting ("One became Two") is not a synthesis or mystical transformation but the minimal, topological difference (the "edge") that names the nonrelationship between two incommensurable terms, a logic Zupančič explicitly aligns with Lacan's formula of the sexual non-rapport.

     what is at stake in this configuration is not an act of domesticating a traumatic and enigmatic 'call' by positing that it indeed comes from us; it is precisely the fact that it comes from us that makes this call so traumatic and enigmatic.

188. #188

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that truth-as-perspective (in Nietzsche) and analytic discourse (in Lacan) share a structurally homologous status: both are constituted not by a new stable position but by the irreducible gap or decentering produced in the *shift* between perspectives/discourses, figured as a "Two" of pure disjunction rather than either the One or the multiple.

     it is only through subjectivization that one becomes 'what one is,' namely, that one becomes the subject one is.

189. #189

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental problem of knowledge and perspectivity is not the subject's partial point of view but the structural disjunction between the gaze (as object inscribed within the thing itself) and the viewpoint, such that the subject is constitutively 'ex-centered' — a part of the subject always already falls out onto the side of objects — and subjectivization is the possible (not necessary) consequence of encountering this expelled, fallen part.

     The constitution of subjectivity coincides with a part of the subject... 'falling out,' whereas subjectivization corresponds to the effect of a possible encounter with this fallen part.

190. #190

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Impossible Object** see **objet a**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances two theoretical moves: first, it contrasts Hegel's 'true infinite' (self-limiting, internally bounded) against the 'bad infinite' (externally endless) to argue that genuine satisfaction requires self-sabotage as an internal limit — positioning Hegel as the preeminent anticapitalist thinker over Marx; second, it glosses the dialectical triad In-Itself / For-Itself / In-and-For-Itself as stages of mediation through which subject and object achieve logical unity.

     Rather than escaping limitation, the true infinite limits itself, like the subject that confines itself to a single project out of a multitude of possibilities.

191. #191

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.39

     **Fantasy** > **Imaginary Order**

     Theoretical move: The Imaginary Order is theorized as a pre-linguistic realm of ego-formation, mirror-identification, and illusory unity whose constitutive lack is ontological rather than developmental, and whose concealment of the Symbolic and Real makes its exposure a political as well as psychoanalytic task.

     he argues that this loss is constitutive of subjectivity itself.

192. #192

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.44

     **Interpellation** > **Little Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage works through four related concepts—the little other as site of quasi-traumatic subjectivity-formation, the lost object as the structural condition of desire and enjoyment, phallic jouissance as the masculine structure of constitutive dissatisfaction, masochism as sadistic reversal, and the master signifier as the empty signifier that initiates the symbolic order and organizes enjoyment through exclusion—demonstrating that lack, loss, and emptiness are not failures of the system but its generative engine.

     the foundation of subjectivity is established in a complicated reaction to a quasi-traumatic encounter with the little other.

193. #193

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Chapters

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     The Politics of Incompleteness: On Žižek's Theory of the Subject

194. #194

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.82

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's ontology of retroactive positing is internally inconsistent — conceding a pre-existent physical reality while denying it — and that this inconsistency reveals a deeper "Frito-Lay" presupposition shared by all modern (Kantian and Hegelian) philosophy: that the subject–world relation exhausts the field of speculation, a presupposition the author proposes to overcome via a non-transcendental, object-oriented ontology.

     the assumption—shared by Žižek—that the transcendental standpoint is the gateway to all rigorous philosophy

195. #195

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.9

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > A Threefold Cord: Lacan, Hegel, Marx

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's thought pivots on a triangulation of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx, with the Real and the Death Drive as central categories: the Real (as internal distortion of the Symbolic) and the Death Drive (as self-negating negativity equated with Hegelian dialectics) together ground Žižek's psychoanalytic politics and his defence of subjectivity against poststructuralist dissolution.

     This negativity that constantly undermines itself is the subject, and its activity is what Freud later theorized as the death drive, which is perhaps the central category in Žižek's thought.

196. #196

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's quantum-ontological updating of Schelling commits him to a "layer-doughnut" model in which human subjectivity is the return of a repressed ontological ground-zero, and that this preference for Schelling over Hegel creates an unresolved epistemological gap where quantum physics cannot substitute for the transcendental-logical function that Hegel's Logic performs within his encyclopedic system.

     human subjectivity is the return of the repressed ontological ground-zero. In Žižek's updating of Schelling, this ontological ground-zero is identified as the domain of quantum indeterminacy prior to the collapse of the wave function.

197. #197

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Violent Issue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's concept of violence is properly self-directed (striking at one's own ideological investment) rather than outwardly aggressive, distinguishes subjective from objective/structural violence to expose liberalism's ideological complicity with capitalism, and contends that Žižek himself does not go far enough in theorizing how the self-destructive violence of the radical act can be integrated into a conception of emancipatory governance.

     It is only through the violent uprooting of our symbolic identity that we genuinely find the groundlessness of our subjectivity.

