Sublimation

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (729)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.36

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that analytic technique must resist popular-psychological labels (like "abuse") that exonerate the analysand and foreclose the discovery of unconscious guilt displacement, submissive agency, and deeper Oedipal crime; conscious understanding through the observing ego is insufficient and may even obstruct the treatment's real work.

   the analysand … needed to come to grips with her anger at her mother for having resented her daughter's very existence

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.205

   **Establishing a Limit**

   Theoretical move: Through the case of José, Fink/Alemán demonstrates how a psychotic subject can construct a substitute for the foreclosed paternal metaphor through a self-invented fictional "parenthesis" — a narrative device that installs a limit to jouissance where the Name-of-the-Father failed to intervene, functioning as a sinthome-like stabilization rather than a delusional resolution.

   What best illustrates the function of these parentheses is that, after some ten years of analysis, the patient began talking about what he called 'his own films,' which he considered to be his 'life's work.'

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.84

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Conclusion**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian ethics requires the analyst to continually deconstruct their own fantasmatic Weltanschauung (which constitutes countertransference) in order to serve the analysand's desire, and gestures toward a resolution of the desire/drive conflict not through sublimation but through a changed relation between desire and the drives.

   if Lacan provides anything by way of a possible 'solution' to the paradox of human desire and satisfaction, I would argue that it is not via sublimation, but rather via a changed relation between desire and the drives

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.80

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Paradox of Jouissance**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance names a paradoxical satisfaction derived from transgression that cannot be dissolved by moral or clinical labelling, because desire is constitutively produced by the Law's prohibition—a structure epitomised by das Ding as the Sovereign Good—making any naive reconciliationist programme in psychoanalysis untenable.

   Lacan suggests that sublimation involves elevating an ordinary object to the status of the Thing.

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.160

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *"On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1957b)*

   Theoretical move: By closely reading Freud's 1912 essay on debasement alongside his 1921 text on aim-inhibited drives, Fink argues that the fusion/split of love and desire is structurally constitutive of Eros rather than accidental, anticipating Lacan's claims about the sexual non-relation and courtly love; moreover, Freud's 1921 revision retroactively reconstitutes affectionate love as secondary (the product of prohibition/repression), not primary, which reframes idealization and sublimation as effects of the failure of satisfaction.

   Idealization, as we see it in courtly love, would thus seem to involve sublimation of the sexual drives.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life

   Theoretical move: Župančič argues that the real problem of Kantian ethics is not the purification of pathological motives but the 'ethical transubstantiation' by which pure form must itself become a materially efficacious drive—and that this conceptual necessity precisely mirrors the Lacanian move from demand to desire via the objet petit a, revealing a structural homology between Kant's 'pure form' and Lacan's surplus-enjoyment/objet petit a.

   how can 'form' become 'matter', how can something which, in the subject's universe, does not qualify as a cause, suddenly become a cause?

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.70

   The Lie > The Unconditional

   Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of Kant's "parable of the gallows" exposes a hidden pathological motive (the good of the neighbour) smuggled into what should be a purely formal moral argument; the passage then aligns Kantian duty with the Lacanian ethics of desire by locating the ultimate limit of pathology in the Other, and grounds the ethical act in the dimension of the Real rather than law or transgression.

   Antigone stops at nothing in order to carry out her intention of burying her brother Polynices. In her persistence she is not guided by any 'good': neither her own... nor the good of the community represented by Creon.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

   Good and Evil > The logic of suicide

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's texts contain two logics of suicide that map onto two structurally opposed ethical positions: a sacrificial logic that preserves and reinforces the big Other, and a second logic—suicide *via* the Other—that annihilates the symbolic coordinates giving the subject identity, and which paradoxically satisfies all the formal conditions of a pure ethical act, making it indistinguishable from (and thus the perverted double of) Lacan's conception of the Act.

   We are dealing with the logic of infinite 'purification', in which sacrificing my life is just 'another step' forward - only one among numerous 'objects' that have to be sacrificed.

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.127

   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 conduct toward Madame de Tourvel exemplifies the perverse structure as Lacan conceives it—making the Other enjoy/become a subject—while his eventual betrayal of Merteuil illustrates Lacan's formula of 'giving ground on one's desire' (céder sur son désir), wherein the rhetoric of 'it is not my fault' is itself the purest confession of guilt and the mark of the subject who has abandoned desire for the logic of the superego.

   As in the case of Valmont, this is merely an inevitable by-product of a 'sublime plan'.

10. #10

    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.

    he understands giving up Madame de Tourvel as the price he has to pay in order to resume his old ways and to make peace with the Marquise

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.164

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego > The second passage is from the Critique of Judgement.

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian sublime is structurally homologous to the Freudian superego: the subject's conversion of anxiety into elevated feeling relies on a "superego inflation" that displaces the ego's concerns while simultaneously functioning as a strategy to avoid direct encounter with das Ding and the death drive in its pure state. The sublime's narcissistic self-estimation, its link to moral feeling, and its metonymic evocation of an internal "devastating force" all reveal the superego as the hidden engine of the sublime.

    There are moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it.

12. #12

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.192

    Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The theft of desire - and the mother in exchange

    Theoretical move: Against the dominant reading of Oedipus as a hero who heroically assumes symbolic guilt, Zupančič argues that Oedipus identifies not with his destiny but with his blindness as abject outcast—a move closer to traversing the fantasy and identifying with the symptom than to subjectivation through internalized guilt—thereby reorienting the ethical stakes of psychoanalysis away from the glorification of lack-of-being toward an irreducible 'being of an outcast'.

    If Oedipus had died, his parricide and incest would have remained the central Thing, around which his image and destiny would have erected a screen to arrest and capture our desire.

13. #13

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.224

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces Claudel's *The Hostage* as the literary-dramatic material Lacan reads in his seminar *Le transfert* as a contemporary tragedy, setting up Sygne de Coufontaine's final tic — her compulsive, wordless refusal — as the key enigmatic gesture around which the theoretical discussion of enjoyment, sacrifice, and the ethics of psychoanalysis will turn.

    they have dedicated and sacrificed everything, their youth and happiness, to it; the family title and a small piece of land are all they have.

14. #14

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.239

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

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

    the temptation to sacrifice to her desire this last pathological object which is, at the same time, the ultimate support of this desire; the temptation to purify her desire until there remains nothing but a single motive for her act, its final and irrevocable character.

15. #15

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.246

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Sygne's final 'no' is not an afterthought but the necessary telos of her sacrifice: the logic of pure desire, by driving the subject to traverse the fundamental fantasy from within, opens onto the register of enjoyment (jouissance), where the remainder of flesh that refuses sublimation prevents the sublime image from closing over the void it veils.

    The central image of Christian divinity absorbs all other images of desire in man with significant consequences... the (Divine) law finds itself face to face with this convulsing flesh that refuses to disappear from the picture, effectively preventing a sublime splendour from appearing in its place.

16. #16

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.258

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "ethics of the Real" is grounded not in finitude but in the infinite's unavoidable parasitism of the finite—identified as jouissance/death drive—and that this opens two distinct figures of the infinite (desire vs. jouissance) corresponding to two paradigms of ethics (classical/Antigone vs. modern/Sygne), a distinction that reframes the death drive as radically indifferent to death rather than oriented toward it.

    And we are purged ... through the intervention of one image among others.... the beam of desire is both reflected and refracted till it ends up giving us that most strange and most profound of effects, which is the effect of beauty on desire.

17. #17

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.271

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

    Theoretical move: Zupančič distinguishes two modes of "realizing desire" - Antigone's sublimation through which she becomes the phallic signifier of desire (the Φ), and Sygne de Coufontaine's drive-logic that short-circuits the infinite/finite opposition by sacrificing even the absolute condition itself, rendering the finite not-whole and making visible the Real of desire (the real residue of castration) rather than the Symbolic/Imaginary phallus.

    she becomes herself the signifier of the desire which runs through her, she incarnates this desire.

18. #18

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.12

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-7-0"></span>[Introduction](#page-5-0)

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes dialectics as the foundational method linking Marxist theory and film theory, arguing that contradiction—between ruling class and working class, between dominant culture and liberation, between context and universality—is the primary analytic object shared by both Marxism and cinema's spectatorship, and that this reciprocal relationship means Marxist theory should be foundational to all film theory.

    This very energy of reflecting on human creativity endows art and artistic expression with a special significance within Marxism.

19. #19

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.17

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-7-0"></span>[Introduction](#page-5-0) > **The universal language**

    Theoretical move: Cinema is theorized as the paradigmatic art form of global capitalism that simultaneously symptomatizes its conditions of production and gestures toward utopian horizons beyond them; Marxist film theory is positioned as capable of historicizing this dialectical tension by centering modes of production, ideology, and class struggle over auteurist genius.

    if art forms can not only symptomatize or diagnose their own conditions of production but also, in their energy as counter-factual and in their essence as creativity, gesture toward utopian horizons beyond those merely existing conditions

20. #20

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.27

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-19-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-1) > **Building things with Marxism[3](#page-185-6)**

    Theoretical move: Against the dominant "anarchovitalist" tendency within Marxist-inflected theory that equates radicality with pure negation, destituency, and formlessness, the passage argues that Marx's own materialism harbours a constructive, form-building dimension—that ruthless critique is the precondition for proactive projection of a new order, not its replacement.

    The work of liberation is the strengthening of those projections into compelling visions, positive platforms, definitive demands, utopian maps.

21. #21

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.30

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's concept of creative labor (poiesis) as the essence of human species-being provides the normative ground for Marxist film theory: alienation names the estrangement from this creative essence under capitalism, and a Marxist critique of form—including film form—is itself an expression of that creative-critical faculty, not merely its negation.

    Milton produced Paradise Lost in the same way that a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature.

22. #22

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.46

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Ideology**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the genealogy of the concept of ideology from its Enlightenment origins through Marx's materialist reformulation, arguing that ideology names not a set of beliefs but the contingent, gap-ridden relationship between material practices and their ideal representations, making it simultaneously a site of recognition and misrecognition of social contradiction.

    the connection between the economic production of goods and the artistic, philosophical, and religious articulation of the good?

23. #23

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.65

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Mediation**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that "mediation" is the central Marxist concept for understanding how forms (aesthetic, social, economic) work bidirectionally—both reproducing and critiquing capitalist relations—and that this concept, traced through Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Williams, and Jameson, gives film theory its critical purchase by showing how art does not merely reflect but actively produces and transforms social relations.

    **Chunk also engages:**

24. #24

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.72

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marxism uniquely bridges film aesthetics and film as social practice, and diagnoses the contemporary marginalization of Marxist film theory as a consequence of post-1989 anti-theoretical turns toward empiricist and social-scientific methodologies in the humanities.

    how aesthetic representation issues from, instantiates, and alters social practice

25. #25

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.75

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The dominance of non-Marxist approaches**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that New Historicism's dominance in film studies has impoverished the field by substituting particularism, complexity, and distributed agency for the Marxist tools of dialectics, contradiction, and synthesis; recovering Marxist dialectics is presented as the only method capable of integrating formalist and contextualist approaches and generating genuine critique.

    It attends to the possibility that films can operate as immanent critique, a critique emergent from the form itself.

26. #26

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.82

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The culture industry**

    Theoretical move: The passage expounds the Frankfurt School's "culture industry" thesis — that industrially produced mass culture functions as propaganda that secures ruling-class hegemony by cultivating passive, conformist subjects — and frames this as the negative-critical baseline against which emancipatory aesthetic theory must be measured.

    Adorno and Horkheimer spend most of their time in negative critique, but they also see an emancipatory potential in art forms.

27. #27

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.84

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Three significant turns away from Marxism in film theory**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that three major currents—realism, auteurism, and cultural studies—constituted a turn away from Marxist (especially Adornian) film theory by privileging spectatorial agency, medium transparency, and particularism over form, mediation, and critique; and that the institutionalization of film studies itself, as part of the cultural superstructure, materially conditioned this retreat from Marxism.

    film theories are parts of the superstructure, parts of the processes of social reproduction

28. #28

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.90

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Three significant turns away from Marxism in film theory**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the particularism of context-driven film analysis (exemplified by New Historicism) is an inadequate one-sided response to the problem of resistant consumption, and proposes instead a dialectical approach that holds form and context together through ongoing, situated interpretation as social practice.

    a film which articulates a critique of capitalism, what kind of analysis is called for?

29. #29

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.102

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

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

    to the ways that the experience of enjoying a movie that seems to criticize dominant capitalist values can restore our faith that we are freely choosing to participate in the capitalist mode of production.

30. #30

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.109

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Film form**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marxist film theory must integrate formalist analysis with contextual/ideological critique by treating film form as a dialectical "system" — a dynamic interrelation of elements — whose internal contradictions and fictionality are precisely what enable the critique of ideology and the capitalist mode of production.

    a populist insurgency with intense libidinal investment in a charismatic leader

31. #31

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.128

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marxist film analysis of *Fight Club* should move beyond documenting class content to examining how the film theorizes the capitalist mode of production itself — offering an economic periodization and a "cognitive map" of late-capitalist conjuncture — while its industrial imagery and organizational form (Project Mayhem as factory) become the site of political vision rather than mere representation.

    the film's industrial imagery becomes the site of its political vision when Project Mayhem starts to organize itself as a factory.

32. #32

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.137

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club*'s gothic aesthetic formally mediates and exposes the capitalist mode of production's concealed contradictions, functioning as a cinematic equivalent of Marx's own gothic rhetoric of illuminating the "hidden abode of production" — thereby treating the film's visual and spatial form as a site of Marxist theory-in-practice.

    When Project Mayhem turns the house into logistics headquarters for their diverse endeavors, they install wall-hung file organizers, desks, more lighting, and bulletin boards, mimicking an office environment.

33. #33

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Analysis***

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a Lacanian-Freudian dream analysis that maps the phallic mother and imaginary father onto dream figures, locating the dreamer's desire for autonomy at the threshold between the Imaginary and the Real, where self-nomination and self-creation begin to emerge as a wished-for but deferred psychic position.

    during this phase when sexuality appears dormant, sexual life is not stifled; rather, it takes different forms, not necessarily attached to specific body parts or functions. I choose conversation as my sexual substitute in the dream

34. #34

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

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

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

    The principle of sublimation—that artistic work is the substitute wish fulfillment of the artist… the creative writer undergoes a similar process by creating her work of art

35. #35

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

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

    Theoretical move: This passage surveys the pre-Freudian literature on dreams, mapping the range of contradictory positions—from radical depreciation of dream-life to its over-estimation—across the dimensions of associative logic, psychic capacity, memory, time, and moral feeling, thereby establishing the theoretical problem-space that Freud's own dream-interpretation will claim to resolve.

    Utterances like those of Schubert, that the dream frees the mind from the power of outer nature, that it liberates the soul from the chains of the sensual

36. #36

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

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

    Theoretical move: The passage surveys pre-Freudian dream theories — from Delage's unadjusted impressions, through Burdach and Purkinje's restorative views, to Scherner's symbolising phantasy — to map the theoretical poles between which dream explanation oscillates, implicitly positioning Freud's own approach as the synthesis that salvages Scherner's insight (body-symbolisation) while grounding it scientifically.

    Burdach and others apparently consider this revelling in the free use of one's own powers as a state in which the mind refreshes itself and takes on new strength for the day work, something after the manner of a vacation holiday.

37. #37

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) SOMATIC SOURCES OF DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud systematically critiques the somatic theory of dream-formation—which reduces dreams to nerve and bodily stimuli—by exposing its explanatory inadequacy: it cannot account for the selection among possible interpretations of a stimulus, the "peculiar choice" of dream imagery, or why somatic excitation sometimes fails to produce dreams at all; this clears the ground for relocating the essential motive for dreaming within psychic life.

    Scherner not only gave a poetically appreciative, glowing and vivid description of the psychic peculiarities which develop in the course of dream formation

38. #38

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) REGARD FOR PRESENTABILITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces 'regard for presentability' (Darstellbarkeit) as a third factor in dream-work alongside condensation and displacement, arguing that abstract dream-thoughts are systematically recast into visual/figurative language to enable dramatisation, with word-play and verbal ambiguity serving both condensation and censorship evasion, and that this symbolic-substitutive mechanism is shared across dreams, neuroses, and cultural/mythic tradition.

    For the attainment of its purpose... it simply follows the paths which it finds already marked out in unconscious thought, and gives preference to those transformations of the suppressed material which may become conscious also in the form of wit and allusion, and with which all the fancies of neurotics are filled.

39. #39

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) WAKING CAUSED BY THE DREAM—THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM—THE ANXIETY DREAM**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a functional theory of the dream as a psychic compromise-formation: the dream serves as a "safety-valve" that allows unconscious wish-energy to discharge through regression to perception while the preconscious restricts and neutralises that energy at minimal cost, thereby preserving sleep—thus the dream is not merely a distortion but a mechanism that brings the unconscious back under preconscious domination.

    The dream has taken it upon itself to bring the liberated excitement of the Unc. back under the domination of the preconscious; it thus affords relief for the excitement of the Unc. and acts as a safety-valve for the latter

40. #40

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.25

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > BODIES ON THE COUCH

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the mirror stage and the Joycean body as Lacanian anchors to argue that trans embodiment reveals a structural feature of all subjectivity—namely, that the body is never naturally "owned" but is always a fragile, externally mediated construction—thereby reframing gender transition away from the "wrong body" myth toward a Lacanian understanding of identification, fragmentation, and the ego's dependence on idealized images.

    This notion resonates with the intricate relationship that trans individuals have with their own bodies—wherein a form of artistry, akin to that of Joyce, manifests in the realm of trans artificiality.

41. #41

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.75

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > BEAUTY

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that beauty functions as a sublimatory and aesthetic mechanism through which Schreber negotiates the psychotic foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the impossibility of feminine representation, reclaiming Malabou's concept of plasticity as a creative act of self-transformation rather than merely a symptom of delusion. Lacan's reframing of Schreber's experience as "transsexual jouissance" and a "push-towards-Woman" is thereby grounded in an aesthetics of femininity that exceeds the phallic-Oedipal framework.

    Beauty served as a sublimatory ideal, a way of reconfiguring the 'threatening ignominy' of his transformation.

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.22

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

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

    the revolution would inaugurate a society where sublimation took the place of repression or where repression was no longer omnipresent.

43. #43

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.31

    FINDIN G SATI SFAC TION UN SATI SF YIN G

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's later theory — the compulsion to repeat as itself satisfying — undermines the liberatory political promise of early Freudian Marxism (Adorno et al.), and that capitalism's hold on subjects derives not from imposed dissatisfaction but from the satisfaction subjects already derive from their own repetition of loss and dissatisfaction.

    The popularity of astrology columns in newspapers, even if one reads them just for fun, signals the existence and repression of desires that the system cannot gratify.

44. #44

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.53

    THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS > BARRIER S WITHOU T B OUNDARIE S

    Theoretical move: Capitalism sustains itself by exploiting the structure of desire: it converts the subject's constitutive loss into perpetual dissatisfaction, thereby capturing subjects within a fantasy of the lost object while simultaneously delivering (unacknowledged) satisfaction through repetition of failure; liberation requires recognizing this self-satisfaction and divesting from the logic of success.

    Such subjects don't simply settle for less than satisfying objects… but instead see their satisfaction in the object's inadequacy.

45. #45

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.105

    SAC R IFIC E BEC OMIN G SEC UL AR

    Theoretical move: Capitalism does not abolish sacrifice but secularizes it — migrating it from visible ritual into the invisible everyday acts of production and consumption — and this secularization is theoretically legible only when we recognise that, for the subject of the signifier, loss is the very structure of value: the lost object is what every actual present object substitutes for, making sacrifice constitutive of desire and satisfaction rather than merely archaic.

    Sacrifi ce migrates from the transcendent site of the ritual into everyday life. Th is migration of sacrifi ce from the sacred realm to the everyday has the eff ect of rendering sacrifi ce common and simultaneously making it seem a thing of the past.

46. #46

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.110

    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.

    Sacrifi ce, as the source of value, has a far more fundamental role within capitalist society than profi t, just as it does within every society.

47. #47

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.124

    HIDDE N E N JOYME N T AND ITS V IC I SSIT UDE S

    Theoretical move: Against Bataille's ontology of excess energy, McGowan argues that capitalism does not abolish sacrifice but renders it invisible and multiplies it structurally; reactionary responses (terrorism, fundamentalism) misread this hiddenness as absence, thereby reinforcing capitalist ideology rather than subverting it.

    It is the creative power of sacrifice that generates its appeal... sacrifice enables us to differentiate, to create a value where none otherwise exists.

48. #48

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.181

    THE V IRT UE S OF IN TE R RUP TION

    Theoretical move: Capitalism does not merely demand pure productivity but structurally requires its interruption: impotentiality and withdrawal from the system paradoxically generate new surplus value, which is why neither Marx's prediction of capitalism's decay nor Agamben's advocacy of impotentiality as resistance straightforwardly escapes the capitalist logic that recuperates refusal as fuel for renewed accumulation.

    Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) is simply a urinal torn from the system of productivity, an interruption of that system... Many art historians consider it one of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century.

49. #49

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.185

    THE V IRT UE S OF IN TE R RUP TION > SLE E PIN G W ITH THE E NE M Y

    Theoretical move: Capitalism is structurally distinguished from traditional societies by its capacity to absorb and even depend upon acts of nonproductivity and refusal; the passage argues that genuine critique of capitalism therefore cannot rest on resistance alone but must reorient subjectivity toward the means (nonproductivity) as an end in itself, thereby exposing and undermining the teleological logic of capitalist productivity from within its own immanent requirements.

    Rather than harming capitalism, sexual liberation helped to save it.

50. #50

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.189

    THE IMM ANE N T ALTE R NATI V E

    Theoretical move: Against both resistance-politics and utopian communist blueprints, McGowan argues that the alternative to capitalism is already immanent within it as the 'means without end' — privileging the means over the final cause constitutes a philosophical act that reveals, rather than constructs, a post-capitalist order already latent in the present system.

    The product becomes a by-product of the means, not the end that the means aims at accomplishing.

51. #51

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.194

    OBTAININ G WH AT YOU D ON' T WAN T

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that love—distinguished from romance—is constitutively structured by dissymmetry and disruption rather than complementarity, and that this structure (visible already in Plato's Symposium) is precisely what capitalism must neutralize by transforming love into romance, which reduces the Other to a mere object of desire.

    Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object.

52. #52

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.206

    ROM AN TIC C OME DIE S AND LOV E C OME DIE S

    Theoretical move: Romantic comedies ideologically transform love into romance by eliminating love's traumatic core and rendering it a profitable commodity; authentic love, by contrast, disrupts social recognition and status, working against the capitalist logic of acquisition that romance serves.

    the romanticization of love or transformation of love into a commodity—manifests itself in the montage sequences that populate almost every entry in the genre.

53. #53

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.229

    A LIFE WORTH LI V IN G

    Theoretical move: Capitalism transforms but does not eliminate the sublime: it subtracts the traumatic, awe-inspiring figure of traditional sublimity and replaces it with a more tolerable, less satisfying version, thereby securing subjects' libidinal investment in a system that would otherwise offer no enjoyment. Sublimation—producing an unreachable object that animates the subject through necessary failure—is identified as the structural mechanism underlying all social reproduction.

    The act of sublimation occurs when the subject creates an object that is out of reach, but it is precisely the status of being out of reach that serves to animate the subject.

54. #54

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.231

    M ARX C ON TR A M ARX

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Marx's apparent self-contradiction between the desublimating logic of capital (Communist Manifesto) and the sublime mystification of the commodity (Capital) is not a break but a causal sequence: capitalism destroys traditional transcendence only to reinstate it as an immanent sublime internal to the commodity form, whose jouissance derives precisely from its inutility.

    capitalism destroys the traditional form of sublimation in order to prepare the ground for the new form it would usher in. Initially, the desublimating effect of capital removes any transcendent place from the social terrain

55. #55

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.236

    THEOLO GIC AL COMMODITIES

    Theoretical move: The commodity's sublimity is a purely formal effect produced by the structure of capitalist exchange—specifically by the barrier/packaging that functions as the object-cause of desire—rather than by any content; advertisements are therefore the true site of satisfaction, since they sustain the promise of transcendence that no empirical commodity can deliver.

    The sublimation of the commodity is a formal operation that emerges out of the basic structure of capitalist exchange: this exchange carries with it the power of sublimation.

56. #56

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.240

    DR I V IN G THE C AR OFF THE LOT

    Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the structure of desire by keeping the sublime perpetually deferred in a futural immanence: the commodity's sublimity evaporates at the moment of acquisition, compelling the subject to artificial strategies (security systems, anticipated threats) that recreate distance—and the Hegelian critique of Kantian morality's 'future sublime' doubles as an implicit critique of capitalism's own deferral structure, pointing toward a 'present sublime' as the condition of an egalitarian alternative.

    Theorists of capitalism chronicle the desublimation of the commodity through the terminology they employ to describe the process of consumption.

57. #57

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.242

    HEGE L'S C ON TR IBU TION TO THE C R ITIQUE OF COMMODIT Y FETISHISM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Hegel's critique of the Kantian 'ought' (Sollen) provides the philosophical lever for a critique of commodity fetishism: where Kant relocates the sublime immanently but retains its futural distance, Hegel collapses that distance by insisting the moral deed is already accomplished, a move that, translated into political economy, destroys the commodity's hold by locating satisfaction in the form itself rather than deferring it to future fulfilment.

    Though the moral law represents an internalization of sublimity so that the figure of the sublime no longer appears in the natural world, Kant actually retains the distance that separates the subject from the sublime.

58. #58

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.247

    A SATI SFIE D OR IE N TALI SM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that orientalism is a structural product of capitalism's commodity-sublime logic — the exoticism of the Other is an extension of commodity fetishism — and that Coppola's *Lost in Translation* performs an antiorientalist move not by revealing an 'authentic' Japan but by relocating sublimity in the act of sublimation itself, thereby invalidating the Other as commodity and opening a Hegelian path beyond capitalist accumulation.

    The sublime is in our act of sublimation, not in the commodity that promises a sublime future.

59. #59

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.250

    THOSE FOR W HOM C APITALI SM I S N OT SUBLIME EN OUGH

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fundamentalism is the internal psychic product of capitalism's broken promise of sublimity, while the true theoretical-political task is to become 'Hegelian rather than Kantian' about the sublime—recognising that failure and immanence, not transcendence, constitute the real nature of the sublime, thereby emancipating oneself from capitalism's obfuscations.

    their attack stemmed from a profound desublimation that affects other non-Islamic fundamentalists as well

60. #60

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.257

    Enjoy, Don't Accumulate

    Theoretical move: The decisive critique of capitalism must begin not from dissatisfaction but from the recognition of the satisfaction capitalism already provides—a satisfaction rooted in loss rather than accumulation. Only by shifting from the logic of accumulation to the logic of satisfaction (acceptance of the lost object) can capitalism be undermined, a move McGowan grounds in a buried sentence from Marx's second volume of Capital and links to Freud's post-1920 thought.

    it is through the banality of the everyday, not in the promised satisfaction of the future, that one discovers the sublime.

61. #61

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.259

    IN TRODU C TION: AF TE R IN J USTIC E AND R E PR E SSION

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnote section providing bibliographic citations and brief scholarly asides for the introduction; it contains no sustained theoretical argument of its own.

    Freud insists on the fundamental difference between sublimation and repression, even though both seem to share the same structure. He champions sublimation as fiercely as he critiques repression. The former enables subjects to find satisfaction and the latter leaves them dissatisfied.

62. #62

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.273

    . THE PE R SI STE N C E OF SAC R IFIC E AF TE R ITS OBSOLESC EN C E

    Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances the theoretical argument that sacrifice under capitalism is not merely destructive but constitutively enjoyable (jouissance-laden), and that capitalism's occlusion of sacrifice—rather than its elimination—is the precondition for modernity's ideological functioning; Marxist, vitalist, and utilitarian critiques fail precisely because they cannot theorize the enjoyment of sacrifice.

    even if it is just sacrificing one's time for the socially useless endeavor of worship. Through the act of sacrifice, we create an absence that serves as a placeholder for the beyond or the sacred.

63. #63

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.289

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

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

    Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 79.

64. #64

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.297

    . THE M AR K ET'S FETI SHI STIC SUBLIME

    Theoretical move: This passage (a footnote/endnote section) develops the theoretical grounding for the chapter's argument that commodity fetishism produces a sublimity rooted in immanent transcendence—a structure Hegel makes possible and Marx theorizes—while also deploying Lacanian concepts (subject supposed to know, lack) to critique orientalism and capitalism's psychic appeal.

    the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an object . . . to the dignity of the Th ing.

65. #65

    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.

    treating everything other than pre-Oedipal 'pee pee' and 'caca'… as 'the mirage of truth' (i.e., as superficial subliminatory façades to be analytically collapsed back into their primitive, infantile points of purported origin)

66. #66

    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 thing speaks of itself

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious, personified as a speaking Thing (la Chose freudienne), is not a hidden depth but a surface-inscribed, linguistically constituted truth that invariably manifests itself — and that the analyst's proper technique is to attend literally to the signifying text of the analysand's speech, treating all analytic material as language-immanent variables.

    **Chunk also engages:**

67. #67

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.54

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively Symbolic rather than Imaginary: needs (hunger as paradigm) are sublated into demand and desire through Imaginary-Symbolic mediation, and post-Freudian reduction of analysis to affective/imaginary phenomena distorts Freud's discovery, culminating in a socio-cultural "general infantilization" through scientistic misidentification with the subject supposed to know.

    The mnemic traces of these attributes/elements open out onto the ontogenetic vicissitudes of subsequent displacements and sublimations.

68. #68

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.61

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Rat Man case as paradigmatic for a structural, transgenerational theory of neurotic etiology: symptoms are encrypted testimonies to symbolically transmitted family debts (signifiers), not to brute biological instincts, and the proper telos of analysis is not happiness/success but the analysand's confrontation with the contingent, factical nonsense—the Freudian Thing—that underpins apparent meaning, achieved by weakening the Imaginary ego to let the Symbolic unconscious speak.

    part of how analysis cures is by turning the (faux) sublimity of neurotic pathos into the ridiculousness of bathos

69. #69

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.134

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

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

    Fort-da is already a rhetorical figure

70. #70

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.224

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "central defect" of post-Freudian theories of transference (genetic/ego-psychological, object-relational, and intersubjective-introjective) is their reduction of the analytic situation to a dual, imaginary relationship, thereby neglecting the symbolic order and the constitutive impasse of desire; against these, Lacan insists that the direction of treatment must be oriented by the patient's signifiers rather than any normalizing ideal of adaptation or harmonious object-love.

    In object relations theory, this notion is linked to oblation, of which, Lacan says, sublimation might be at work. However, we should not confuse this with the perfect orgasm.

71. #71

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.270

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that negation (Verneinung/Bejahung) is not a logical operation but a structural one grounded in the signifying chain: the "failed negation" of the French 'ne' exemplifies how repression and the return of the repressed are identical, and how the subject of desire emerges precisely from the space carved out between the statement and enunciation by this structural capacity for one signifier to replace another — making lack, not fusion or adaptation, the founding condition of both subject and objective reality.

    Are they not just modifications (sublimations?) of the drives themselves, such that one could say that drives always manage to get themselves expressed?

72. #72

    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.

    sublimation [54], [224], [270]

73. #73

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.21

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Freud's Three- Pronged Spear

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's critique of religion operates along three interlocking prongs—wish-fulfillment, superego masochism, and symptomatic compromise-formation—showing how infantile illusion and self-punishing ascesis are not contradictory but complementary modes of controlling helplessness, with Nietzsche's bad conscience serving as a structural precursor to Freud's account of the superego.

    Nietzsche even uses the same word to describe such products: 'sublimation.' 'This uncanny, dreadfully joyous labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself... as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena, also brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation'

74. #74

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.34

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* — the Thing — is not primarily a Kantian noumenal kernel of objects but the inaccessible, anxiety-generating core of the mother's desire encountered in the primordial relation with the fellow human being, making the (m)Other's unknown desire the constitutive ground of subjectivity and the original template for all subsequent object-relations.

    Sublimation is achieved, Lacan says, when 'the object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing.'

75. #75

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.57

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* does not disappear from Lacan's thought after Seminar VII but is progressively replaced by *objet petit a*, which functions as the trace of the Thing; this substitution is theoretically motivated by the need to avoid reifying the Thing, which is ultimately a locus of pure lack—not a substance but something purely supposed by the subject.

    In the Ethics, Lacan's claim was that sublimation elevates the object 'to the dignity of the Thing.'

76. #76

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.74

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix > It Speaks

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates on two irreducible dimensions—a semantic pole anchoring definite meaning and a "mantic" pole opening toward das Ding as pure lack—and that this bifold matrix grounds both the psychoanalytic method (free association, the slip of the tongue) and the quasi-religious capacity to create ex nihilo, illustrated by Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier of signifying itself.

    In such a context, the object in question becomes a container of absolute sublimity. No longer a pot, bowl, or jug, we might say, but a chalice.

77. #77

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.80

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Force

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that archaic Greek religion—its temple architecture, ritual sacrifice, and pantheon—can be read through Lacan's framework as a structural apparatus for staging the Real: the temple encloses the void of the Thing, sacrifice reenacts the birth of the signifier (the "murder of the thing"), and the gods themselves are modes by which the Real is revealed, not simply screened.

    Lacan offers a parallel account. He poses the temple as a cardinal example of his definition of sublimation, in which 'a work of art always involves encircling the Thing.'

78. #78

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.87

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Agon of Forces

    Theoretical move: By reconstructing the archaic Greek ontology as one of "no things, only forces," Boothby argues that the Greek gods represent more-than-human natural forces arranged in a hierarchical agon, and uses this to ground a Lacanian conception of the big Other as the order of cosmic precincts of power, with fate (moira) as its ultimate, unknowable face.

    Sacrifices were made in hopes of inviting the larger forces into concert with one's own purposes, or at least of evading their vengeful opposition.

79. #79

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.94

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Myth Was Not Proto- Science

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Greek myth's true function was not proto-scientific explanation but a deliberate aesthetic and ethical opening onto the unknowable Real; by mobilizing Lacan's concept of das Ding and his gloss on mythos, Boothby reframes myth as a form of sublimation that intentionally preserves the inscrutability of the divine rather than resolving it into credible narrative.

    On the side of its aesthetic function, myth achieved an effect of sublimation exactly as Lacan defines it: elevating the object to the dignity of the Thing. For Nietzsche, the gods of the Greek myths constituted 'a beautiful dream image.'

80. #80

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.98

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Myth Was Not Proto- Science > The Archaic Ethos

    Theoretical move: The archaic Greek ethos, exemplified through the mythic figure of the Gorgon and Homeric heroism, constitutes an ethical structure organized around the confrontation with das Ding (the void, death, radical unknowing): true virtue consists in proximity to — not mastery over — the abyss, making the mortal's inferiority to the gods paradoxically the ground of the hero's supreme ethical dignity.

    Courage elevated the hero to a kind of godlike status of his own... The resulting picture might be compared to a jeweler's diamond that shines forth even more dazzlingly when laid on a jet-black pillow.

81. #81

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.120

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Terms of the Deal

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that from a Lacanian perspective, the Abrahamic covenant's demand for circumcision instantiates the "mark of the cut" — a voluntary symbolic submission to the law of desire passing through the Other — thereby inaugurating a religion of inward subjectivity over pagan externalism, and marking a decisive shift in the history of sacrifice from quantitative object-value to pure intentional devotion.

    By this route, the Jewish covenant marks an epoch-making shift away from a life in thrall to externalities in the direction of a purely inward life of the spirit.

82. #82

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.121

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

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

    the whole point of the story is to introduce us to the abyssal space of spiritual inwardness, to reveal how the heart of the monotheistic believer is tensed by a dizzying range of undecidables.

83. #83

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

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

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

    the service of mere utility gives way to something over and beyond the regime of practical necessity

84. #84

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.150

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > From Circumcision to Crucifixion

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that bodily mutilation rituals in Judaism (circumcision) and Christianity (crucifixion) operate as structurally distinct symbolic operations: circumcision establishes the signifier of the phallus and holds open the regime of signification, while crucifixion installs a phantasmatic identification with the objet a that risks collapsing into a narcissistic-masochistic perversion rather than genuine opening toward the Other.

    In this self-flagellating identification with the objet a, Christian ascetics offer themselves as the privileged object of desire.

85. #85

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.153

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that crucifixion, read through the intersection of Lacanian and Hegelian frameworks, figures not as sacrificial atonement but as the subject's embrace of the Other's foreignness as an opening to what is unknown in itself — a "dying away" of the ego that parallels Lacan's rereading of Freud's *Wo Es war, soll Ich werden* and Hegel's dialectical conception of love as constitutive self-division, which in turn grounds a psychoanalytic ethics of non-judgement toward the analysand.

    crucifixion marks the event of rebirth in the here and now

86. #86

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.173

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Other Paths, Other Gods

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the three Abrahamic/Western religious traditions represent a progressive trajectory of increasing directness in approaching *das Ding* — from Greek paganism's indirect relation to unknowing, through Jewish monotheism's concentration of the unknown in an inscrutable deity, to Christianity's most radical move: fully restoring the abyssal Thing to its primordial site in the relation with the human Other, reframed as the imperative to love what is unknown and threatening.

    religions variously stylize the relation to unknowing

87. #87

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.175

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Religious Symptom

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Lacan's tripartite RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) framework to argue that the three Abrahamic-plus-Greek traditions are each symptomatic formations organized around a defensive response to das Ding: Greek polytheism as imaginary, Judaism as symbolic, and Christianity as the religion of the Real—and therefore the most extravagantly symptomatic, generating both the greatest defenses and the greatest historical violence. Religion itself is thus theorized as the most elemental and ubiquitous human symptom, substitutable only by other forms of sublimation.

    Human beings can wean themselves from the religious symptom only through other forms of sublimation— one or another means of 'raising the object to the dignity of das Ding'

88. #88

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.178

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

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

    In moksha, the subject achieves the ultimate sublimation, the sublime transformation of the ego itself.

89. #89

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.189

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing!

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that money in capitalist culture functions as a phantasmatic incarnation of *das Ding*, structuring social relations by both intensifying and defending against the anxiety produced by the unknown Thing in the Other — capitalism thereby operates as a religion, with the market economy displacing the "human economy" of gift-exchange that kept subjects entangled with the Other's desire.

    The consumer experiences the very opposite of sublimation. The object is not raised to the dignity of the Thing. On the contrary, when money has been traded for the commodity, das Ding is degraded to the status of a pathetic object.

90. #90

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.218

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

    Theoretical move: This notes section maps the theoretical genealogy of *das Ding* and *objet petit a* across Lacan's seminars, documenting the Thing's partial eclipse by the object a while tracing its persistent appearances and its structural relationships to the Other, the subject, fantasy, sublimation, and the paternal metaphor.

    Todd McGowan provides an excellent commentary, with special reference to sublimation, on the strange appearance and even stranger (near) disappearance of the notion of das Ding in Lacan's seventh seminar.

91. #91

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.244

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 244–247) listing conceptual terms, proper names, and their page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage but reveals the conceptual architecture of Boothby's text by mapping Lacanian concepts (das Ding, objet a, jouissance, sujet supposé savoir, sexuation, etc.) onto comparative religion.

    crucifixion: … as sacrifice, 133–34, 217n7 … God, Christian: … as waste object, 140–41

92. #92

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.250

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is an index page (pp. 250) from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive in itself but maps the key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts deployed throughout the work, including das Ding, objet a, sexuation, the subject supposed to know, the symbolic, symptom, and the void in relation to religion and the sacred.

    sublimation: vs. consumption, 180; Nietzsche on, 12; as pacifying, 17

93. #93

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.20

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > You're No Good

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis poses a fundamental challenge to all emancipatory politics by revealing that the Good is constituted by its own prohibition (das Ding), making antagonism not a resolvable conflict but an internal, constitutive feature of the social order — a position that differentiates Freud from both liberal reconciliation theories and Marx's ultimate vision of overcoming antagonism.

    psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and a certain literature, on the other, perhaps constitute possible instances of revolt culture.

94. #94

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.52

    I > 1 > Th e Joy of Not Surviving

    Theoretical move: McGowan reinterprets the death drive not as a drive toward biological death but as a compulsion to repeat the foundational experience of losing the privileged object — the very loss that constitutes the desiring subject — arguing that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally tied to this loss rather than to pleasure, and that the fort/da game, tragedy, and the pleasure principle itself are all best understood in this framework.

    We can also understand the appeal of tragedy as an art form... tragedy does not simply depict a random loss... The enjoyment that tragedy produces in the spectator occurs through the repetition of sacrifice.

95. #95

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.97

    I > 3 > Analyzing the Rich

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that class privilege functions as a systematic barrier to enjoyment by demanding repression and producing only a circuitous, unrecognized enjoyment (outrage, disgust), so that psychoanalysis's critique of capitalism is not that it produces too much enjoyment but that it structurally prevents subjects from avowing their own enjoyment—making the psychoanalytic rallying cry "more enjoyment" rather than "less."

    the joke, in order to remain acceptable, must undergo more and more deformation and repression, so that its original sexual dimension appears only obliquely or indirectly.

96. #96

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.102

    I > 3 > Th e Cost of Recognition

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the pursuit of social recognition structurally forecloses enjoyment because recognition operates at the level of the signifier's demand while concealing the Other's unarticulated desire; genuine jouissance is incompatible with validation by the Other, and the subject's sacrificed enjoyment feeds the social order, making the pursuit of recognition a form of subjection rather than liberation—a critique that exposes the limit of recognition-based political projects.

    The demand aims to redirect subjects away from their own enjoyment and toward social productivity. This turn is unimaginable without guilt.

97. #97

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.144

    I > Changing the World > Th e Obscenity of Revelation

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the traumatic realization of fantasy — its exposure within external reality — is not a failure but the very mechanism by which fantasy transforms social reality, because the form of fantasy (its hiddenness and transgressive structure) rather than its content constitutes the subject's obscene enjoyment, and only by shattering this private reservation does the subject become an agent of social transformation rather than a neurotic refuge-seeker.