198. #198

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.2

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Pavlovian Reactions Aren’t Just for Dogs

     Theoretical move: The introduction establishes a "third Žižek" — neither charlatan nor genius — whose theoretical contribution consists in an anamorphic reversal of reigning doxa, deploying Lacanian, Hegelian, and Marxist frameworks to expose the repressed truths underlying our ontological phantasmagorias, and whose repetitive style enacts Kierkegaardian creative repetition rather than mere self-plagiarism.

     classical questions of ontology, epistemology, the philosophy of subjectivity, and cultural theory

199. #199

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Friedlander](#contents.xhtml_ch12a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek refines his politics of hopelessness by insisting that hopelessness is not merely a clearing-away of false hope but an irreducible, inescapable risk that cannot be transcended, and extends this into a defence of apathy as a basic right against capitalism's demand for hyper-activity, ultimately arguing that only a communist (rather than socialist) collectivism can address the structural crises produced by global capital.

     our satisfactions, subjectivity, and the social are rooted in constitutive loss

200. #200

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: Johnston argues that the Žižek–Johnston debate about quantum physics vs. neurobiology as science-partners for materialist philosophy conceals a deeper Schelling–Hegel divergence between two models of emergence: Schelling's circular "layer-doughnut" (where highest and lowest layers converge via Spinozistic *natura naturans/naturata*) and Hegel's linear "layer-cake" (where sublation preserves differences-in-kind), and that Žižek's Schellingian quantum metaphysics is inconsistent with his own dialectical-materialist commitments.

     there lurks an older philosophical tension… this tension is most manifest between the metaphysical systems of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel… forging an uncompromisingly materialist yet thoroughly anti-reductive theory of subjectivity.

201. #201

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.165

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

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

     One of the attractions of Zhuang Zi's dream is therefore that it highlights some of the fundamental ambiguities related to subjectivity in general, and especially those that are related to the critique of ideology in the Žižekian form

202. #202

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.33

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's embrace of Schelling's ground-existence distinction implicitly endorses a Spinozistic metaphysics (natura naturans/natura naturata) that is irreducibly spiritualist and idealist, thereby undermining any materialist reading of Schelling's Naturphilosophie that Žižek might intend.

     he consistently throughout his early and middle periods emphasizes that natura naturans is subject-like, a sort of universal subjectivity, an organism or even mind writ astronomically large, animating the entirety of creation through its activity and generative powers.

203. #203

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The State of Self-Erasure

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's political thought contains a structural lacuna: while he theorizes self-destructive violence at the level of the revolutionary act (via Benjamin's divine violence), he fails to extend this logic into a theory of emancipatory governance or post-revolutionary normality, leaving "the next day" unthought—a gap the author proposes to fill by moving beyond divine violence toward a theorized self-destructive state violence.

     Violence inheres in the structure of governance itself, just as it inheres in the structure of subjectivity.

204. #204

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's "layer-cake" emergentism, which insists on genuine non-identity between substance and subject (via "sondern ebensosehr"), is philosophically superior to Schelling's "layer-doughnut" panpsychism, which covertly presupposes subjectivity within nature; and further that Hegel's privileging of contingent actuality over possibility as the foundational modal category provides a more defensible metaphysics than Schelling's potentiality-first ontology—a distinction that also bears on how Žižek should interpret quantum collapse.

     Schelling's spiritualization of nature ... covertly relies upon precisely the sort of either-or dualism he so frequently decries.

205. #205

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

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject occupies a paradoxical double role in ideology critique—simultaneously enabling genuine rupture and enabling ideological reproduction through ironic non-identification—and that this ambivalence demands a dimension of critical praxis (exemplified by Laibach and Žižek) that exceeds mere theoretical questioning.

     his contemplations highlight some crucial questions about subjectivity, especially in its Lacanian conceptualization

206. #206

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.175

     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.

     Žižek's reading of Laibach, with all its related questions of subjectivity, ideology, fantasy, event, etc.

207. #207

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.141

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

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the history of ideology theory from Marx through Althusser to argue that neither Marx's "false consciousness" model nor Althusser's interpellation model can account for the unconscious dimensions of ideological investment—a gap that Žižek fills by recentering ideology theory on the desiring subject rather than the economic infrastructure.

     By placing the emphasis on subjectivity, not the economic infrastructure, as the source of ideology, Žižek turns the theory of ideology away from the emphasis on manipulation that it has for Marx.

208. #208

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.96

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against Žižek's "gappy ontology" (holes/voids in being) by proposing that Hegel's negativity is better understood as the normative autonomy of the "space of reasons"—the irreducibility of rational, rule-following practices to natural/neurological causes—without requiring a paradoxical negative ontology or Lacanian lack.

     self-consciousness and consciousness of something that is to be—not ourselves,—are necessarily connected; but the first is to be regarded as the 'conditioning' factor, and the second as the conditioned

209. #209

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.100

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's Hegelianism turns on a "gappy" phenomenal ontology and a retrospective, open-ended dialectic, and critically examines whether this justifies Žižek's claim that bourgeois capitalist society is fundamentally unreformable and demands "the Act," finding that claim underdeveloped while acknowledging the Lacanian logic that repression creates its own opposite.