    In certain favourable circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming permanently estranged from it

98. #98

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.207

    I > Against Knowledge > Too Much Democracy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy must be reconceived not as a social good but as a lost object—a groundless, excessive enjoyment beyond the capitalist order—so that it can mobilize subjects through sacrifice of interest rather than through rational self-interest, reversing the domestication of democracy by capitalism and aligning it with psychoanalytic emancipation via enjoyment.

    democracy does not serve our interests. Capitalism delivers the goods — and the good — just as efficiently, if not more so, without democracy as with it.

99. #99

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.220

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Marx with the Philosophers

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's political project shares a fundamental structure with Western philosophy's politics: both treat the critique of fantasy as the precondition for authentic political action, identifying fantasy (whether as commodity fetishism, individualist ideology, or the mystification of profit) as the barrier to class consciousness and emancipation — thereby making the attack on fantasy the sine qua non of Marxist politics.

    The commodity becomes a fantasmatic object, completely divorced from the process of production — the social relations — that created it... they implicitly deny the role that labor plays in the creation of commodity value.

100. #100

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.245

     I > 9 > Fighting for Death in the Guise of Life

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that American social conservatism's "culture of life" rhetoric is structurally a culture of death: it privileges limit, negation, and the interruption of life's flow as the only source of value, thereby aligning itself—beneath its own stated position—with the death-affirming logic it projects onto its enemies.

     Christ's death, a death that redeems the world and gives it meaning, stands out in contrast with the banality of life in modernity.

101. #101

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.306

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 1. The Formation of Subjectivity

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the theoretical argument that loss is constitutive of value, subjectivity, and drive, reinterpreting Freud's death drive as the theoretical elaboration of repetition compulsion and positioning Hegel—rather than Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—as Freud's closest philosophical predecessor through the shared recognition of a structural limit (nonknowledge/unconscious desire) within the project of knowledge.

     The structure of the drive would manifest itself elsewhere.

102. #102

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.317

     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).

     Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation

103. #103

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.330

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

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

     Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge ma: mit Press, 2002), 164.

104. #104

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_59"></span>**ego-ideal**

     Theoretical move: Lacan systematically differentiates three Freudian 'formations of the ego'—ego-ideal, ideal ego, and superego—by assigning them to distinct registers (symbolic vs. imaginary vs. unconscious) and developmental moments, thereby grounding their algebraic notation I(A) and i(a) in a structural topology of identification.

     the ego-ideal exerts a conscious pressure towards sublimation and provides the coordinates which enable the subject to take up a sexual position as a man or woman

105. #105

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_63"></span>**ethics**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's analytic ethic is defined against both traditional (Aristotelian/Kantian) ethics and the normative ethics of ego-psychology, positioning it as an ethic of desire — and later of 'speaking well' — that refuses the Sovereign Good, the pleasure principle, and the 'service of goods' in favour of the subject's fidelity to their desire.

     When morality gains the upper hand in this conflict, and the drives are too strong to be sublimated, sexuality is either expressed in perverse forms or repressed.

106. #106

     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_197"></span>**Sublimation**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's reformulation of Freudian sublimation: rather than redirecting the drive to a non-sexual object, Lacan argues that sublimation changes the object's *position* within the structure of fantasy by elevating it to the dignity of the Thing, thereby grounding sublimation in the symbolic order, ethics, and the death drive rather than in biology or social prohibition alone.

     sublimation relocates an object in the position of the THING. The Lacanian formula for sublimation is thus that 'it raises an object…to the dignity of the Thing' (S7, 112).

107. #107

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_44"></span>**death**

     Theoretical move: Death is a multi-dimensional concept in Lacan, functioning simultaneously as constitutive of the Symbolic order (the symbol murders the thing), as a topological limit (between-two-deaths), as a philosophical inheritance from Hegel and Heidegger, as an analytic stance (the analyst as 'dummy'/dead), and as the structuring question of obsessional neurosis.

     it is the function of beauty to reveal man's relationship to his own death—S7, 295

108. #108

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_21"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0037"></span>**art**

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

     He explained artistic creation by reference to the concept of SUBLIMATION, a process in which sexual libido is redirected towards non-sexual aims.

109. #109

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     2

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the programme of the pleasure principle governs mental life but is structurally incompatible with reality, and surveys the various strategies (intoxication, sublimation, drive-control, isolation, etc.) by which human beings attempt to manage this constitutive tension between the pursuit of happiness and the inevitability of suffering — positioning religion as one palliative among others rather than as a unique answer to the purpose of life.

     Another technique for avoiding suffering makes use of the displacements of the libido that are permitted by our psychical apparatus... Sublimation of the drives plays a part in this.

110. #110

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     2

     Theoretical move: Freud surveys the available techniques for achieving happiness and avoiding suffering—art, love, beauty, narcissistic withdrawal, religious delusion, neurosis—and concludes that none can fully satisfy the programme imposed by the pleasure principle; the best strategy is a flexible economy of the individual libido rather than any single exclusive technique.

     For the second of these types the nature of his gifts and the extent to which he is able to sublimate his drives will determine where he should lodge his interests.

111. #111

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is itself the primary source of neurotic suffering—its demands for instinctual renunciation generate unhappiness—while simultaneously being the very apparatus through which humanity seeks protection from nature, thus making any simple "return to primitive conditions" self-undermining. The passage pivots on the paradox that technological mastery (the "god with artificial limbs") has not increased happiness, relocating the unconquerable element of nature inward, in the psyche.

     Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience, which he embodied in his gods… Man has now come close to reaching these ideals and almost become a god himself

112. #112

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a structural homology between civilizational development and individual libidinal development, arguing that civilization is built on drive-renunciation (via repression, suppression, and sublimation), that order is a compulsion to repeat modelled on natural regularities, and that the tension between individual freedom and communal restriction is the fundamental, potentially irreconcilable problem of civilization.

     Sublimation of the drives is a particularly striking feature of cultural development, which makes it possible for the higher mental activities – scientific, artistic and ideological – to play such a significant role in civilized life.

113. #113

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     4

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is founded on two forces—Eros (love/libido) and Ananke (necessity/work)—but that the same civilizing process structurally conflicts with sexuality by diverting libidinal energy into aim-inhibited, sublimated forms, thereby restricting and damaging sexual life as an inherent and not merely contingent consequence.

     obliging them to sublimate their drives – a task for which women have little aptitude. No person has unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal

114. #114

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     5

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is constitutively threatened by an innate human drive to aggression that is irreducible to socio-economic conditions, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor functions as civilization's ideological demand precisely because it runs counter to this fundamental hostility—thus establishing the antagonism between Eros and aggression as the central engine of cultural development.

     summoning up the largest possible measure of aim-inhibited libido in order to reinforce the communal bonds with ties of friendship

115. #115

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     7

     Theoretical move: Freud resolves the apparent contradiction between two accounts of conscience's origin by arguing that the sense of guilt is fundamentally the expression of the ambivalence-conflict between Eros and the Death Drive: whether aggression is acted out (parricide) or suppressed, guilt is inevitable, and civilization's expansion necessarily intensifies this guilt by transferring the Oedipal conflict onto the social mass.

     the intensification of the sense of guilt, perhaps to a degree that the individual finds hard to endure, is indissolubly linked with it, as a consequence of the innate conflict of ambivalence

116. #116

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     8

     Theoretical move: Freud extends the Eros/death-drive formula from individual psychology to civilization by arguing that civilization develops its own super-ego whose ethical demands (especially "Love thy neighbour") are therapeutically defective for the same reasons as the individual super-ego, and tentatively raises the diagnostic possibility that entire civilizations may be neurotic—while cautioning against mechanical application of psychoanalytic concepts beyond their original sphere.

     the development undergone by the individual; moreover, it was said to have revealed the secret of organic life in general

117. #117

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     8

     Theoretical move: Freud frames civilization's fate as a conflict between Eros and the death/aggression drive, arguing that cultural progress (upright posture, organic repression of smell, sublimation through work) channels but never fully resolves the tension between libidinal binding and destructive drives—leaving the outcome of this struggle genuinely open.

     Special satisfaction comes from professional activity when this is freely chosen and therefore makes possible the use, through sublimation, of existing inclinations

118. #118

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

     <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Jungle/darkside music as a cultural-theoretical site where jouissance, the death drive, and dystopian negativity paradoxically flip into a utopian gesture, while the concept of 'scenius' (collective anonymous production) is posed against individualist celebrity as the structural condition of radical cultural innovation.

     Pop was the portal out of the prosaic. Music was only part of it. Art pop was a finishing school for working class autodidacts, where, by following up the clues left behind by earlier pioneers…you could learn about things that weren't on the formal curriculum.

119. #119

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

     <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from an interview with Leyland Kirby (The Caretaker) about hauntological music-making to a theoretical argument that hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension—phonography over phonocentrism—and that The Shining's "ghosts of the Real" must be read psychoanalytically as a fantasmatic, retrospectively posited past structured around repression, superego demands, and libidinal economy.

     these songs that are melancholy even at their most ostensibly joyful, forever condemned to stand in for states that they can evoke but never instantiate.

120. #120

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

     <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Joy Division's depression is not a mood but an ontological-philosophical position that operates beyond the pleasure principle—a Schopenhauerian diagnosis of the Will's obscene undead insatiability—and that what makes it theoretically distinct from ordinary sadness or rock nihilism is the total absence of an object-cause, making it structurally homologous to Lacanian melancholia while functioning as a dangerously seductive half-truth about the human condition.

     Suicide was a guarantee of authenticity, the most convincing of signs that you were 4 Real. Suicide has the power to transfigure life... into a cold myth, as solid, seamless and permanent as the 'marble and stone'

121. #121

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

     <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.

     The detachment, naturally, is a performance, concealing anxiety even as it sublimates it.

122. #122

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

     <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses The Caretaker's music as a diagnostic object to argue that postmodern culture suffers from a structural anterograde amnesia: not nostalgia as longing for the past, but an incapacity to form new memories of the present, which he links to late-capitalist temporal disorder and the death of rave futurity.

     Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom was a kind of replicant mnemonic implant, a false memory of the tearoom pop of the twenties and thirties.

123. #123

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

     <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Joy Division as a cultural symptom—their music indexes the threshold moment (1979–80) when social-democratic, Fordist modernity collapsed into neoliberal control society, arguing that the band's depressive, catatonic expressionism is not merely aesthetic but diagnostic of a historically specific breakdown of subjectivity, community, and futurity.

     cavorting around with beery, leery Keith Allen…was a consummate act of desublimation

124. #124

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

     <span id="Chapter7.htm_page100"></span>Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and ‘the 70s On Trial’

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses the Jimmy Savile scandal to theorise how power structures warp the experience of reality itself—what was "out in the open" could not be acknowledged because institutional authority produces a cognitive dissonance that forecloses the naming of abuse in the present, confining it structurally to the past; fiction (Peace's noir) functions as the only available register for a Real that consensual reality cannot accommodate.

     The roots of 70s television were here, in these ballrooms and dancehalls, their seediness waiting to be transubstantiated into light entertainment.

125. #125

     Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.50

     **2** > <span id="page-38-0"></span>**The Adversary**

     Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's critique of his analytic "adversaries" (ego psychologists and Kleinian object-relations theorists) turns on two axes: their fetishization of clinical forms over Freud's living spirit, and their reductive pre-Oedipal reductivism—both of which are shown to be impossible by the Nachträglichkeit structure that permanently mediates and liquidates any access to a pre-Oedipal "real." The passage's deeper theoretical move is to show that transference neurosis maps the analysand's libidinal economy onto the analyst-as-Ur-Other, and that psychoanalytic truth, once discovered, propagates itself even through its falsifications.

     treating everything other than pre-Oedipal pee pee and caca…as 'the mirage of truth' (i.e., as superficial subliminatory façades to be analytically collapsed back into their primitive, infantile points of purported origin)

126. #126

     Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.203

     **11**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that biological need (hunger as the oral drive) undergoes a transformational sublation into signifier-mediated demands and desires through Imaginary and Symbolic mediations, and that this Freudian-Lacanian thesis is reinforced by Hegel's (via Kojève) dialectic of recognition, wherein bare survival becomes inextricably entangled with intersubjective recognition—while the ego's resistance to recognizing the unconscious is recast as the Imaginary blocking Symbolic (full) speech.

     The mnemic traces of these attributes/elements open out onto the ontogenetic vicissitudes of subsequent displacements and sublimations (i.e., other objects providing other satisfactions).

127. #127

     Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.231

     **12**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis works not by destroying the ego but by attuning consciousness to the Symbolic rather than the Imaginary register, such that the truth of the unconscious is revealed not as profound meaning but as opaque, material, contingent nonsense—an anti-hermeneutical conclusion where analytic endings are reductions to absurdity rather than arrivals at depth, grounded in the pure materiality of the signifier.

     part of how analysis cures is by turning the (faux) sublimity of neurotic pathos into the ridiculousness of bathos

128. #128

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *The Truth of Psychology and the Psychology of Truth* 79 > *The Object of Psychology Is Defined in Essentially Relativistic Terms*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic concepts—particularly identification, the complex, imago, and libido—constitute a genuinely relativistic (rather than merely subjective) psychological science, and distinguishes two uses of libido (energetic vs. substantialist) to show how analytic theory can advance toward positive knowledge of psychical reality.

     it is the metabolism of the sexual function in man that Freud designates as the basis of the infinitely varied 'sublimations' manifested in his behavior.

129. #129

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > IOI Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aggressiveness is constitutively tied to narcissistic structure and ego formation—not a secondary or contingent feature—such that the ego's paranoiac structure, its méconnaissance, and its identificatory operations (including the Oedipus complex) all revolve around an irreducible aggressive tension that no sublimation or 'oblativity' can dissolve, and which grounds both symptom-formation and cultural subordination.

     In its normal form, its function is that of sublimation, which precisely designates an identificatory reshaping of the subject

130. #130

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > Presentation on Transference

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes transference not as a mysterious affective phenomenon but as the appearance, at moments of stagnation in the analytic dialectic, of the subject's permanent modes of constituting objects—while countertransference (Freud's biases, passions, and inadequate information) is identified as the primary cause of the Dora treatment's failure, specifically Freud's over-identification with Herr K and his normative bias toward the paternal figure.

     this mystery drives Dora toward the solution Christianity has offered for this subjective impasse by making woman the object of a divine desire or a transcendent object of desire

131. #131

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis can achieve scientific rigor only by formalizing three essential dimensions—intersubjective logic, the temporality of the subject, and the historical theory of the symbol—drawing on mathematics, linguistics, and the liberal arts tradition rather than biologistic or phenomenological shortcuts.

     it expresses nothing less than the re-creation of human meaning in an arid era of scientism.

132. #132

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's interventions—including abstention, session length, and temporal punctuation—constitute the junction between the Symbolic and the Real, and that the variable-length session ("short sessions") has a precise dialectical function: by shattering discourse it brings forth genuine speech, countering the obsessive's strategy of working-through as seduction of the master.

     not only is the subject's creation [oeuvre] taken away from him by another—the constitutive relation of all labor—but the subject's recognition of his own essence in his creation, in which this labor finds its justification, eludes him no less, for he himself 'is not in it.'

133. #133

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.279

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's death instinct not as a biological notion but as the structural limit of the subject's historicity, grounded in the negativity of speech and the symbolic order—the death instinct names the point where the subject's historical function encounters its irreducible finitude, and repetition automatism is its temporal expression in transference, while the symbol itself (Fort! Da!) is founded on the "killing of the thing" through language.

     he raises his desire to a second power. For his action destroys the object that it causes to appear and disappear by bringing about its absence and presence in advance. His action thus negativizes the force field of desire in order to become its own object to itself.

134. #134

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *A Bat Question: Examining It in the Light of Day*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the crisis of therapeutic criteria in psychoanalysis reveals a constitutive méconnaissance: the field's "extraterritoriality" from external scientific validation is mirrored by an internal misrecognition, and the only available criterion for what constitutes psychoanalysis is tautological—defined solely by who practices it—thereby making ethical rigor and theoretical formalization, not therapeutic outcome, the true standard of analytic practice.

     This mystification—which is, in fact, the technical term for any process that hides from the subject the origin of the effects of his own action

135. #135

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.457

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > 777. *The Letter, being, and the other* > *Notes*

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of footnotes and editorial additions to "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," acknowledging theoretical debts (to Jakobson, Saussure, Freud) and polemical remarks (against the IPA and ego psychology), with no sustained new theoretical argument — it is apparatus, not exposition.

     the typology neglects the structure in which the subject is caught up in fantasy, the drive, and sublimation, respectively.

136. #136

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.524

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > 777. *Where Do We Stand Regarding Transference?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan diagnoses three systematic distortions in the psychoanalytic theory of transference—geneticism/defense analysis, object-relations theory, and intersubjective introjection—arguing that each partial theory produces a correspondingly deformed technique, and that all three fail because they reduce the analytic situation to a dyadic relation, thereby missing the symbolic (signifying) structure that governs transference, desire, and the phallus.

     Sublimation may be at work in the 'oblation' that radiates from love, but we should try to go a little further into the structure of the sublime and not confuse it with the perfect orgasm.

137. #137

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.588

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person* > FIGURE 3

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses his optical model to demonstrate its own limits: while the model clarifies the imaginary register and its mirror-play of ego-ideals, it cannot account for the symbolic function of objet petit a, which structures desire as a relation to absence and grounds the true end of analysis — not narcissistic identification but the subject's confrontation with its own abolition in fundamental fantasy.

     Being selected as the index of desire from among the body's appendages, object a is already the exponent of a function, a function that sublimates it even before it exercises the function.

138. #138

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.613

     In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical reading of Jones' theory of symbolism to argue that the signifier—not affect—is what is repressed, and that the phallus exemplifies the signifier's function as marker of the subject's constitutive loss, thereby subordinating Jones' developmental biologism to a properly structural account of desire, condensation, displacement, metaphor, and metonymy.

     this is the usual detour of all sublimation and one can say that, with the exception of physics, this detour has not been completed

139. #139

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.620

     In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism > On an Ex Post Facto Syllabary

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Jones's critique of Silberer and Jung to vindicate his own tripartite distinction of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as the methodological foundation of psychoanalysis, arguing that the "true symbol" is not a figure of the concrete but a signifier marking the place of a constitutive lack, and that confusing the symbolic with the imaginary is the error that opens the door to both "hermeneuticization" and "psychologization" of psychoanalysis.

     Psychical strata are evoked here, displacing the phenomenon by suggesting a possible endoscopy of depths that verge on the sublime.

140. #140

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.652

     Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *On a book by Jean Delay and another by Jean Schlumberger¹*

     Theoretical move: Through a psychoanalytic reading of André Gide's life and love, Lacan argues that desire is constitutively structured by lack and death—that the beloved object is always already "embalmed" by a symbolic subtraction linked to the death drive—against ego-psychological notions of genital/oblative love, revealing the secret of desire as inseparable from the mark death leaves on the flesh when the Word separates it from love.

     everything here is supported by a very old tradition, justifying his mention of the mystical bonds of courtly love. Gide himself was not afraid to relate his union... to Dante's mystical union with Beatrice.

141. #141

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.659

     Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *On a book by Jean Delay and another by Jean Schlumberger¹*

     Theoretical move: Through a reading of Madeleine Gide's act of burning her husband's letters, Lacan identifies a structural truth: the letter comes to occupy the place from which desire has withdrawn, and Madeleine's uncompromising feminine act opens a void in the Other's being that comedy (not tragedy) illuminates—pointing toward the fetishistic nature of subjectivity and the gap between desire and the beloved object.

     the music of a disappointed striving toward beauty

142. #142

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.678

     Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > SCHEMA I

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's apologue from the Critique of Practical Reason as a lever to argue that desire—not the moral law—is the deeper truth that Kant's examples inadvertently reveal, while simultaneously gauging the limits of Sade's attempt to articulate a right to jouissance, showing that Sade's work ultimately fails to transcend the fantasy structure it tries to expose.

     our queen, an appropriate figure with which to designate the daring deeds of courtly love

143. #143

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.765

     On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" by Jean Hyppolite

     Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" argues that negation is not merely a logical operation but a constitutive act — the Aufhebung of repression — whose structure (presenting being in the mode of not-being-it) yields a genesis of thought itself, readable through Hegelian dialectics (negation of negation, Aufhebung) and implicating the primordial couple of Eros/expulsion as the mythical ground of both attributive and existential judgment.

     he does not show how the intellectual separates from the affective, but how the intellectual is that sort of suspension of content for which the somewhat barbaric term 'sublimation' would not be inappropriate.

144. #144

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.844

     Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY "

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes glossing Lacan's "Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality," providing philological, bibliographic, and cross-referential annotations that clarify key Lacanian concepts (phallus as equivalence-function, love as giving what one does not have, sublation) and their debts to Jones, Klein, Horney, Freud, and Seminar VIII.

     She was probably making a virtue of necessity when she kept insisting on the purity of her love ... Lacan comments on the case at length in Seminar IV, chapters 6, 7, and 8.

145. #145

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.357

     The Freudian Thing > or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis > *The Adversary*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian return to meaning is inseparable from a fundamental question of truth: psychoanalysis is not merely a technique of mirage-recognition or an economic re-organization of reality, but the inauguration of a new relation to truth—one that is not reducible to the verity that "something is veritable," but that structurally transforms reality itself.

     how can the sort of hothouse auscultation on which this 'new-look' of analytic experience borders be the final stage in a development that appeared at the outset to open up multiple paths among all the fields of creation?

146. #146

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.405

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956

     Theoretical move: Lacan diagnoses a structural degeneration in post-Freudian psychoanalysis: the foundational conceptual apparatus Freud built around the symbolic order and the signifier has been progressively replaced by an imaginary dyadic relation and pre-conceptual, inarticulate notions (affect, character armor, countertransference, object-relation), producing a clinico-theoretical impasse that can only be overcome by restoring Freud's symbolic-order grounding of the imaginary.

     the treasure in it, treasure that made his followers rich, is the symbolic determination to which the imaginary function is subordinated

147. #147

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.428

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *Notes*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the institutionalization of psychoanalysis has degenerated through imaginary identification—specifically identification with the analyst's ego as the telos of training analysis—producing conformist terror, theoretical stagnation, and a drift toward behaviorism/psychologism, all of which are structurally opposed to Freud's discovery of the primacy of the signifier in intersubjective relations.

     the figure of its promoters' ideals

148. #148

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's article on narcissism to argue that the distinction between egoistical and sexual libido—and the corresponding distinction between neurosis and psychosis—requires the tripartite framework of Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, with the Mirror Stage grounding the imaginary constitution of the ego, and the neurosis/psychosis structural difference hinging on whether the subject retains access to imaginary substitution when withdrawing from reality.

     a directed, sublimated retreat of interest in the world which the anchorite may achieve, and that of the schizophrenic, whose result is however structurally quite distinct

149. #149

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     **vn**

     Theoretical move: Using Melanie Klein's case of Dick, Lacan argues that the subject's entry into the human world is not a matter of ego development but of symbolic integration: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, and it is the analyst's grafting of the Oedipal symbolisation onto the child's imaginary inertia that constitutes the therapeutic act—demonstrating that genuine speech, not language as such, is what coordinates the symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

     He accedes to richer and richer contents, such as to the possibility of defining the contained and the non-contained.

150. #150

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     **Xffl**

     Theoretical move: The Fort/Da game is read as the originary moment where desire becomes human through its entry into language: the symbol's power to negate the thing (the "original murder of the thing") opens the world of negativity, grounds both human discourse and reality, and locates primal masochism at this inaugural negativation; desire thereafter is only ever reintegrated through symbolic nomination, and analytic technique must be understood in terms of freeing speech from its moorings within language.

     No love can be functionally realisable in the human community, save by means of a specific pact… at one and the same time within language and outside of it. That is what we call the function of the sacred

151. #151

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: The passage works through Freud's "On Narcissism" to distinguish two distinct functions—Ideal Ego (*Idealich*) and Ego Ideal (*Ichideal*)—arguing that their coexistence in Freud's text is not a confusion but marks two different structural functions; simultaneously, the passage establishes that both narcissistic and anaclitic object choices are imaginary and grounded in identification, and separates sublimation (object-libido process) from idealization (ego-libido process) as theoretically distinct operations.

     Sublimation is a process involving object libido. In contrast, idealisation deals with the object which has been ennobled, elevated, and it does so without any modification in its nature.

152. #152

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.292

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

     Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's *Verneinung* argues that negation (*Verneinung/dénégation*) is not simply the negation internal to judgement but the very genesis of thought: by presenting one's being in the mode of not being it, the subject achieves a *Aufhebung* of repression that separates the intellectual from the affective, and the analysand's intellectual acceptance of what was denied constitutes a "negation of the negation" that still leaves the repressive process intact.

     he does not show how the intellectual is separated from the affective, but how it, the intellectual, is that sort of suspension of content for which the term, in rather barbaric language, sublimation is not inappropriate.

153. #153

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **Xffl**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Mirror Stage inaugurates a fundamental imaginary alienation in which desire is projected onto the other, generating an irreducible aggression toward the other as the site of that alienation; the symbolic order (language, the Fort/Da game) is the only mediation that rescues the subject from the destructive logic of the imaginary dual relation, while also locating primary masochism and the death drive at the juncture of the imaginary and symbolic.

     He renders himself master of the thing, precisely in so far as he destroys it.

154. #154

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference must be understood through the dialectic of the imaginary and symbolic registers rather than reduced to the real (Ezriel) or to ego-normalization (ego psychology); the imaginary relation, rooted in the mirror stage and the ideal ego, crystallizes transference while the symbolic—via speech and the analyst as mediating Other—enables the subject's integration of repressed history.

     The subject enters into a semi-maniacal state, a sort of sublime release, a freedom from a narcissistic image

155. #155

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the animal ethology of Gestalt-governed sexual behaviour (stickleback dance) as a contrast case to argue that in the human animal, the imaginary function is radically disordered — no image adequately releases sexual behaviour — which is precisely why the mirror apparatus (real image/spherical mirror schema) is needed to theorise how the ego-ideal operates at the joint of the imaginary and the symbolic, and how this bears on the question of the end of analysis.

     Hence sublimation opens up the expedient of satisfying this demand without involving repression. That is successful sublimation.

156. #156

     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.

     sublimation 134. 292. 292n9

157. #157

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a series of aphorisms on the love-desire-jouissance relation, arguing that anxiety mediates between desire and jouissance, that sadism and masochism are not reversible but constitute a fourfold structure each concealing the other's true aim, and that "only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire" — with castration functioning as the structural impasse that governs the encounter between the sexes.

     love is the sublimation of desire... Only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire.

158. #158

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.28

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

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

     In Saint Thomas Aquinas, to mention him by name, some very, very fine things concerning a division of affect... into the concupiscent and the irascible.

159. #159

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

     an unusual emotion emerges along the mysterious paths of a specifically auricular affect that cannot fail to touch, to a truly uncommon degree, all those who come within earshot of them

160. #160

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

     sublimation 145-6, 179-80, 302, 322

161. #161

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anal object (excrement as objet petit a) achieves its subjective function not through the mother's demand alone, but through its structural articulation with castration (- φ): excrement symbolizes phallic loss, grounds obsessional ambivalence, and prefigures the function of the object a as territorial/representative trace — yet this still falls short of explaining how the concealment of the object founds desire as such.

     one prefers all the same to tell him that it would be better to do it with something else, with the little plastic gloves and aprons used by child analysts, or with nice colours that don't smell so bad.

162. #162

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.333

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

     the fate of his symptoms and his sublimations — the possibility is introduced of something else coming in to function that will take on its meaning as what circumvents the central gap of phallic desire

163. #163

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

     Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Buddhist iconography (the Kanzeon/Avalokitesvara/Guanyin statues), Lacan argues that the object of desire (objet petit a) emerges precisely at the limit of the three stages (oral, anal, phallic-castration) as something radically separated off, and that castration's function in the object is illuminated by a culturally specific figure that appears as desire's object while remaining indeterminate with respect to sex—thus the mirror, as field of the Other, is the site where the place of the a first appears.

     the inverse radiance to what one cannot fail to recognize as a long desire, borne throughout the centuries by these recluses unto this divinity of psychologically indeterminate sex.

164. #164

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes artistic creation as sublimation that serves a social function through the dual operation of 'dompte-regard' (taming the gaze) and 'trompe-l'œil' (the lure), arguing that the work satisfies desire by encouraging renunciation and that the painter's success depends not on verisimilitude but on the structural play of the gaze.

     it is a question of creation as Freud designated it, that is to say, as sublimation, and of the value it assumes in a social field.

165. #165

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions painting as the site where Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological challenge to the eye/mind relation converges with psychoanalysis's advance beyond Freud, arguing that the principle of artistic creation cannot be reduced either to the organization of representation or to the artist's originary fantasy, but points toward something that 'stands for' (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) rather than representing.

     Freud always stressed with infinite respect that he did not intend to settle the question of what it was in artistic creation that gave it its true value

166. #166

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > THE LINE AND LIGHT

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorises painting as an 'Apollonian' operation that does not trap the gaze but rather invites the spectator to lay it down, distinguishing this pacifying function from expressionism, which instead satisfies the demand of the gaze in the drive-sense — thereby establishing a structural distinction within the scopic field between the eye as organ and the gaze as object.

     He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one's weapons.

167. #167

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that constitutes alienation; Lacan uses the phenomenon of verbal hallucination—where the subject is immanent in the hallucinatory voice—to reframe the analytic goal not as purification of the percipiens but as the subject's grounding encounter with the object-voice as support.

     We would now say that we base the assurance of the subject in his encounter with the filth that may support him, with the petit a of which it would not be untrue to say that its presence is necessary.

168. #168

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The geometral dimension of vision — exemplified by anamorphosis and Holbein's skull — does not reproduce reality but captures and constitutes the subject within the scopic field, revealing an enigmatic relation between vision, desire, and death.

     the vanity of the arts and sciences—the secret of this picture is given at the moment when, moving slightly away, little by little, to the left, then turning around, we see what the magical floating object signifies. It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death's head.

169. #169

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the enigma of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is fundamentally decoupled from biological rhythm, kinetic discharge, and aim-attainment, establishing the drive as a constant force whose satisfaction does not require reaching its object.

     Freud tells us repeatedly that sublimation is also satisfaction of the drive, whereas it is zielgehemmt, inhibited as to its aim—it does not attain it. Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression.

170. #170

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historiography cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, because sacrifice reveals an irreducible drive to find the desire of the "dark God" in the object of sacrifice; Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers a rare escape, but Kant's moral law is ultimately truer—and closer to pure desire—for psychoanalytic experience.

     the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other

171. #171

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.280

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis occupies a structural position analogous to science—not religion—precisely because it is grounded in the central lack where the subject experiences itself as desire, with the corpus of scientific knowledge functioning as the equivalent of the objet petit a in the subjective relation.

     it manages to rediscover itself marked, in ceremony, with what I will call the same empty face.

172. #172

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions psychoanalytic engagement with painting against both art-historical criticism and Freudian biography/fantasy-reduction, arguing that painting's function must be located at a more radical principle—one that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the gaze begins to open but which psychoanalysis must carry further via the concept of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and the distinction between picture and representation.

     Freud always stressed with infinite respect that he did not intend to settle the question of what it was in artistic creation that gave it its true value.

173. #173

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between psychopathological art and genuine artistic creation, arguing that sublimation structures the painter's work by offering a social function (the 'dompte-regard') that both comforts and encourages renunciation of desire, and that this function is inseparable from—not opposed to—the trompe-l'œil effect, as illustrated by the Zeuxis/Parrhasios opposition.

     For me, it is a question of creation as Freud designated it, that is to say, as sublimation, and of the value it assumes in a social field.

174. #174

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that trompe-l'œil painting does not merely simulate appearance but competes with the Platonic Idea by presenting itself as the appearance that declares its own appearance; the objet petit a is identified as the true stakes around which this combat revolves, making the painter's relation to patronage ultimately a relation to the objet a.

     it is always a question of the objet a, or rather a question of reducing it—which may, at a certain level, strike you as being rather mythical—to an a with which—this is true in the last resort—it is the painter as creator who sets up a dialogue.

175. #175

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the paradox of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is structurally decoupled from biological rhythm and from the attainment of any specific aim, establishing the drive's constancy as irreducible to kinetic or biological models.

     Freud tells us repeatedly that sublimation is also satisfaction of the drive, whereas it is zielgehemmt, inhibited as to its aim—it does not attain it. Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression.

176. #176

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function as rims precisely through the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that whenever non-erogenous zones enter the economy of desire they do so under the sign of desexualization—manifested paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the wider circulation of desire.

     two major aspects of desire as it may emerge in the fall of sexualization—on the one hand, disgust produced by the reduction of the sexual partner to a function of reality

177. #177

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive's turning-inside-out movement through the erogenous zone is structured as an appeal that seeks a response in the Other, and that the drive's proper "organ" is not the biological organ but an ungraspable, circumventable false organ — the objet petit a — whose nature he will illuminate via a myth drawn from Plato's Symposium.

     the function of oblativity emerges. In short, the object, here, is not very far from the domain that is called that of the soul.

178. #178

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historical frameworks cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, which reveals that human desire is fundamentally oriented toward finding evidence of the dark Other's desire in the sacrificial object; only Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers an escape, but Kant's practical reason is ultimately 'more true' because it shows moral law as pure desire culminating in sacrifice.

     that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one's human tenderness

179. #179

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index for Seminar XI, listing key concepts and page references; it is non-substantive for theoretical extraction purposes, functioning purely as a navigational apparatus.

     sublimation, II, 165

180. #180

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis has mapped out its clinical procedures without genuinely theorising them — transference, identification, the symptom as knot — and that Freud's founding discovery (the Signorelli forgetting) demonstrates that the unconscious operates at the level of signifying material (phonemes), not repressed content, grounding the claim that the subject is primordially determined by language/discourse rather than by any substantial soul or intentional consciousness.

     It is not enough to know how to do something - turn a vase or sculpt an object - to know what one is working on.

181. #181

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Plato's *Sophist*, the passage argues that the question of non-being (the status of the *phantasma*/simulacrum) is ultimately a question about the subject's particular, perspectival position with respect to a universal, and that the Sophist's art—producing illusions calibrated to the observer's viewpoint—anticipates the psychoanalytic concept of *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz* and fantasy. The dialogue's apparent concern with ontology is recast as a topology of the subject's place.

     The art sorting out the similar and the better by purification... correction or teaching.

182. #182

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.

     accedes to a ........... that is henceforth symbolic

183. #183

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the lens of psychoanalytic experience, Audouard argues that the dialogue's central problem is not the ontological status of non-being per se but rather the status of the subject, whose particular point of view (place) is precisely what makes the simulacrum (fantasma/Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) possible — thereby transposing an ancient metaphysical problem into a Lacanian one about the split, positionally-determined subject.

     the schema will be the art sorting out the similar and the better by purification... correction or teaching... admonishing or refuting

184. #184

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

     the almost sacred character of the treasure that he represented for his mother, leads him to remember some rudimentary elements of his religious formation.

185. #185

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a topological witness that anticipates the psychoanalytic function of the objet petit a (as the gaze/look), arguing that the medieval opposition of knowledge and truth (doctrine of the double truth) prefigures the split that modern science inherits, and that the poet—through his projection of cosmological knowledge into the field of "final ends"—inadvertently maps the edge-topology that links the word-in-the-Other to the emergence of the o-object, concretely illustrated by the conjunction of the liar and the counterfeiter in Hell.

     It is having made of the cosmology of his time what he intends to sing about a beyond of knowledge, the proper field of truth, that he manages to bring out

186. #186

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not the object of need's satisfaction but the structural cause of desire, arising from the relationship between the subject's demand and the Other's desire — and that the scopic field (the gaze) occupies a privileged position in this structure precisely because Freud founded the analytic position by excluding the look, making it a paradigmatic object that reveals the subject's foundational relationship to the Other.

     it is something which is borrowed from the carnal domain and which becomes the stake in a relationship that, to speak quite incorrectly, one could call intersubjective.

187. #187

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses projective geometry to establish that every perspective structure contains two subject points—not one—and then maps this duality onto the scopic fantasy, identifying the elided "window" (opening/split) as the site of the objet petit a, while illustrating the argument through Velázquez's Las Meninas and distinguishing his reading from Foucault's by centring the inverted canvas as the structurally decisive element.

     We seem to have admitted, with the term sublimation, something which, in short, is nothing else. For if we have sufficiently explored the mechanism of the drive to see that what is happening in it is a return journey from the subject to the subject

188. #188

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.

     This privileged structure - I can only here refer to my seminar on ethics those who attended it - is linked to something which is courtly love and which is so important for us to reveal the structures of sublimation.

189. #189

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's position is precisely to demand nothing, and that the privileged o-object in the field of the Other's demand is anal—linking oblativity, the phallic fantasy in obsessional neurosis, and the anal phase's logic of the bar (gift/retention) to show that 'giving what one has' is always giving shit, whereas genuine love is to give what one does not have.

     it is never a question of anything, when one gives what one has, than to give shit. This is also the reason that when I tried to define love for you… I said that love was to give what one does not have

190. #190

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is non-specular — it appears as an image of nothing — and that courtly love (as in Dante's poetic construction) uniquely structures the relationship between the subject, the ego ideal, the o-object, and jouissance, thereby grounding psychoanalytic theory of sublimation in a topological framework.

     This privileged structure... is linked to something which is courtly love and which is so important for us to reveal the structures of sublimation.

191. #191

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses projective geometry to argue that perspective structure necessarily contains two subject-points (not one), and that the elided "window" or opening between them is the structural site of the objet petit a in the scopic field — a topology he then illustrates via Velázquez's Las Meninas, reading the painting's face-down canvas as a figure for the division of the subject and the drive's Möbius-strip circuit.

     We seem to have admitted, with the term sublimation, something which, in short, is nothing else. For if we have sufficiently explored the mechanism of the drive to see that what is happening in it is a return journey from the subject to the subject

192. #192

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the sexual act through the harmonic "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio logic), mapping the relation between the subject (small o), the mother as unifying One (capital O), and castration (minus phi) as the fundamental lack structurally inscribed in any subjective realization of the sexual act — thereby grounding sublimation and acting-out as proportional variants within the same signifying quadrangle organized by repetition.

     it is precisely in the measure that something, or some object, can come to take the place that the minus phi takes in the sexual act as such, that sublimation can subsist, giving exactly the same order of Befriedigung given in the sexual act

193. #193

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

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

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

     this little rectangle in which I situated the fundamental alienation of the subject, precisely in its relation to a possibility which was only the place marked for the sexual act in the logical form of sublimation

194. #194

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act installs the subject precisely at the disjunction between body and jouissance: the body of the woman becomes the metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinguished from the penis) functions as the symbol of a withdrawn jouissance that underlies social exchange — yet this structural arrangement leaves feminine jouissance unresolved and adrift, mirroring the slave's displaced jouissance in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

     **Chunk also engages:**

195. #195

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a biographical anecdote but a structural-logical condition that "norms" the subject with respect to the sexual act, and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the mediation of a value-function tied to castration — a move that repudiates ego-psychology's proliferation of subjective entities and the concept of primary narcissism.

     it can take on a quite clear hedonistic value, since it can, as I recalled, be pushed as far as asceticism. And that one or other philosophy can make of it … a foundation for one's wellbeing. Remember Diogenes

196. #196

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions sublimation as the fourth term in a structural table alongside repetition, passage à l'acte, and acting-out, arguing that sublimation — defined via Freud's *zielgehemmt* — is the conceptual locus for understanding the satisfaction (*Befriedigung*) that underwrites repetition, while simultaneously critiquing ego-psychology's (Hartmann's) energetics framework for inverting and obscuring this problem; he then anchors sublimation's solution in the proposition that the act is a signifier, with the sexual act as the paradigmatic case whose repetition traces the oedipal scene.

     Sublimation is the term - that I would not call mediating, for it is not that at all - is the term that allows us to inscribe the basis and the conjunction of what is involved in subjective stability, in so far as repetition is its fundamental structure

197. #197

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and creation are structurally tied to identification with the feminine position—specifically to the logic of the "gift of what one does not have"—while masculine jouissance is defined by the fainting/aphanisis of the subject at the phallic moment, which in turn grounds the illusory "pure subjectivity" of the knowing subject and the denial of castration that constitutes idealist thinking.

     it is always through identification to the woman that sublimation produces the appearance of a creation

198. #198

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot close the gap between even and odd power series—between the sexes—thereby demonstrating that there is no sexual relation at the level of the signifier, and condemning the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism/fusion as the foundation of libidinal economy.

     I have been pointing out to you how it could support, give an image, for the operation of what is realised on the path of the sexual drive, under the name of sublimation.

199. #199

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion is structurally intelligible as the attempt to reconnect jouissance and the body that have been disjuncted by the signifying intervention constitutive of the subject, with the objet petit a (small o) serving as the topological and structural key to this reconnection, while the sadistic act paradigmatically illustrates how the perverse subject, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of a jouissance located in the Other rather than knowing itself as the subject of that jouissance.

     realisable, but only in the form of sublimation… to say that it can be realised in the form of sublimation, is to separate oneself precisely from what we have to deal with

200. #200

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (mean and extreme ratio) as a matheme to distinguish the sexual act—where lack is structurally elided—from sublimation, which starts from lack, reproduces it iteratively, and arrives at a final cut strictly equal to the initiating lack; Fantasy ($ ◇ a) is then re-situated as the relation between objet a and the barred subject in the field of sexual satisfaction.

     contrary to the pure and simple sexual act, it is from the lack that it starts and it is with the help of this lack that it constructs what is its work which is always the reproduction of this lack.

201. #201

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from methodological self-reflection on the subject's implication in psychoanalytic field-theory to the conceptual forging of "the psychoanalytic act," arguing that analytic theory systematically effaces the cut-structure of the sexual act, and that neither libertarian ideology nor the genital-stage ideal resolves the structural deficit (castration, guilt) inscribed in sexuality; this sets up the question of whether hatred, not tenderness, can co-constitute the sexual act.