     It is only after the world-historical influence of Christianity that Greek philosophy could come to seem unable to provide the resources to account for what would eventually come to be understood as Christian inwardness, subjectivity, and so a very different view of agency.

210. #210

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.191

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Racializing the Palestinian Other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Levinas's ethics of the face substantializes the Other in a way that, when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, ideologically neutralizes concrete racialized suffering; Žižek's counter-move is to insist that true emancipatory ethics must pass through "objective violence" and structural analysis, suspending the dyadic face-to-face encounter in favor of attending to the other's others.

     resists the lure of 'subjective violence,' and steps back to attend to the 'objective violence'

211. #211

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

     Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section from the edited volume "Žižek Responds!" listing proper names and concepts (H–K) with hyperlinked page references; it performs no theoretical argument.

     subjectivity [here]

212. #212

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > Shoot the Hostage

     Theoretical move: Žižek identifies the political act with self-directed violence (subtraction from one's own symbolic investments) rather than violence against the Other, arguing that this structure repeats the originary self-inflicted violence of the death drive through which subjectivity itself first emerges — making violence against oneself the irreducible condition of both subjectivity and emancipatory politics.

     Is not such a radical gesture of 'striking at oneself' constitutive of subjectivity as such?

213. #213

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.113

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Pippin](#contents.xhtml_ch4a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends his thesis of ontological incompleteness against Pippin's transcendental-apperception alternative, arguing that (1) Kantian freedom itself implies a "hole" in phenomenal reality, (2) truly autonomous acts retroactively posit their own reasons rather than applying pre-given norms, and (3) every particular social form is structurally self-contradictory in a Hegelian sense, making Pippin's reformist social-democratic horizon abstractly incomplete.

     how should reality be structured so that (something like) subjectivity can emerge in it?

214. #214

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.152

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **PLEASE RECOGNIZE ME**

     Theoretical move: Identity politics is theoretically indicted as a site of ideological interpellation: identity is neither essence nor free choice but the result of a "forced choice" between subjectivity and symbolic identity, whose appeal is sustained not by ideological deception alone but by the jouissance derived from exclusion—making any truly universal inclusion structurally impossible.

     The forced choice is between subjectivity and identity. In order to be part of society, one must identify oneself with some socially recognized form of identity.

215. #215

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.122

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **THE PERILS OF ISOLATION**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism's structuring principle—the commodity form—produces an empty particularity in subjects that identity politics (religious, ethnic, nationalist) compensates for without challenging; this double function of identity sustains capitalism by both misdirecting opposition and obscuring the commodity form as the true target of critique.

     In modernity, the project of turning to identity attempts to compensate for what capitalist subjectivity lacks.

216. #216

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.192

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **ZOOTOPIA VS. UTOPIA**

     Theoretical move: Using *Zootopia* as a philosophical allegory, McGowan argues that identity is a false solution to the problem of subjectivity: the film stages a dialectical move in which the apparent multicultural utopia of mutual tolerance is revealed as a site of hidden political antagonism, and true universality is achieved only when subjects abandon their investment in identity altogether.

     identity is a false solution to the problem of subjectivity

217. #217

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.136

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **A DISDAINFUL STRUCTURE**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism's structuring principle is constitutively invisible to the subjects it produces: by enforcing a perspective of pure particularity, it renders structural unemployment legible only as individual moral failure, thereby masking the systemic necessity of the unemployed and generating ideological contempt for those who occupy a structurally required position.

     Our collective inability to recognize the necessity of the unemployed is the result of the form that capitalist subjectivity takes.

218. #218

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.136

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's thesis that repetition itself selects/expels difference through centrifugal force, Zupančič-via-Lacan argues that only the production of a new signifier (S1) — generated from the subject's enjoyment-in-talking within analytic discourse — can effect a genuine separation at the heart of the drive's repetition, thereby triggering a new subjectivation that repression alone cannot accomplish.

     This new signifier is the event proper, and it triggers a new subjectivation.

219. #219

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.130

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against realist materialisms (including object-oriented ontology) that dissolve the subject into one object among many, Zupančič argues that the Lacanian subject is the objective embodiment of reality's own internal contradiction/antagonism—and that this is precisely what makes psychoanalysis a genuinely materialist theory: materialism is thinking that advances as thinking of contradictions.

     what is at stake, and what one could argue for, is a different kind of materialism which is precisely not based on the opposition between 'naked' reality… and an 'always-already' subjective/subjectivized (or subject-constituted) reality.

220. #220

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that British youth's political disengagement is not apathy but 'reflexive impotence'—a self-fulfilling epistemological posture produced by the control society's logic of indefinite postponement, depressive hedonia, and the privatization/pathologization of systemic problems, which forecloses politicization more effectively than overt repression.

     Jameson observed there that Lacan's theory of schizophrenia offered a 'suggestive aesthetic model' for understanding the fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial complex.