     It is not completely vain to consult this literature, since in truth, the dimension of tenderness evoked there is undoubtedly something respectable, is not to be contested. But that one should consider it to be something like a structural dimension of it is something with which I do not believe it is vain to enter into some contestation.

202. #202

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.242

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

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

     this little rectangle in which I situated the fundamental alienation of the subject, precisely in its relation to a possibility which was only the place marked for the sexual act in the logical form of sublimation

203. #203

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the illusion of pure subjectivity are gendered formations: feminine jouissance creates through lack (the vanishing phallus), while masculine jouissance generates the delusion of pure knowing by taking the 'minus something' of castration for zero—making the 'subject of knowledge' a male forgery founded on the denial of castration.

     it is always through identification to the woman that sublimation produces the appearance of a creation. It is always in the mode of a genesis... very strictly linked to the gift of feminine love

204. #204

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot achieve a perfect 'One' or sexual relation—a gap always remains between even and odd power series—and then leverages this to attack the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism and the 'unitive' fantasy, asserting that the subject is 'measured by sex' as by a unit, not fused with it, and that no analytic sense can be given to 'masculine' or 'feminine' as signifiers.

     give an image, for the operation of what is realised on the path of the sexual drive, under the name of sublimation.

205. #205

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "sexual relation" does not exist as a consistent dyadic unity — it is structurally a hole or gap between the small o and the big Other — and uses the cauldron metaphor (from Freud's Witz) to indict analytic theory for triply refusing to acknowledge this void; the Oedipus myth is recruited to demonstrate that accessing full jouissance covers over a foundational rottenness that truth cannot tolerate.

     One of the most useful things, would be, obviously, to decant from this field the rottenness, the shitty coaltar - I am saying, properly speaking, given the privileged function that the anal object plays in this operation - with which current psychoanalytic theory covers it.

206. #206

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "masochism" as a clinical label obscures the logical structure of neurotic desire (specifically the "wish to be refused"), and that grasping the full range of satisfactions implied by the sexual act requires logical articulation—not moralistic or adaptive frameworks—culminating in the claim that the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the prohibited mother, the phallus) and that feminine jouissance remains fundamentally unarticulated by sixty-seven years of psychoanalytic practice.

     this philosophical type excludes himself … from the dimension of the city. I repeat, there is here something that one would be wrong to smile at, it is a properly speaking ascetic aspect, a way of living.

207. #207

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.

     realisable, but only in the form of sublimation… to say that it can be realised in the form of sublimation, is to separate oneself precisely from what we have to deal with

208. #208

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan installs sublimation as the fourth term of a structural quartet (alongside repetition, passage à l'acte, and acting-out), arguing that sublimation names the locus of fundamental satisfaction (Befriedigung) internal to repetition, and that the act is constitutively signifying—a repeating signifier that establishes and restructures the subject, with the sexual act exemplifying this structure by repeating the Oedipal scene.

     Sublimation is the term - that I would not call mediating, for it is not that at all - is the term that allows us to inscribe the basis and the conjunction of what is involved in subjective stability, in so far as repetition is its fundamental structure and that it involves this essential dimension about which there remains the greatest obscurity…which is called satisfaction.

209. #209

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (mean and extreme ratio) as a structural matheme to differentiate the sexual act from sublimation: whereas in the sexual act the lack is obscured (the remainder o² is not noticed), sublimation begins from lack and iteratively reproduces it, with the repetitive reduction of successive powers of o converging on the original lack—thereby grounding sublimation's structure in repetition and linking objet petit a to fantasy as the subject's relation to sexual satisfaction.

     contrary to the pure and simple sexual act, it is from the lack that it starts and it is with the help of this lack that it constructs what is its work which is always the reproduction of this lack.

210. #210

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the harmonic (mean and extreme) ratio — anchored in the Phallus as signifier — to formalise the sexual act's relation to repetition, castration, and subjective lack, then uses this quadrangular proportion to position passage à l'acte, acting-out, sublimation, and repetition in structural relation to one another and to the analytic act.

     it is precisely in the measure that something, or some object, can come to take the place that the minus phi takes in the sexual act as such, that sublimation can subsist, giving exactly the same order of Befriedigung given in the sexual act.

211. #211

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

     sublimation does not rule out the truth of enjoyment, which is why heroisms, by being better explained, are organised according to whether they are more less alert

212. #212

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as the site where the subject-effect — constitutively divided — can 'return' as act; this requires the psychoanalyst to support the function of the objet petit a, and the psychoanalysand to accomplish, by an act, the realisation of castration and the forced alienating choice. The passage then situates this act-theory against the broader *bivium* of modern thought: the Cartesian cogito, which founds science by evacuating the subject, versus thinking that touches the subject-effect and thereby participates in the act (revolution as the paradigm case).

     the things that remain, like that, pinned up in university herbariums, the Stoic school, for example - had this end of act. This sometimes stops abruptly.

213. #213

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the not-all logic of the unconscious prevents any totalisation of psychoanalytic knowledge, and that the psychoanalyst's proper position is defined not by mastery-knowledge but by occupying the place of the objet petit a — cause of desire and object of demand — a position exemplified through the Gaze as the most occluded partial drive in clinical practice.

     its complement, the psychoanalytic task itself, is reiterated by cancelling itself out as sublimation.

214. #214

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Ego Psychology's normative ideal (Fenichel's "genital character") and Winnicott's object-relations framework to establish that the psychoanalytic act — constitutively tied to the manipulation of transference — is precisely what analysts have most systematically evaded theorising, and that there is no analytic act outside this transference dimension.

     the capacity to discharge large quantities of excitation signifies the end of 'reaction formations' and a growth in the capacity to sublimate.

215. #215

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "not-all" logic of quantification—applied to the proposition "not all knowledge is conscious"—does not entail the existence of a positive unconscious knowledge; instead, the analyst's proper position is determined by their identification with the objet petit a (as cause of desire and object of demand), and each register of this object (gaze, voice, breast, anal) carries an immunity to negation that grounds the psychoanalytic act.

     Just as its complement, the psychoanalytic task itself, is reiterated by cancelling itself out as sublimation.

216. #216

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fenichel/Winnicott discussion to distinguish a normative, ego-psychological discourse about psychoanalysis from the analytical act proper, arguing that transference cannot be legitimised by an appeal to the analyst's objectivity but is itself constitutive of analytic practice—and that the analytic act has been systematically eluded, even by Freud's own treatment of parapraxis.

     the capacity to discharge large quantities of excitation signifies the end of 'reaction formations' and a growth in the capacity to sublimate.

217. #217

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.204

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

     sublimation does not rule out the truth of enjoyment, which is why heroisms, by being better explained, are organised according to whether they are more or less alert

218. #218

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Meno* alongside the analytic act, Lacan argues that the theory of reminiscence — knowledge already in the soul, recoverable through questioning — is the archaic, mythical form of the function he calls the 'subject supposed to know,' which underpins every question about knowledge and is inseparable from the structure of transference and the unformulated end of the training analysis.

     virtue is much closer to true opinion, as it is put, than to science. Now true opinion, where does it come to us from? Well, from the heavens.

219. #219

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a semi-autobiographical digression on surrealism, Sartre, and student militancy to frame a critique of ideology-critique as self-defeating repetition, then pivots to position sublimation—especially courtly love—as the more productive terrain before gesturing toward the drive-level account of sublimation (the bell/grelot figure) and the broader subversion of the function of knowledge that psychoanalysis enables.

     The last time I spoke to you about sublimation... the idea that sublimation is this effort to allow love to be realised with the woman, and not simply... to pretend that it is happening with a woman.

220. #220

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.216

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual relationship cannot be grasped through biological, logical, or identificatory schemas (active/passive, male/female, +/−), and that Freudian logic ultimately reduces sex to the formal mark of castration as constitutive lack; this requires distinguishing the Other (as terrain cleared of enjoyment, site of the unconscious structured like a language) from Das Ding (the intolerable imminence of jouissance/the neighbour), and poses the central question: is the Woman the locus of desire (the Other) or the locus of enjoyment (the Thing)?

     It is not enough all the same to translate this into what is undoubtedly the usual thing by thus imagining that it is at the expense of their sexual satisfaction that the authors, whose works take on a social value... that there is here some obscure substitution or other.

221. #221

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that jouissance functions as an absolute Real, and that it is hysteria—not androcentric theory—that logically unveils the structure of desire as lack-of-the-One; the drive already implies knowledge, but this knowledge is marked by a constitutive lie (proton pseudos), forcing the displacement from sign to signifier as the properly psychoanalytic move beyond metaphysics.

     There was someone called Simmel who spoke, in his time, about sublimation, before Freud. It was in order to start from the function of values.

222. #222

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: The neurotic's problem is located in the impossibility of integrating the objet petit a onto the imaginary plane alongside the narcissistic image; Lacan reframes primary narcissism as a retroactive illusion produced by secondary (imaginary) narcissistic capture, and positions the fantasy formula ($ ◇ a) at the level of sublimation—while diagnosing neurosis as a structural failure of sublimation.

     the problem of the neurotic will be re-centred, the manifestation also of the fact that, qua neurotic, he is precisely destined to a failure of sublimation.

223. #223

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the imaginary (body image, ideal norms, Utopia) provides the historical ground for pre-scientific "knowledge," but genuine science — including the Freudian rationalist doctrine — breaks with the imaginary by grounding itself in the symbolic/mathematical function (x = f(y)), where meaning is retroactively determined by the point of arrival in a signifying chain.

     I left you on the subject of sublimation once it had been opened up, and we will have to continue on with some tallying about what is involved, from the point of structure, about what is involved in perversion

224. #224

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.102

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager and its renunciation of pleasures as a pivot to historicize the displacement from hedonistic ethics (grounded in a natural sovereign good) to modern capitalist morality, arguing that Freud's pleasure principle operates not as the ancient hedone but as a subterranean regulatory mechanism — a tempering force in the underground — which reframes how psychoanalysis must situate pleasure and the objet petit a.

     It is indeed this that guides those who, let us say, from all antiquity, when they began, in order to ground morality, to take this reference point, that pleasure ought all the same to guide us along this path

225. #225

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.364

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.

     This indeed is why the neurotic is incapable of sublimation. Sublimation for its part is the proper of what makes the circuit of what the subject supposed to know is reduced to.

226. #226

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.223

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

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

     we can now advance a little as regards what is involved in sublimation... One sublimates, he tells us, with the drives... something here resembles the Thing

227. #227

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the o-object is fundamentally an extimate topological structure that functions as the locus of captured enjoyment within the field of the Other, and that the pervert's clinical function is precisely to fill the hole that this structure opens in the Other—making him, paradoxically, a "defender of the faith" rather than a contemner of the partner.

     sublimation should be questioned in its relationship to the role played in it, in short, by the o-object… the work of art, to call it by its name, that today centres, constitutes the aim of what we are stating about sublimation.

228. #228

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.209

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

     sublimation is properly speaking and as such a mode of satisfaction of the drive. It is with the drive, a drive that he qualifies as zielgehemmt, diverted, people translate, from its goal.

229. #229

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **ANALYTICON**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that revolution reproduces the discourse of the Master (as Freud's mass psychology demonstrates), and that genuine transformation requires clinging to the impossible-real rather than producing culture or chasing truth; the analytic discourse uniquely enables a "change of phase" in the circuit of the Master Signifier, albeit not its abolition.

     In the whole measure that you are able to produce some agreeable nonsense, you will feed the system... you are not serving the system. On the contrary, you are feeding it!

230. #230

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Master structurally generates surplus-jouissance as the extracted 'tithe' from the slave's knowledge, and that Marx's critique of surplus value is the memorial of this prior extraction of enjoyment — a process whose secret lies in knowledge itself, not in labour, thereby subverting Hegel's claim that labour culminates in Absolute Knowledge.

     Consumer society takes its meaning from the fact, that to the element of it that is qualified as 'human', in quotation marks, there is given the homogenous equivalent of any surplus enjoying whatsoever that is the product of our industry, in a word, a pinchbeck surplus enjoying.

231. #231

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language uses subjects rather than being used by them — enjoyment is the motor of discourse — and that truth stands in a sisterly relation to forbidden enjoyment, a relation legible only from within the discourse of the Hysteric. He frames this against Sade's theoretical masochism (the second death), Freud's discourse on the unconscious as self-speaking knowledge, and a sustained critique of Ego Psychology as a regression to the discourse of the Master.

     Only, being a psychoanalyst, I was in a position to notice that the second death comes before the first, and not after, as Sade dreams.

232. #232

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that writing is equivalent to jouissance within the discourse of the analyst, and that the non-inscribability of the sexual relationship is the fundamental failure at the heart of language—a failure that the letter (as in Poe's purloined letter) stages by feminising those under its shadow and by making truth structurally dependent on fiction.

     the minimal share that cannot be sublimated, as Freud explicitly puts it

233. #233

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's appeal to Copernican and Darwinian "revolutions" to explain resistance to psychoanalysis actually masks the true subversion psychoanalysis introduces: not a revolution in cosmological or biological knowledge, but a transformation in the very structure and function of knowledge itself — specifically, the discovery that the unconscious is a knowledge unknown to itself, structured like a language, and inextricably bound to jouissance and the body's descent toward death.

     The enjoyment which is really of the order of erotology that is within anyone's reach - it is true that at that time the publications of the Marquis de Sade were less widespread - that is why I thought I should, as a way of fixing a date, to mark somewhere in my Ecrits the relationship between Kant and Sade.

234. #234

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > **4 1 \* May 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual relationship is grounded not in biological or metaphysical mythology (Eros-as-fusion) but in the formal structure of the sexuation formulae and set theory: the One emerges from a foundational lack (the empty set), which means sex as the dual-real can never produce a relationship, only two irreducible ones.

     To find - and my God, from the pen of Freud - the idea that Eros is grounded (se fonde)... that Eros should found itself by making one out of two. This is obviously a strange idea

235. #235

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     VI > M. H YPPOLI TE: A lot is.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the machine—not consciousness or biology—is the foundational metaphor that makes possible both Freudian energy theory and the discovery of the symbol; the transition from Hegel's anthropology to Freud's metapsychology is marked by the industrial advent of the machine, which forces the concept of energy and reveals the symbolic beyond of the inter-human relation.

     Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology. It is a matter of manipulating symbols with the aim of resolving energy questions.

236. #236

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.333

     XXIII > A, m, a, S > FATHER BEIRNAERT: Why?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the death drive is not a biological tendency but the mask of the Symbolic order insofar as the Symbolic has not yet been realised — the Symbolic is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, and analysis reveals not the subject's biological reality but the signification of his lot within a received symbolic speech.

     What is this transcendent tendency towards sublimation? Freud repudiates it in the most formal way in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

237. #237

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: By reading Poe's M. Valdemar alongside Oedipus at Colonus and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan argues that life is fundamentally a detour toward death, that desire emerges only at the joint of speech/symbolism, and that the phenomena of wit, dream, and psychopathology all inhabit the vacillating level of speech where the subject's being is at stake.

     Life insists on entering into it, but it expresses something which is perhaps completely beyond this life, since when we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death.

238. #238

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Freudian concept of libido away from its quantitative-theoretical usage, arguing instead that desire is a relation of being to lack—irreducible to objectification, prior to consciousness, and constitutive of the human world—thus establishing desire as the foundational category of psychoanalytic experience over and against classical epistemology's subject-object adequation.

     Hence one would talk of transformations, regressions, fixations, sublimations of the libido, a single term which is conceived of quantitatively.

239. #239

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the ground from which its supplements (love, phallic jouissance, courtly love) must be theorised, and uses the distinction between reading and understanding—illustrated by commentary on *Le titre de la lettre*—to reframe the Subject Supposed to Know as the very structure of love/transference.

     courtly love... It is a highly refined way of making up for (suppléer à) the absence of the sexual relationship, by feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle thereto.

240. #240

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively deficient — it is the "other satisfaction" that language-structured beings cannot fully live up to — and proposes that reality is approached through "apparatuses of jouissance" (language), thereby correcting Freud's pleasure principle and rejecting developmentalist (Lust-Ich/Real-Ich) accounts as mere "hypotheses of mastery."

     it is clear that the other satisfaction I was talking about earlier is exactly the satisfaction that can be seen to emerge from what?... from the universals: the Good, Truth, and Beauty.

241. #241

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is the substance of thought and that its irreducible gap from language—marked by the cry "that's not it"—demonstrates that structure and jouissance are co-constitutive, grounding the non-existence of the sexual relationship; Christianity and Aristotle serve as foils to show how philosophical and theological traditions have covered over this gap with the fantasy of knowledge and soul.

     In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity, particularly in art... everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance... but without copulation.

242. #242

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every wisdom tradition—Taoism, Buddhism, mythology, Christianity—fails to satisfy the "thought of being" except at the price of castration, positioning psychoanalytic discourse as a contingent, non-mathematical pathway toward an economy of jouissance that science and religion alike cannot reach.

     The baroque is the regulating of the soul by corporal radioscopy.

243. #243

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of metalanguage to pivot toward topology: because the symbolic ex-sists rather than being, and because language can only be transmitted through further language, the matheme/formalization points beyond itself to the Borromean knot as the structural figure that can 'operate' on the first knot—linking writing, jouissance, and the non-rapport of sexuation under a single topological framework.

     when one leaves it all alone, it sublimates with all its might, it sees Beauty and the Good - not to mention Truth

244. #244

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.68

     **II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual relationship necessarily fails, and that this failure is not incidental but constitutive—the object itself is failure—and uses modal logic (the necessary as "what doesn't stop being written") to show that phallic jouissance is the only jouissance, with the 'other' (feminine) jouissance marking the not-whole that cannot be fully articulated.

     I said that, if something freshened the air a bit after all this Greek foot-dragging around Eudemonism, it was certainly the discovery of utilitarianism.

245. #245

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 Ma y 1973

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no metalanguage by distinguishing the Symbolic from being, grounding formalisation in the act of saying rather than in ontological subsistence, and then demonstrates how topology—specifically the Borromean knot and the torus—provides the only adequate 'writing' of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject.

     when it is left alone, it sublimates all the time with all its might. It sees beauty, the good, without counting the true

246. #246

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.234

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance (enjoyment) constitutes the substance of thinking and is irreducibly linked to the inertia of language, such that the sexual relationship remains inexistent and unthinkable — a gap named the Other — and all cultural, religious, and philosophical formations (including Christianity's baroque obscenity and Aristotle's active intellect) are so many failed attempts to make enjoyment adequate to the sexual relationship, with castration as the only price of any apparent satisfaction.

     everything is exhibition of the body evoking enjoyment, except for copulation... nowhere more than in Christianity, does the work of art as such show itself in a more blatant way for what it is, always and everywhere: obscenity.

247. #247

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.237

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse diverges from scientific discourse precisely because the 'economy of enjoyment' cannot be rendered as a mathematical device, yet mythology, the Counter-Reformation, and Baroque art all attest to historically contingent attempts to regulate jouissance — attempts that are 'founded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being' and that analytic discourse may partially continue.

     everything that is hanging on the walls, everything that crumbles, everything that delights, everything that is delirious, anyway what I called earlier obscenity, but exalted.

248. #248

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that what supplements the absent sexual relationship is not a dyadic fusion but a singular "there is something of the One" — irreducibly solitary — and that love (including transference as love) is the operative name for this supplement; the big Other, far from being abolished, must be reckoned with precisely as the site that mediates between the sexes in the absence of a sexual relationship, a point that also grounds his endorsement of courtly love as a "feint" for the missing relation.

     What is courtly love? It was this kind, this highly refined way of supplying for the absence of the sexual relationship, by feigning that it is we who are setting an obstacle to it.

249. #249

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention in Lacan's seminar on Joyce traces how the Name-of-the-Father operates as a plural, shifting function in Ulysses—not as a fixed paternal authority but as a series of displacements (Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Virag, Dedalus, J.J. O'Molloy) that fill and re-fill structural holes in the text, while the epiphany is reread as a redoubling that liquidates the poetic dimension, and the mother's imaginary relationship to religion frames Joyce's entire symbolic economy.

     founding in law the bearer of the law, Moses... That eternal symbol of wisdom and prophesy which... deserves to live, deserves to live.

250. #250

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot—understood as the concrete support of any relation between things—constitutes the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as interdependent, and that the parlêtre's bodily status depends entirely on this knot; Joyce's art is then positioned as uniquely aimed at substantialising the fourth term (the sinthome) that completes and holds this knot.

     how can an art aim in an explicitly divinatory way at substantialising in its consistency, its consistency as such, but moreover its ex-sistence and moreover this third term which is the hole

251. #251

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's relationship to madness, faith, and writing as a clinical-theoretical probe to distinguish the true from the Real, locating jouissance (including masochism) in the Real rather than the true; he simultaneously advances a topological argument about the Borromean knot and the torus as the best available "physics" for measuring belief and subjective structure.

     Does he go as far as substituting himself for what he manifestly has faith in: the falsehoods... the falsehoods the priests tell him about the fact that there is a redeemer, a true one. Did he, yes or no.

252. #252

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     What is the way of distinguishing these two cases?

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on two interlocking theoretical moves: Lacan argues for the primacy of topological structure over phenomenal shape (using the torus and Klein bottle), and Alain Didier extends this by mapping the circuit of the invocatory drive onto the logic of separation, proposing that musical jouissance operates as a sublimation that "evaporates" the lost object and thus transmutes lack into nostalgia.

     sublimation, is effectively a matter of making a solid pass into the state of vapour, of gas; and sublimation, is this paradoxical path by which Freud teaches us – and Lacan has articulated in a much more sustained way – it is precisely the path along which we can have access, precisely along the path of desexualisation, to enjoyment.

253. #253

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

     It is only poetry, as I told you, which permits interpretation, and that is why I no longer manage, in my technique, to get it to hold up; I am not enough of a pouâte.

254. #254

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     So then what is this lack?

     Theoretical move: The passage maps a four-moment dialectical circuit of the drive (using music as its privileged illustration) in which the subject's repeated failure to encounter the objet petit a gradually confirms its radical impossibility, ultimately enabling a leap "through the fantasy" toward an ecstatic, desexualised Other jouissance that Lacan identifies with sublimation – and which constitutes the terminal point of the analytic process beyond ordinary surplus-jouissance.

     this point of enjoyment which appears to me to be what Lacan articulates as being the enjoyment of the Other, is precisely the point of maximum desexualisation, I would say total, superior, sublime, sublime in the sense of sublimation; and it is indeed at this point that sublimation is connected with desexualisation and enjoyment.

255. #255

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     **XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's discovery belongs irreducibly to the field of the signifier — not to biography, sexuality, or intuition — and that the current deformation of psychoanalysis into ego-orthopedics and object-relations represents a fundamental misrecognition of this literal, deciphering dimension that Freud himself enacted in dream-interpretation.

     what I shall articulate in my discourse by recalling that his family... had to choose this name from a list of first names

256. #256

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     **XXV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is irreducibly symbolic—not imaginary—because the phallus operates as a signifier rather than an imaginary element; and that the signifier as such (illustrated through the example of naming/the rainbow) introduces an ordering structure that cannot be derived from imaginary or naturalistic dynamics, with this distinction being decisive for differentiating neurosis from psychosis.

     a ring, he tells us, doesn't enter into play as an analytic symbol insofar as it represents marriage, with all that is cultural and developed, even sublimated - since this is how he expresses himself - that this conveys.

257. #257

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     **XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the central question animating all of Freud's work as how the symbolic order — the system of signifiers constituting law, truth, and justice — seizes an animal who has no natural need for it, producing neurotic suffering and guilt; from this he derives the thesis that psychoanalysis must be understood as the science of language inhabited by the subject, fundamentally anti-humanist and anti-egological.

     He is fundamentally anti-humanist to the extent that there is in humanism this romanticism which would like to make the mind the flower of life.

258. #258

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental distinction between neurosis and psychosis lies in the register where the repressed returns: in neurosis it returns *in loco* within the symbolic order (under a mask), while in psychosis it returns *in altero* in the imaginary (without a mask) — and that post-Freudian ego-psychology's reduction of psychosis to ego-defense mechanisms systematically obscures this economic and topographical distinction.

     it foments this neo-production we call a hallucination, which is another way of acting and transforming its dual instincts - sublimation, in its own way, but with serious drawbacks.

259. #259

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.419

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the scholarly correction of Freud's mistranslation (kite vs. vulture) in the Leonardo essay not to discredit Freud but to isolate what is genuinely original in that text: the introduction of the phallic mother as the child's imaginary relation to the phallus-as-lack, which also marks the inaugural structuring of the imaginary register and the first appearance of narcissism in Freud's work.

     as one of the crucial outlets of what remains of the exhilarated and indeed fixed infantile tendency at issue in the case of Leonardo, Freud brings in the notion of sublimation that he had already introduced in the Three Essays.

260. #260

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.423

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Leonardo essay to develop a structural account of sublimation as the displacement of the radical alterity of the absolute Other into an imaginary relation—a "relation of mirage"—distinguishing this from the ego-psychological account of de-instinctualisation, and situating it through Leonardo's peculiar relationship to Nature as a non-subjective other accessible via imaginary identification.

     the way in which it displaces the radical relation to a certain essential alterity so as to cause it to be inhabited by a relationship of mirage — this is what is known as sublimation and this is what is exemplified constantly by Leonardo's oeuvre on the plane of genius and creation.

261. #261

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.426

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation is structurally correlated with an inversion of the ego/other relation in the imaginary register, such that the very process of de-subjectification (sublimation) entails a fundamental self-forgetting—illustrated through Leonardo's mirror writing as the symptom of a radical alienation in which the subject addresses himself from the position of his own imaginary other.

     correlative to each sublimation, that is to say, to the process of the de-subjectification or the naturalisation of the Other which would constitute the essential phenomenon of the sublimation

262. #262

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.371

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the paternal metaphor through the Hugo poem on Boaz and Ruth, showing that the father's function is constitutively metaphorical (substitution + castration complex), and applies this formula to the case of Little Hans to explain how the horse-phobia acts as a substitute metaphorical mediator when the paternal metaphor is absent, while also distinguishing phobic and fetishistic objects as "milestones" of desire in the real that are nonetheless only accessible through signifying formalisation.

     Any creation of a new meaning in human culture is essentially metaphoric.

263. #263

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish must be understood not in terms of an imaginary deficiency (the real penis) but as a substitute for the symbolic phallus qua absence — the phallus that exists only insofar as it circulates in symbolic exchange as both present and absent — thereby locating fetishism within the structure of the veil/curtain, where the object stands in for a constitutive lack that is simultaneously affirmed and disavowed.

     it is in so far as they latch onto this sole and central object that is distinguished by the fact that it is precisely not an object, but an object that has undergone symbolic valorisation in the most radical way

264. #264

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's analysis of wit, Lacan argues that the pleasure of witticisms is not reducible to infantile verbal play but is grounded in the structural homology between the laws of the signifier (metaphor/metonymy) and the unconscious, and that this structural primacy of the signifier fundamentally perverts the relationship between need, demand, and desire.

     sense in nonsense... records the two visible sides of pleasure - a witticism immediately strikes one as nonsense, it grabs you and then compensates you with the emergence, inside this very nonsense, of some secret meaning

265. #265

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

     Theoretical move: By reading Genet's *The Balcony* as a clinical illustration, Lacan argues that the Ego Ideal is not the product of sublimation but of an eroticization of the symbolic function, and that perversion consists in enjoying the image of a signifying function; the drama's resolution—where the Chief of Police finally achieves symbolic recognition only through castration—demonstrates that accession to the order of the phallic symbol is inseparable from castration.

     What happens at the level of different forms of the ego-ideal is not, as is thought, the result of sublimation, in the sense in which this means the progressive neutralization of deeply rooted internal functions.

266. #266

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

     at the level of the revelation of meaning, it was considered to have an ultimate meaningful character.

267. #267

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.

     It's through the analysis of this Whipping fantasy that Freud really brought perversion into his real analytic dialectic. It doesn't appear as the pure and simple manifestation of a drive, but proves to be attached to a dialectical context

268. #268

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: The Oedipus complex's dissolution (Untergang) is structured as a mourning of the phallus, which Lacan re-articulates through the triad of castration/frustration/deprivation: symbolic castration marks the barred subject as speaking subject, and the imaginary subtraction of the phallus (−φ) is what generates Objet petit a as the object that sustains the subject precisely in his position as "not being the phallus."

     The being in question must mourn something that he must offer up as a sacrifice or holocaust, in order to raise it to the level of its function as a missing signifier.

269. #269

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.414

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "cut" (coupure) is the fundamental structural characteristic of the symbolic order and the locus of the subject's relation to being, and that works of art—exemplified by Hamlet—do not sublimate or imitate reality but structurally instantiate this cut, thereby making accessible, via fantasy, the subject's real as an unconscious speaking subject.

     we can no longer consider a work of art to be a transposition or sublimation, call it as you will, of reality. One can no longer say that it involves imitation or amounts to mimesis

270. #270

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire is not the correlate of need but what props the subject up at the moment of his disappearance behind the signifier; deploying the Graph of Desire, Lacan situates 'desire' between the alienating appeal to the Other and the dimension of the unsaid, using Freud's 'dead father' dream to show how statement and enunciation articulate desire's structural role in the subject's existence.

     the miser is ridiculous - in other words, far too close to the unconscious for you to be able to bear it... I will take an example from the film by Jean Renoir entitled La Regle du jeu

271. #271

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.498

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation — defined as the form into which desire flows, reducible to the pure play of the signifier — and perversion together constitute a dialectical circuit that resists social normalization, and that the analyst's function is to occupy the position of desire's midwife by maintaining the "cut" as the privileged mode of psychoanalytic intervention.

     Sublimation is thus truly placed at the level of the logical subject, where everything that is, strictly speaking, creative work in the realm of logos is established and unfolds.

272. #272

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.424

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that being is co-extensive with the cut/gap in the signifying chain, and that the subject, constituted as "not one" (barred, split), appears precisely at those gaps in desire — a structural account that displaces both ego-psychological notions of genital maturity and religious/moral frameworks for desire's satisfaction, while insisting on desire as the irreducible proof of the subject's presence.

     the object of desire were the most mature and 'adult' of objects, as people put it in the sort of blithering drunkenness in which they exalt 'genital desire'

273. #273

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.462

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

     owing to our artifices, their desire can, following our lead, be reduced to need - or even be led toward sublimation along the elevated pathways of love

274. #274

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.482

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion inverts the neurotic's proof-structure: where the neurotic must ceaselessly prove desire's existence, the pervert takes it as given, and organises his entire construction around identifying with the phallus-as-object inside the mother, using the fetish or idol to symbolise the split between symbolic identification (I) and imaginary identification (i(a)) — a structure illustrated paradigmatically through male and female homosexuality and confirmed clinically via the anecdote of Gide's marble.

     an object that is, in the final analysis, rejected through a magnificent Sublimierung [sublimation].

275. #275

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.387

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan presents a synchronic schema of the dialectic of desire that articulates how the subject is constituted through the structural failure of the Other as guarantor, establishing objet petit a as the remainder produced by the division of the Other by Demand—a mortified lost object that desire aims at only as hidden, always beyond the nothing to which the subject must consent through castration.

     What is placed in a treasure chest is removed from the circuit of life, being subtracted therefrom, in order to be preserved as the shadow of nothing, and this is what makes it the miser's object.

276. #276

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.418

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the function of fantasy in Hamlet is not instrumental (a 'means employed') but structural: the ghost's revelation — a paradoxical speech-act that poisons Hamlet through the ear — constitutes a hole/wall/enigma that traps the subject in a permanent deferral of truth, and only the artifice of theatrical representation partially restores Hamlet's capacity for desire and action.

     How does he little by little reclaim the use of his members? Through a work of art. The actors come just at the right time for him to bench test 'the conscience of the king'

277. #277

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.531

     449. "Your daughter is mute" > 462. The article I devoted to the case of Andre Gide > 463. Gide's history

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus chunk (editorial notes and source identifications) for Seminar VI, identifying textual sources for Lacan's references to Spinoza's cupiditas, phallocentrism, a Toulet poem, and Ernst Kris's ego-psychology paper — it performs no independent theoretical argument of its own.

     XXVII Toward Sublimation

278. #278

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.476

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural difference between neurotic and perverse desire turns on how each subject bears the "cut" or split: the neurotic indefinitely defers his desire in metonymic evasion, while the pervert directly identifies with the split/cut as constitutive of fantasy—a distinction Lacan develops by critiquing Gillespie's anatomical reduction of ego-splitting and by reading Gide's fantasies as evidence that perverse identification with the phallus operates differently from neurotic castration anxiety.

     Sublimation, I am saying, lies in the reconversion of desire's impasse into signifying materiality.

279. #279

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation must be understood as the imaginary colonization of the field of das Ding, where fantasy elements ($ ◇ a) overlay the subject at the very point of das Ding; the gap between the narcissistically structured object and das Ding is precisely where the problem of sublimation is situated, and this gap is historically refracted through the shift from ancient emphasis on the drive to modern emphasis on the object.

     Between the object as it is structured by the narcissistic relation and das Ding, there is a difference, and it is precisely on the slope of that difference that the problem of sublimation is situated for us.

280. #280

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.102

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's doctrine of the libido (against Jung's cosmological misreading) to establish Das Ding as the structural obstacle around which the subject must navigate on the path of pleasure, arguing that sublimation cannot be reduced to direct drive-satisfaction or collective approval because it always involves an antinomy—a reaction formation—that reveals the fundamental incompatibility between the drive and any Sovereign Good.

     Sublimation is characterized by a change of objects, or in the libido, a change that doesn't occur through the intermediary of a return of the repressed nor symptomatically, indirectly, but directly, in a way that satisfies directly.

281. #281

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **XIV** > **XIX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates the ethical and aesthetic force of Antigone in the liminal zone between life and death (the 'second death'), arguing that it is precisely there that desire is both reflected and refracted to produce the effect of beauty — a zone Hegel's dialectical reading of reconciliation entirely misses, and which requires a rigorous analysis of signifiers rather than a moralising or aesthetic reduction.

     The extinction or the tempering of desire through the effect of beauty that some thinkers, including Saint Thomas, whom I quoted last time, insist on. On the other hand, the disruption of any object, on which Kant insists in The Critique of Judgment.

282. #282

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic conception of the good cannot be reduced to the hedonist tradition because Freud's pleasure principle—read through the Entwurf up to Beyond the Pleasure Principle—introduces a dimension of memory/facilitation/repetition that rivals and exceeds satisfaction, thereby grounding ethics in the subject's relation to desire rather than in utility or the natural good.

     the perspective is a sublime one, indeed a sublimated one. Now sublimation could be defined from a certain point of view as an opinion in the Platonic sense of the term, an opinion arranged in such a way as to reach something that might be the object of science, but that science doesn't manage to reach where it is to be found.

283. #283

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo to argue that the primordial murder of the father does not open the path to jouissance but paradoxically strengthens its prohibition — a structural asymmetry in which the transfer of jouissance to prohibition always increases the superego's cruelty, while the reverse passage (toward uninhibited jouissance) generates its own obstacles, revealing the fundamental fault at the origin of moral law.

     since I have happened to talk to you about the primitive sublimation of architecture, let me say that the problem of the temple that was destroyed without trace remains.

284. #284

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's engagement with the commandment to love one's neighbor (from *Civilization and Its Discontents*) as the pivot for a meditation on the death of God, the Name-of-the-Father, and the political/ethical consequences of Freud's demystification of the paternal function, arguing that the "truth about truth" must be approached step by step rather than through metaphysical pretension.

     the recognition of the function of the Father is a sublimation that is essential to the opening up of a spirituality that represents something new, a step forward in the apprehension of reality as such.

285. #285

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Sperber's sexual-origin theory of language by insisting that the metaphorical spread of sexual signifiers proves not a reduction of meaning to sexual roots but rather that an "emptiness" or gap — the form of the female organ — is the privileged pole around which metaphorical play of the signifier is organised; (2) it pivots to Freud's treatment of the paternal function in religious experience, arguing that religious knowledge (Moses, the Name of the Father) belongs within the analytic field of inquiry precisely because all knowledge emerges against a background of ignorance.

     If I wanted you to be acquainted with Sperber's article, it is because it is coupled to our sublimation train.

286. #286

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's cosmological argument for crime and a reading of Freud's death drive to establish that the drive is not a natural instinct toward equilibrium (entropy) but a historically articulated, signifier-dependent will to destruction and creation ex nihilo — a "creationist sublimation" that points to Das Ding as the foundational beyond of the signifying chain, and that sublimation (exemplified by courtly love) locates its object in this same place of being-as-signifier.

     The notion of the death drive is a creationist sublimation, and it is linked to that structural element which implies that, as soon as we have to deal with anything in the world appearing in the form of the signifying chain, there is somewhere... the ex nihilo on which it is founded.

287. #287

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the claim that courtly love (the Lady as representative of das Ding) is the purest historical instance of sublimation, and that this construction can be grasped analytically only once the Freudian drive (Trieb) is understood as a fundamental ontological — not merely psychological — response to the crisis of the dead Father/Creator.

     To what extent does it allow us to explain the phenomenon as a work of sublimation in its purest sense?

288. #288

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.321

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis is grounded not in the service of goods or traditional moral regulation, but in the question "Have you acted in conformity with your desire?" — a standard derived from the topology of desire that both tragedy and comedy reveal, and which Kant's categorical imperative partially anticipates but fails to complete, leaving a void that psychoanalysis identifies as the place of desire.

     The ethics of psychoanalysis has nothing to do with speculation about prescriptions for, or the regulation of, what I have called the service of goods.

289. #289

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar VII listing key terms and page references; it is non-substantive but maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar, cross-referencing entries such as sublimation, Das Ding, signifier, subject, second death, service of goods, and sovereign good.

     sublimation, 85-164 artistic reward and, 144-45 collective, 99 courtly love as, 128,131, 136, 142, 160,161-63, 215 creativity and, 106-7,115-17,238 death drive as, 212

290. #290

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that courtly love, like Surrealist 'amour fou', both emerge as cultural formations around Das Ding (the Thing): the signifier creates a place for the Thing, and what appears to be objective chance or 'madness of love' is structurally the irruption of the real in the place vacated by rational or causal order.

     They are in their poetic context exactly at that frontier or limit which in my own words I am attempting to enable us to localize and feel

291. #291

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.345

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar VII, non-substantive in theoretical content but reflecting the conceptual terrain of the seminar through its entries.

     sublimation and, 322 ...love as sublimation of feminine object, 109,112

292. #292

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in approaching the central field of Das Ding (radical desire), two barriers stand between the subject and destruction: first, the good (linked to pleasure and utility), and second—closer to the center—beauty, which both arrests and points toward absolute destruction, making the beautiful structurally nearer to evil than to the good.

     she warns the poet of the form she may take as signifier... Just blow in that for a while and see if your sublimation holds up.

293. #293

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.295

     **XIV** > **XXI** > **SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his reading of Antigone by situating its ethical force at the intersection of the second death, language, synchrony/diachrony (via Lévi-Strauss), and the beauty-effect produced by the hero's proximity to Ate, then pivots to Kant's analytic of the beautiful and sublime as the necessary conceptual bridge for his ongoing topological argument.

     Involved in what I had to say to you about catharsis is the beauty effect.

294. #294

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the field "beyond the good principle" is delimited on one side by the beautiful (which suspends desire rather than fulfilling it) and on the other by pain/masochism, and that neither side exhausts that field; it pivots toward Antigone as the exemplary case of an absolute, non-good-motivated choice, while grounding the whole inquiry in the relationship between the human being, the signifier, and the death drive.

     The definition he gives of sublimation at work in artistic creation only manages to show us the reaction or repercussions of the effects of what happens at the level of the sublimation of the drive, when the result or the work of the creator of the beautiful reenters the field of goods.

295. #295

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **XXIII**

     Theoretical move: The true goal of psychoanalysis—especially training analysis—is not psychological normalization or the 'service of goods' (happiness, comfort, social adjustment) but a confrontation with the fundamental human condition of *Hilflosigkeit* (helplessness/distress) and the relation to desire and death, as exemplified by the figures of Oedipus and Lear; to promise happiness is a form of fraud, and the analytic end must pass through absolute disarray rather than bourgeois comfort.

     That's the choice with which a human existence such as Oedipus's has to end... he dies from a true death in which he erases his own being.

296. #296

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads *Antigone* through the lens of Aristotle's hamartia and Kantian practical reason to argue that Creon's error is the unlimited pursuit of the good, and uses the conjunction of beauty and the Sadean fantasy of indestructible suffering to define the "limit of the second death" as the structural boundary that both tragedy and psychoanalysis must locate — a limit that Christianity displaces onto the image of the crucifixion.

     The limit involved, the limit that it is essential to situate if a certain phenomenon is to emerge through reflection, is something I have called the phenomenon of the beautiful, it is something I have begun to define as the limit of the second death.

297. #297

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The vase as fabricated signifier enacts creation *ex nihilo* by introducing emptiness/void into the real, and this structure — the signifier hollowing out a gap in the real — is coextensive with Das Ding as the central problem of ethics, sublimation, and the question of evil.

     man fashions this signifier and introduces it into the world - in other words, we need to know what he does when he fashions it in the image of the Thing, whereas the Thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it. The problem of sublimation is located on this level.

298. #298

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's work to argue that the literary experiment of transgression reveals the structure of jouissance as approach to an unbearable centre, and introduces two theoretical terms: the part object (as the logic of Sade's social law) and the indestructibility of the Other in fantasy — ultimately connecting the Sadistic relation to the structure of obsessional neurosis.

     the work of art in this case is an experiment that through its action cuts the subject loose from his psychosocial moorings - or to be more precise, from all psychosocial appreciation of the sublimation involved.

299. #299

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that courtly love operates as a structural technology of sublimation that installs an artificial vacuole—an emptied, depersonalized object (das Ding)—at the center of signification, thereby organizing desire through inaccessibility and privation rather than mystical or historical derivation; this structural analysis then pivots to the ethics of eroticism, connecting the courtly logic of foreplay (Vorlust) and detour to the psychic economy as something irreducible to the pleasure principle.

     by means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner.

300. #300

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **IX** > **X**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Das Ding from Hegelian mediation by insisting on its irreducible, non-dialectizable character—locating it at the limit of signification where the pleasure principle itself functions as the dominance of the signifier—and uses anamorphosis as the paradigm of sublimation: not a recovery of the Thing but a formal pointing toward a void that only language, by its artifice, can encircle.

     The formula for sublimation that you have given us is to raise the object to the dignity of the Thing... isn't this Thing not really a thing, but on the contrary a Non-Thing, and isn't it through sublimation that one comes to see it as being the Thing

301. #301

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.341

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section (pages 340-344) of Seminar VII, listing key terms, proper names, and page references with no independent theoretical argument; it is non-substantive filler but maps the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     sublimation and, 95,99,115,117,126,129,131,134,158 ... defense systems and, 95 ... drives and, 110,238

302. #302

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     **XIV** > **XV** > *The Death Drive According to Bernfeld*

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames Freud's death drive as itself a sublimation projected beyond the barrier where the object-as-jouissance is inaccessible, and uses Bernfeld's failed energetic theory of the drive as a productive aporia that reveals the ethical-subjective dimension within which Freud's thought actually moves.

     all individual sublimation is projected beyond that barrier, along with the sublimations of the systems of knowledge, including - why not? - that of analytical knowledge itself.

303. #303

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.289

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Antigone's beauty functions as a blinding screen that prevents direct apprehension of the death drive she incarnates; situated between two deaths, her complaint (κομμός) and her identification with Niobe reveal her as the pure embodiment of the desire of death, rooted in the criminal desire of the mother, which she perpetuates by guarding the being of the criminal (Atè) against all social mediation.

     The violent illumination, the glow of beauty, coincides with the moment of transgression or of realization of Antigone's Atè

304. #304

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     **V**

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

     the systematic questioning of principles there where they need to be questioned, that is, at the level of the imperative. That is the culminating point for both Kant and Sade with relation to the Thing

305. #305

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's moral fable to expose the limits of the reality/pleasure principle as a criterion for ethics, arguing that sublimation and perversion both open onto a different register of morality oriented by das Ding (the place of desire), and re-grounds sublimation theoretically by distinguishing it from symptomatic repression through the drive's capacity to find its aim elsewhere without signifying substitution.

     Sublimation is represented as distinct from that economy of substitution in which the repressed drive is usually satisfied.

306. #306

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade as a limit-figure who, in his theory (if not his fantasy), points toward the genuine space of the neighbor as irreducibly other — beyond imaginary capture by the fellow-man — and thereby illuminates the structure of jouissance, transgression, and the ethical problem of loving one's neighbor as oneself.

     the idea of a technique oriented toward a jouissance that is not sublimated... Shall we investigate its value as sublimation?

307. #307

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **XIV** > **XIX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Aristotle's concept of catharsis through a Freudian-Lacanian framework, arguing that tragedy — and specifically Antigone's image — reveals the structure of desire: the fascination produced by Antigone's beauty purges the imaginary by operating at the limit between two symbolic fields, thus showing catharsis to be not mere abreaction but a purgation of the imaginary order through the intervention of a singular image.

     It has to do with Antigone's beauty and with the place it occupies as intermediary between two fields that are symbolically differentiated. It is doubtless from this place that her splendor derives, a splendor that all those who have spoken worthily of beauty have never omitted from its definition.

308. #308

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces sublimation as the positive, "other side" of the psychoanalytic critique of ethics, arguing that the plasticity and displacement-structure of the drives (*Triebe*) — irreducible to instinct and governed by the play of signifiers — is the necessary starting point for any theory of sublimation, while simultaneously exposing the paradoxical cruelty of the moral conscience as a parasite fed by the very satisfactions it demands.

     Sublimation is, in effect, the other side of the research that Freud pioneered into the roots of ethical feeling, insofar as it imposes itself in the form of prohibitions, of the moral conscience.

309. #309

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must not collapse the distance between analyst and analysand into imaginary fusion; such a collapse (figured as the "joiner" fantasy) leads to psychosis or perversion, and points toward the ethics of analysis being grounded in sublimation and the sublime rather than imaginary incorporation.

     The conjunction of this term with that of sublimation is probably not simply an accident nor simply homonymic.

310. #310

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld** > **A CURIOUS CASE OF SUBLIMATION**

     Theoretical move: By reading Arnaud Daniel's scatological poem within courtly love, Lacan demonstrates that sublimation does not require the disappearance of the sexual object but instead involves the construction of a refined symbolic apparatus around a cruel, empty Thing — the Lady's very crudity is what unveils Das Ding at the heart of sublimation.

     Sublimation is not, in fact, what the foolish crowd thinks; and it does not on all occasions necessarily follow the path of the sublime. The change of object doesn't necessarily make the sexual object disappear - far from it.

311. #311

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the history of art—from cave painting through anamorphosis—as an extended metaphor for sublimation, arguing that art's true end is not imitation but the encircling and rendering present/absent of the Thing (Das Ding), and that the Oedipal/paternal myth (including Freud's Moses) functions as the founding mythic support for sublimation's possibility within the ethics of psychoanalysis.

     I have only been following this line of argument because I want to discuss today that form of sublimation which appeared at a certain moment in the history of poetry, and which interests us in an exemplary way in connection with something that Freudian thought has placed at the center of our interest in the economy of the psyche, namely, Eros and eroticism.

312. #312

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of sublimation grounded in the topological function of Das Ding: the Thing is that which "in the real suffers from the signifier," is constitutively veiled, and is represented—never directly encountered—by the created object, whose paradigmatic form is the potter's vase, a void-around-which that enacts creation ex nihilo.

     the function I attribute to the Thing in the definition of sublimation... an object, insofar as it is a created object, may fill the function that enables it not to avoid the Thing as signifier, but to represent it.

313. #313

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the world of goods structured around the ego ideal and ideal ego necessarily produces a catastrophic demand that exceeds it, and that only practices like the potlatch—the ritual destruction of goods—bear witness to the possibility of disciplining desire outside the dialectic of competition and conflict; this insight is linked to the contemporary threat of collective annihilation as a structural, not merely accidental, consequence of the discourse of science.

     The potlatch bears witness to man's retreat from goods, a retreat which enabled him to link the maintenance and discipline of his desire... to the open destruction of goods

314. #314

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286

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

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

     Is she, as the classic interpretation would have it, the servant of a sacred order, of respect for living matter? Is hers the image of charity? Perhaps, but only if we confer on the word charity a savage dimension.

315. #315

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Decalogue—especially the commandments against lying and coveting—structurally reveals the dialectical relationship between desire and the Law: the Law does not merely prohibit desire but constitutes and inflames it, so that das Ding, as the primordial lost correlative of speech, is only accessible through (and as the excess produced by) the Law's interdiction, a logic Lacan demonstrates by substituting 'Thing' for 'sin' in Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

     We will have to explore that which, over the centuries, human beings have succeeded in elaborating that transgresses the Law, puts them in a relationship to desire that transgresses interdiction, and introduces an erotics that is above morality.

316. #316

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     **IX** > **X**

     Theoretical move: Lacan organizes sublimation around Das Ding (the Thing) as a constitutive emptiness, then maps the three Freudian mechanisms—Verdrängung, Verschiebung, and Verwerfung—onto art, religion, and science respectively, arguing that science's foreclosure of the Thing causes it to reappear in the Real, while courtly love is positioned as the paradigmatic case of sublimation in art.

     Courtly love is, in effect, an exemplary form, a paradigm, of sublimation. We only have essentially the documentary testimony of art, but we still feel today the ethical ramifications.

317. #317

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian discovery of desire—irreducible to need or reason—exposes the structural insufficiency of both Hegelian and Marxist accounts of human self-realization, and that jouissance, as the satisfaction of a drive (not a need), constitutes the inaccessible yet central problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

     the fable of Sade... Sade lays out for our benefit the theory that it is through crime that man collaborates in the new creations of nature.

318. #318

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Kantian ethics and Sadian ethics are structural mirrors of each other—both arrive at *das Ding* by eliminating all pathological (affective) reference from the moral law—and that this convergence reveals the fundamental relationship between the moral law, desire, and the Real, with pain as the sole sentient correlative of pure practical reason.

     one of the possible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics, by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788

319. #319

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's ethical task is inseparable from the question of desire's realization—which can only be posed from the standpoint of a "Last Judgment"—and that sublimation, properly understood via the metonymic structure of the drive and the signifier, is not a new object but the change of object as such, grounding the subject's access to its own relationship with death.

     In the definition of sublimation as satisfaction without repression... there is a passage from not-knowing to knowing, a recognition of the fact that desire is nothing more than the metonymy of the discourse of demand.

320. #320

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's ego-psychological account of sublimation (which grounds it in pre-given *Ichziele*) in order to pose the real problem: how a social consensus can originate a structural function like the poetic, and then demonstrates that courtly love is the paradigm case — a historically emergent, signifier-driven construction of the Lady as sublimated object that reshapes the entire economy of desire and social exchange.

     the contradiction between the Zielablenkung side of the Strebung, of the Trieb or drive, and the fact that that takes place in a domain which is that of the object libido, also poses all kinds of problems for Bernfeld

321. #321

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's ego-psychological account of sublimation (which grounds it in pre-given *Ichziele*) in order to pose the real problem: how a social consensus can originate a structural function like the poetic, and then demonstrates that courtly love is the paradigm case — a historically emergent, signifier-driven construction of the Lady as sublimated object that reshapes the entire economy of desire and social exchange.

     the very curious function of the poet of courtly love starts to be exercised... it is important to recall his social situation, which is of a kind to throw a little light on the fundamental idea or graphic style that Freudian ideology can give to a fashion whose function the artist manages in a way to delay

322. #322

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar VII by consolidating the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction not to give ground relative to one's desire, articulating the relationship between jouissance, sublimation, and the 'service of goods' through the figures of the hero, the saint, and tragic catharsis, and ends by locating modern science as the unconscious refuge of human desire.

     In eating the book we come into contact with what Freud means when he speaks of sublimation as a change of aim and not of object.

323. #323

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.331

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar VII by consolidating the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction not to give ground relative to one's desire, articulating the relationship between jouissance, sublimation, and the 'service of goods' through the figures of the hero, the saint, and tragic catharsis, and ends by locating modern science as the unconscious refuge of human desire.

     That good which is sacrificed for desire - and you will note that that means the same thing as that desire which is lost for the good - that pound of flesh is precisely the thing that religion undertakes to recuperate.

324. #324

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the defining formula of sublimation — "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — as the key to understanding how the drive finds satisfaction beyond its aim, and he illustrates this via courtly love and a concrete fable of collecting, arguing that sublimation reveals the relationship of the drive to das Ding as distinct from any imaginary object.

     The sublimation that provides the Trieb with a satisfaction different from its aim — an aim that is still defined as its natural aim — is precisely that which reveals the true nature of the Trieb insofar as it is not simply instinct, but has a relationship to das Ding as such, to the Thing insofar as it is distinct from the object.

325. #325

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's account of sublimation as dependent on a synchrony with repression and the Ich/Libidoziele distinction, arguing instead that sublimation must be articulated around das Ding — a primordial, non-object — which precedes the ego's aims and anchors the properly Freudian ethics/aesthetics Lacan is developing throughout Seminar VII.

     The problem of sublimation has to be posed early, but we don't for that reason have to limit ourselves to individual development.

326. #326

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

     Saint Martin shares his cloak, and a great deal is made of it. Yet it is after all a simple question of training; material is by its very nature made to be disposed of

327. #327

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Kant's moral calculus collapses once jouissance—understood as implicitly bound to evil and death—is substituted for pleasure in the ethical equation: the moral law then serves as a support for jouissance rather than its constraint, revealing that the law of the good can only operate through evil, and that the ethical subject is torn between a duty of truth that preserves the place of jouissance and a resignation to the good that extinguishes it.

     there's no need of sublimation - for the example to be ruined

328. #328

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the true backbone of Freud's thought is not a developmental/genetic schema (the child-as-father-of-the-man trope, historically located in English Romanticism) but the fundamental opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the latter functioning not as mere equilibrium but as a corrective apparatus against the psychic apparatus's radical inadequation—its natural tendency toward hallucinatory satisfaction rather than need-satisfaction.

     Pleasure in Aristotle is an activity that is compared to the bloom given off by youthful activity - it is, if you like, a radiance... the sign of the blossoming of an action, in the literal sense of évépyeia, a word that expresses the true praxis as that which includes its own end.

329. #329

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Diotima's speech in the Symposium as staging a fundamental slippage between two functions of beauty—beauty as a veil over the desire for death (between-two-deaths) and beauty as the metonymic object of desire—arguing that this movement illustrates the metonymic structure of desire itself, while also pointing toward what is missed when Plato is read as reducing Eros to narcissistic self-perfection (identification with the ideal ego).

     beauty is designed to veil his desire for death insofar as it is unapproachable... the desire for beauty [désir de beau] — desire insofar as it attaches itself to this mirage and gets caught up in it — is what corresponds to the hidden presence of the desire for death.

330. #330

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

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

     It is in this respect that we can say, without forcing things, that to us the extremely detailed composition of this canvas gives - in an exemplary fashion, through the intensity of the isolated image produced here - a tangible character to what a structural analysis of the myth of Apuleius could be.

331. #331

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.259

     **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** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.

     the reparative ideology of our initiative as therapists, of our analytic vocation

332. #332

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the topology of desire in the death drive and the "between-two-deaths," arguing that Freud's discovery of the unconscious is not reducible to the content of the Oedipus myth but to its structural form—"he did not know"—which inscribes the subject's desire in a signifying chain beyond consciousness, beyond adaptation, and in permanent tension with individual life.

     man aspires to annihilate himself in order to have his being inscribed [in history]. The hidden contradiction or rub is that man aspires to destroy himself in the very act of becoming immortal.

333. #333

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Greek love (erastes/eromenos) as a purified pedagogical model for theorizing the lover as desiring subject and the beloved as possessing something the lover lacks, thereby grounding the psychoanalytic concepts of desire, transference, and love in a single dialectical framework; simultaneously, he insists that homosexuality remains a perversion regardless of its cultural sublimation, and introduces the axiom that "love is giving what you don't have."

     It was quite obviously a kind of sublimation - recall that I tried last year to provide a slight rectification in your minds regarding the real function of sublimation.

334. #334

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.24

     **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.

     The idea of eternal death must be distinguished here from death insofar as it makes being itself into a detour... Eros is what unites unitively.

335. #335

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines the psychoanalytic object as *àgalma* — the partial object of desire that is incommensurable with ordinary objects of equivalence — and argues that this object, not identificatory or metaphysical constructs, is the true pivot of love, desire, and analytic practice, requiring a strict topology of subject, little other, and big Other to be properly situated.

     The one drowns, sends off course, masks, elides, and sublimates everything concrete in the experience of love, in an infamous ascension toward a supreme good.

336. #336

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium to locate the origin of a specifically modern, narcissistic conception of love—the fantasy of fusion with a lost half—distinguishing it from both Christian mystical love and Socratic/Platonic eros, while also theorizing transference as the structural effect of Plato's own fantasy asserting itself across historical contexts.

     Plato's dream bore the mark of higher sublimation... after courtly love's sublimation which I spoke to you about last year

337. #337

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     **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 articulates the oral, anal, and genital stages through the dialectic of demand and desire, showing how each stage structures the subject's relation to the Other differently, culminating in the genital/castration stage where objet petit a is defined as the Other minus phi (a = A - φ), revealing that the subject can only satisfy the Other's demand by demeaning the Other into an object of desire.

     the delights of consuming Christ's body are detailed in it and we are asked to dwell upon this exquisite cheek, this delicious arm... revealing to us what is always implied in even the most elaborate forms of oral identification.

338. #338

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structural features of the Symposium's narrative transmission—its layered oral "brain recording," the repeated scholarly evasion of the Alcibiades scene, and Socrates' self-claimed expertise solely in love—to position the dialogue as an analogue of psychoanalytic sessions, thereby establishing that the relationship between love and transference is the real theoretical stake of his seminar.

     when I talked last year at length about sublimation as concerns love for women, the author I didn't mention was neither Plato, nor any other scholar, but rather Marguerite de Navarre.

339. #339

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.428

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XV - Oral, Anal, and Genital**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, clarifying terminological, textual, and referential details; it is non-substantive in theoretical terms but does briefly gloss key Lacanian concepts such as aphanisis, the barred Other, and sublimation as they appear in the surrounding lecture text.

     whereas need can suffer no deviation in object or aim, sublimation can

340. #340

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symposium's final scene between Alcibiades and Socrates reveals the fundamental structure of desire: the subject, through the metonymic sliding of the signifier, finds an object (objet petit a / agalma) that arrests that sliding and paradoxically restores subjective dignity, while the subject simultaneously undergoes a "deposing" before the Other—establishing that transference is not reducible to repetition but must be approached via this dialectic of love and desire.

     This object is overvalued. And it is insofar as it is overvalued that it serves the function of saving our dignity as subjects.

341. #341

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

     Polyxena's breasts were as beautiful as those found on votive offerings [ex-votos]. Indeed, the breasts of votive figures are made on a lathe or in a mold and are always perfect.

342. #342

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.324

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's figure of Pensée as a topology of desire in which the woman, by becoming frozen into the object of love, incarnates the structure of desire itself — revealing that desire necessarily involves the four terms (two imaginary doubles a/a, the barred subject, and the big Other), and that the analyst's task is to locate those extreme points rather than succumb to therapeutic normalization.

     what it became by being filtered through the sublimation of the Christian tradition

343. #343

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *PAUSANIAS*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pausanias's speech in the *Symposium* as a "psychology of the rich" — an ethics of love structured entirely around the valuation, investment, and capitalization of the beloved as a good — and uses this reading to argue that any ethics which reduces love to outward signs of value inevitably produces illusion, thereby distancing Plato himself from Pausanias's position.

     Strangely enough, people generally try to see in this the first manifestation in history of what Kant called righteous intention.

344. #344

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.405

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.

     To consider this emergence of what I would almost call the most sublime island - this fantasy, reflection, or image - in which the object is incarnated as an object of desire

345. #345

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ERYXIM ACHUS*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Eryximachus' speech in Plato's Symposium as staging the foundational antinomy between concord-from-similarity and concord-from-dissimilarity/conflict, using it to illuminate topology's "full and empty," the pre-Socratic logic of contraries (Heraclitus), and—obliquely—the definition of psychoanalysis as "the science of the erotics of bodies." The comic register of the Symposium is foregrounded as philosophically significant, not merely ornamental.

     the harmony that dictates the order of the seasons. When it is the kind of love in which people get carried away, in which there is hubris or excess… then disasters begin

346. #346

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the *Symposium* as the privileged textual introduction to his seminar on transference, using the scandalous encounter between Alcibiades and Socrates—and the broader figure of Alcibiades as an exemplar of seduction, fascination, and the limits of love—to set the scene for a psychoanalytic investigation of what is at stake in transference.

     Greek love, which I'll stress later, that already provides a backdrop of constant eroticism to the speeches on love.

347. #347

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.28

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic relationship is not reducible to a neutral "situation" but is constituted by a high-degree sublimation of libidinal investment, making love — not well-being — the proper telos of analysis; he thus announces a return to the philosophical tradition on love (via Plato's Symposium) to supply what psychoanalytic literature has entirely neglected.

     psychoanalysis requires, right from the beginning, a high degree of libidinal sublimation at the level of collective relations.

348. #348

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

     Theoretical move: By reading the scandalous comportment of the gods of Antiquity through the concept of âgalma, Lacan argues that divine love (eros/agape) structures the deceptive, mutually-luring relation between Socrates and Alcibiades, and that this same structure—from the unconscious toward the subject ascending to the core object—governs the psychoanalytic dialectic of love.

     Alcibiades provides the true representation, unbeknown to himself, of what is implied by the Socratic ascesis.

349. #349

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.

     It is neither beauty, nor ascesis, nor identification with God that Alcibiades desires, but rather this unique object, this special something he saw in Socrates and which Socrates turns him away from

350. #350

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     **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.

     what we might call a sublimated voracity is perpetuated, insofar as it takes this Lust, this pleasure... through a reversal in the use of the term 'sublimation,' that I am justified in saying that we see here a deviation in aim occurring in a way that does not happen when it comes to the object of need.

351. #351

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Agathon's speech in the Symposium is a deliberately ironic, "macaronic" discourse in which the tragic poet reveals love as what is radically unclassifiable and always inopportune — always lagging behind — and that this comic-tragic ambivalence is structurally necessary: in the Christian context, love fills the void left by the inexorable fatal oracle and the commandment of the second death, which can no longer be sustained.

     love takes their place, filling up this emptiness [vide]... We had to reach a Christian context for Iphigenia to no longer suffice as a tragic figure, and for it to be necessary to double her with Eriphilia.

352. #352

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium through the Alcestis/Achilles contrast, Lacan argues that the "signification of love" culminates in the reversal whereby the beloved (eromenon) acts as lover (erastes) — a structural inversion that anticipates his analytic distinction between activity and strength, and between lack and desire, particularly as these play out in the heterosexual couple.

     what the gods find sublime, more marvelous than anything else, is when the beloved behaves as one would expect a lover to behave.

353. #353

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from critiquing reductive accounts of desire to introducing Claudel's trilogy as a contemporary tragedy that, like Antigone, pushes the subject to the limit of the "second death" — here uniquely demanding that the heroine sacrifice not merely life but her very being, the sacred pact constituting her identity, going *beyond* the limits Antigone reached.

     she must renounce her very being — the pact that has kept her forever faithful to her own family… to the sacrifice of what for her, as for every being, is worth more than life itself

354. #354

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 19*: *Wednesday 9 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is not beyond language but structured through it, and that the subject's constitution as desire requires grasping both the topological dimension of the objet petit a and its role in fantasy—where the Graph of Desire's two-level structure reveals that fantasy anticipates the ideal ego in a temporal logic of the future perfect, pointing toward a 'temporal dynamics' that exceeds mere spatial topology.

     that desire is set up in transgression is something everyone feels, everyone clearly sees... It is beyond the frontier that has been broken through that desire begins. Of course, this often appears to be the shortest way, but it is a hopeless way.

355. #355

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

     I tried to explain to you in the structure of courtly sublimation whose real import I am not at all sure after all of having made you really understand.

356. #356

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The neurotic's defining feature is the desire to know — specifically to reverse the effacing of the thing by the signifier and recover the real that preceded signification — and this structure, rather than social maladjustment, gives neurosis its theoretical authority; meanwhile, sublimation is reframed as a paradoxical detour through signification by which jouissance is obtained without repression.

     sublimation, in Freud's discourse, is inseparable from a contradiction, namely that jouissance, the aim of jouissance, subsists and is in a certain sense realised in every activity of sublimation, that there is no repression, that there is no effacing, that there is not even a compromise with jouissance, that there is a paradox, that there is a detour

357. #357

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.294

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper aim of analysis is not therapeutic adaptation but the subject's entry into desire, and grounds this claim structurally by showing that the object of desire (objet petit a) is constituted not by privation or frustration but by castration, and that this castrated object uniquely "carries number with it" — a point illustrated through re-reading the Wolf Man's primal-scene fantasy.

     we prohibit ourselves from doing better, knowing full well that this action of ours… is carried out along paths which do not concern the result

358. #358

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces how the subject constitutes itself through the unary trait and the non-response of the Other, rewriting Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as a formula of the One's advent, and then uses Sade to demonstrate that the object of desire is structurally dependent on the Other's silence—culminating in the Sadian drive toward annihilating signifying power as the logical extreme of this dialectic.

     the affinity of the object with this Other - with a big 0 - in so far for example as it manifests itself in love, that the famous speech of Eliante in Le Misanthrope is taken from the De natura rerum of Lucretius

359. #359

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

     The sublimable value of the Father's function is underscored directly at the same time as the properly verbal or even poetic form of its consequence surfaces.

360. #360

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     V. The Word BringsJouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Gospel of John's "In the beginning was the Word" by insisting that the Word precedes the beginning and is the fundamental condition of human suffering ('ravaged by the Word'), while simultaneously grounding the clinical practice of analysis in the Word as a source of jouissance — the reason analysands return.

     He taught Adam to name things. He didn't give him the Word, for that would have been too big a deal. He taught him how to name.

361. #361

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.57

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

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

     Isn't this the key to the function of sublimation that I am currently getting those who attend my Seminar to dwell upon? Man tries to compromise with the Thing in various forms: in the fundamental art… in religion… and in science.

362. #362

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     II. The Anxiety of Scientists

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Real as that which "doesn't work" — what escapes the smooth functioning of the world — and uses scientists' anxiety attacks over dangerous biology as a foil to argue that analysts, who deal exclusively with the Real, face an even more impossible profession than science, governance, or education.

     someone takes them out of the laboratory... That would be a true triumph. It would mean that humanity would truly have achieved something - its own destruction.

363. #363

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.12

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychotherapeutic "positive orientation" of contemporary society constitutes a collective disavowal of a foundational inner negativity or deadness, and that psychoanalysis — despite Freud's self-distinction from religion's consolation function — largely replicates religion's salvational logic by promising deliverance from suffering rather than confronting the constitutive negativity of existence.

     We are negative on the inside and positive on the outside.

364. #364

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.16

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: Reshe argues that the death drive constitutes an irreparable "negative insight" that undermines psychoanalysis from within, revealing it as a self-defeating practice: the therapeutic frame structurally contradicts—and thereby cancels—any genuine acknowledgement of suffering as constitutive and incurable, making the psychoanalyst a fraud and psychoanalysis itself a living-dead institution.

     What psychoanalysis inherited from religion and secularised is the goal of alleviating human suffering.

365. #365

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.21

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that conventional psychoanalysis, psychology, and therapeutic culture are defence mechanisms that alienate suffering from the subject by pathologising it, while Zapffe's "depressive realism" — pushed further than Freud's own pessimism — reveals that inner pain is constitutive of human existence rather than a deviation from health, thereby grounding the book's anti-therapeutic, radically negative psychoanalytic project.

     Everything we do in our lives—from our most shameful weaknesses to the most sublime endeavours, literally any human activity—can exhaustively be explained as an effort to escape, silence, or give meaning to inevitable suffering.

366. #366

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.33

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

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Catherine Malabou's critique, the passage argues that both Freud and Lacan fail to conceptualise trauma as genuinely formative and irreparable: the death drive is domesticated back under the pleasure principle, and the Real's intrusion is assumed to be ultimately assimilable, leaving psychoanalysis unable to think the 'living dead' — a new posttraumatic subject formed by destruction itself, without continuity or possibility of restoration.

     For him, traumas don't create; they only damage and modify.

367. #367

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.89

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Project of Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely negative psychoanalysis, centred on the death drive as constitutive lack rather than as a path to enjoyment, must abandon all positive agendas (healing, emancipation, improved enjoyment) and function as a non-redemptive, comic-tragic witness to the irrevocable loss at the core of subjectivity and social bonds.

     The tragic hero sacrifices themselves for nothing, not hoping that their sacrifice will be compensated or even that it will improve anything.

368. #368

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.99

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive—understood as a drive toward loss, self-destruction, and repetition of originary absence—is the foundational structure of both subjectivity and sociality, with sacrifice, love, and political bonds all grounded in shared nothingness rather than positive satisfaction; the emancipated subject is thus one who avows hopelessness rather than seeking untainted enjoyment.

     The proclivity to sacrifce is linked to the primacy of the death drive.

369. #369

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.106

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that existentialism gestures toward the death drive through its affective categories (Angst, despair, being-towards-death) but ultimately betrays it by offering a compensatory benefit (authenticity, overcoming bad faith), whereas a genuinely negative psychoanalysis would refuse all such rewards — with art emerging as the only practice that is faithful to the death drive precisely because its 'benefit' is immanent to the self-destructive process itself, not a subsequent reward.

     Art is turning one's self-destruction into a form of beauty, while it remains self-destruction and doesn't escape that.

370. #370

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.145

     <span id="page-138-0"></span>Epilogue: No Salvation

     Theoretical move: The epilogue proposes "negative psychoanalysis" as a practice that refuses salvation, expertise, and positive consolation, remaining faithful to the negative insight that nothing can save us—a self-cancelling praxis that mirrors the constitutive rupture of the subject and the social bond itself.

     We would collectively mourn and collectively laugh at how pathetic and messed up we are.

371. #371

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Copernican revolution in metaphysics—making objects conform to our faculties of cognition rather than vice versa—simultaneously limits speculative reason to phenomena while opening a practical domain for freedom, morality, and belief; the critique's "negative" restriction of knowledge is thus positively enabling for practical reason and ethics.

     to deny the positive advantage of the service which this criticism renders us would be as absurd as to maintain that the system of police is productive of no positive benefit

372. #372

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > CHAPTER III Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the pure concepts of the understanding (categories) have no legitimate transcendental use—they can only be applied empirically, i.e., to objects of possible sensuous experience—thereby dismantling ontology's pretension to deliver synthetic a priori cognition of things-in-themselves and reducing it to a mere analytic of the understanding conditioned by sensible intuition.

     the proud name of an ontology, which professes to present synthetical cognitions a priori of things in general in a systematic doctrine, must give place to the modest title of analytic of the pure understanding.

373. #373

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that metaphysics requires a principled architectonic division grounded in the kind and origin of pure a priori cognition—not merely in degree of generality—and that this systematic unity constitutes philosophy's highest office: the critical regulation of speculative reason to prevent dialectical excess in morals and religion.

     metaphysics forms likewise the completion of the culture of human reason... its subject-matter is the elements and highest maxims of reason, which form the basis of the possibility of some sciences and of the use of all.

374. #374

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION II. Of Transcendental Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure reason, by seeking the unconditioned totality of conditions beyond any given synthesis, generates transcendental ideas—necessary but immanently inapplicable conceptions—that function not as constitutive but as regulative canons orienting the understanding toward an absolute unity it can never fully attain in experience.

     they perhaps render possible a transition from our conceptions of nature and the non-ego to the practical conceptions, and thus produce for even ethical ideas keeping, so to speak, and connection with the speculative cognitions of reason.

375. #375

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION VI. Of the Impossibility of a Physico-Theological Proof.

     Theoretical move: Kant demonstrates that the physico-theological (design) argument cannot stand alone as a proof of God's existence: it secretly depends on the cosmological argument, which in turn depends on the ontological argument, making the ontological proof the sole possible ground for speculative theology—while simultaneously showing that no such empirical path can bridge the gap to the unconditioned.

     The mind, unceasingly elevated by these considerations... will not suffer itself to be depressed by the doubts suggested by subtle speculation; it tears itself out of this state of uncertainty... and rises from height to height, from condition to condition

376. #376

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three questions of pure reason—what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope—converge on a moral theology in which the necessary connection between moral worthiness and happiness can only be grounded in the postulate of a supreme rational cause (God) and a future life, making the 'ideal of the summum bonum' a practically necessary idea of reason rather than a speculative one.

     the glorious ideas of morality are, indeed, objects of approbation and of admiration, but cannot be the springs of purpose and action

377. #377

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. Of the Ultimate End of the Pure Use of Reason.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three transcendental ideas of pure reason (freedom, immortality, God) have no constitutive speculative use but converge on a single practical-moral interest, thereby subordinating the entire speculative enterprise to the question of what we ought to do — reason's ultimate vocation is moral, not theoretical.

     Not deployed — removing.

378. #378

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION I—Of Ideas in General.

     Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes Platonic Ideas (pure rational conceptions transcending possible experience) from lower representational forms, arguing that Ideas are indispensable regulative archetypes for ethics, legislation, and nature—and insisting on terminological precision to preserve the concept's theoretical integrity against empiricist reduction.

     the mental power exhibited in this ascent from the ectypal mode of regarding the physical world to the architectonic connection thereof according to ends, that is, ideas, is an effort which deserves imitation and claims respect.

379. #379

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three ideas of pure reason (soul, world, God) are strictly regulative—not constitutive—principles: they function as schemata for systematically unifying empirical inquiry rather than as cognitions of actual objects, and treating them as constitutive produces characteristic errors (ignava ratio, false spiritualism, physico-theological dogmatism).

     the highest formal unity, which is based upon ideas alone, is the unity of all things—a unity in accordance with an aim or purpose

380. #380

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

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

     In algebra, a certain method of notation by signs is adopted, and these indicate the different possible constructions of quantities... algebra, by means of a symbolical construction of quantity... arrives at results which discursive cognition cannot hope to reach by the aid of mere conceptions.

381. #381

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > CHAPTER I. Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that rational psychology collapses into a paralogism by mistaking the mere formal unity of consciousness (the "I think") for an intuition of a substantial subject, thereby illegitimately applying the category of substance to what is only a logical unity; this critique demolishes speculative proofs of the soul's immortality while clearing space for a practical (moral) grounding of belief in a future life.

     he feels himself bound to prize the mere consciousness of probity, apart from all advantageous consequences—even the shadowy gift of posthumous fame—above everything

382. #382

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION III. Of the Interest of Reason in these Self-contradictions.

     Theoretical move: Kant stages the antinomy of pure reason as an irreducible conflict between Dogmatism (thesis) and Empiricism (antithesis) in the determination of cosmological ideas, arguing that neither side can be settled by theoretical reason alone and that the tension itself points toward the need to locate the source of the conflict in reason's own structure rather than in the objects it investigates.

     philosophy discovers a value and a dignity, which, if it could but make good its assertions, would raise it far above all other departments of human knowledge—professing, as it does, to present a sure foundation for our highest hopes and the ultimate aims of all the exertions of reason.

383. #383

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.138

     The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses Freud's well-known ambivalence toward music as a pivot to argue that the voice operates across three registers in Freud's texts (fantasy, desire, drive), and that the key fault-line in the Freudian corpus is between an unconscious that "speaks" (structured like a language) and drives that are constitutively mute — with the death drive as the silent, invisible shadow subtending the "clamor" of Eros.

     the highest rampart against the object voice, as we have seen

384. #384

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.180

     Silence > Ulysses

     Theoretical move: Dolar reads Kafka's "Silence of the Sirens" to articulate how the law operates not through command but through silence—its zero-point of voice—which is irresistible precisely because there is nothing to resist, and shows that Ulysses' "escape" relies on a self-cancelling pretense whose structure mirrors the logic of the Jewish joke, leaving the law's mechanism intact.

     This is the very image of the division between labor and art, and this is the place to start scrutinizing the function of art, in its separation from the economy of work and survival—that is, in its powerlessness.

385. #385

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.9

     Series Foreword

     Theoretical move: The series foreword argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis functions as a privileged instrument of "short-circuit" reading—a critical procedure that crosses incongruous textual/conceptual registers to expose the disavowed presuppositions and unthought of canonical texts, producing decentering rather than mere desublimation.

     what such a reading achieves is not a simple 'desublimation,' a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause

386. #386

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.185

     Silence > The mouse

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kafkan "strategy of art"—exemplified by Josephine's voice as a minimal, ready-made gap within the law—inevitably defeats itself: the very institutionalization of the exception reinserts it into the symbolic order, closing the gap it opened and confirming that art's transcendence is always domesticated back into a social function.

     all its power stems from the place it occupies, as in Lacan's definition of sublimation: 'to elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing'

387. #387

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.195

     Silence > The dog

     Theoretical move: By reading Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," Dolar traces how the acousmatic voice-from-nowhere (objet petit a as pure resonance) converges with the enigma of food to identify objet petit a as the common-source intersection of voice and nourishment—both passing through the mouth in mutual exclusion—while also theorising psychoanalysis as the abandonment of childhood rather than its retrieval.

     The science of music is held in higher esteem than the science of nurture, it reaches the sublime, but this is precisely what prevents it from penetrating 'deeply into the life of the people'

388. #388

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.145

     A month later:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.

     They are defensive structures, sublimations and embellishments of the facts, and at the same time serve the purpose of self-exoneration.

389. #389

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.147

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > Breast-Feeding and Freedom

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject's definition as free necessarily generates anxiety by including the Real within the Symbolic as a negation (the indestructible double), and that the proper response is not to interpret anxiety as demand but to sustain the object a as the unspeakable support of freedom—illustrated negatively by Frankenstein's reduction of the monster's desire to a demand.

     The symbolic world-the second space of Freud's dream of Irma's injection-is strictly parallel to the Kantian conception of the aesthetics of the beautiful.

390. #390

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.83

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Colonies and Colonnades

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

     The transposition of neoclassical architecture to the sites that had become the goals of this mission euphemized the brutal process of the erasure of the colonies' own beginnings.

391. #391

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

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

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

     using the Lacanian definition of sublimation, that psychoanalysis 'raises ' the unconscious and the woman's desire 'to the dignity of the Thing.'

392. #392

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.74

     Theory and Opposition > World Spirit on Horseback

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of comedy structured around the coincidence of lack and excess, arguing that while Zupančič's Hegelian account of comedy as the concretization of the abstract universal captures something essential, it remains too narrow; the truly fundamental comic operation is the short-circuit that brings lack and excess together as two faces of the same structure.

     Aristophanes reveals what Zupančič calls 'the universal at work.' In doing so, his play strips away the abstraction of the universal, forcing the spectator to confront the universal in its concrete incarnation.

393. #393

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.78

     Tragedy and Pathos > Proximate Genres

     Theoretical move: By mapping comedy against its proximate genres, the passage argues that tragedy, comedy, and pathos are differentiated not by subject matter but by how they distribute lack and excess: tragedy insists on pure excess/transcendence, pathos insists on pure lack/finitude, while comedy is uniquely constituted by their intersection and simultaneous coincidence.

     Tragic heroes place an infinite duty above concern for their own finite existence.

394. #394

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.81

     Tragedy and Pathos > The Pathetic Martin Heidegger

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophy of finitude installs pathos as the dominant modern mode of relating to others, crowding out both tragedy and comedy—both of which require transcendence—and that this ubiquitous finitude reduces all beings to pitiable victims, eliminating the dignity that comedy and tragedy confer.

     The bodily sound in the first case is comic, while it leads to a feeling of pathos in the second.

395. #395

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.89

     Tragedy and Pathos > The Status of the Body

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difference between comedy and pathos lies in the visibility of the subject: the pathetic body is one reduced to mere finitude (matter without subject), while the comic body is one in which the subject's excess appears through and against the body's material constraints — making laughter more ontologically respectful than pity.

     The body is the source of pathos, but when we see the subject acting in the body, the comic emerges out of the pathetic.

396. #396

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.93

     Tragedy and Pathos > The Ego and Its Own Lack

     Theoretical move: Comedy requires the simultaneous revelation of both the ideal and its material basis — neither pure transcendence nor pure materiality is comic — and its inherently fleeting structure makes it paradoxically speculative and philosophical, unlike the durable forms of tragedy and pathos.

     Comedy occurs not just when one reveals the material basis of an ideal but when one shows the identity of the material and the ideal— how the ideal is inextricably involved in its material basis and how the material basis produces an ideal that transcends it.

397. #397

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.116

     Philosophy and the Finite > Trying to Laugh at Existentialism

     Theoretical move: Comedy requires the intersection of finitude and transcendence: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are comic philosophers because they retain a form of transcendence (God/Übermensch) alongside their critique of finitude, while Sartre and Camus, by confining the subject entirely to finitude and rejecting any avenue toward the infinite, structurally preclude comedy from their philosophies.

     According to Nietzsche, we can transcend our finite existence through an embrace of the eternal return, through what he calls amor fati.

398. #398

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.141

     Distance and Proximity > The Fortunate Fall

     Theoretical move: Comedy's notorious subjectivity is explained not by arbitrary taste but by its structural requirement that the spectator occupy a precise position where excess and lack are seen to overlap in the comic object; too much identification collapses comedy into pathos, too little into disinvestment, making the comic position an unstable third term that simultaneously requires proximity and distance.

     The nerd achieves a type of transcendence through his very ostracism that those ensconced in the strictures of popularity lack.

399. #399

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.143

     Distance and Proximity > Envisioning the End of the World

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the affective register of any event—comic, pathetic, or indifferent—is not intrinsic to the event itself but is entirely a function of the subject's positional distance or proximity to it, using three films about Earth's destruction as comparative cases to demonstrate how comedy specifically requires the precise interplay of identification and distance.

     Kubrick presents the total destruction as a comic event occasioned by the stupidity of the military leaders and the societies that developed weapons capable of this devastation.

400. #400

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.146

     Distance and Proximity > Laughing from a Distance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy requires a paradoxical combination of disinvestment from an event's social utility AND investment in the event itself, dismantling the simple "distance = comedy" adage by showing that pure distance produces indifference, not laughter; representation is identified as the privileged site where this dual requirement is most reliably met.

     Rather than investing oneself fully in the activity, one adopts a different mode in which practical concerns, especially concerns about utility, no longer count.

401. #401

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.159

     Outside and Inside > Where the Little Tramp Belongs

     Theoretical move: The Little Tramp functions as the comic embodiment of the coincidence of lack and excess: his structural exclusion from the social order is not merely a social commentary but an ethical injunction to embrace the social remainder, and his comedy collapses the moment full social inclusion is achieved — as dramatized in *Limelight*, where Calvero's complete acceptance by the crowd immediately precipitates his death.

     the Little Tramp decides to cook his shoe for dinner... he cooks and eats it as if engaged in fine dining. He carefully boils the shoe over the stove, and when eating it, he twirls the laces around his fork as if he was rolling spaghetti

402. #402

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.191

     Speculation and Levity

     Theoretical move: Comedy is not a moral holiday or cathartic release but a speculative act that forces subjects to confront the constitutive contradiction of subjectivity—the indissoluble link between lack and excess, trauma and enjoyment, finitude and transcendence—making it philosophically equivalent to, and more accessible than, formal speculation.

     comedy undermines our pretensions of escaping the body and finitude, while rendering it impossible to view ourselves solely through the lens of finite concerns like well-being and survival.

403. #403

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.213

     Notes > Chapter 6

     Theoretical move: This notes section elaborates the theoretical architecture of the book's comedy thesis by defending key distinctions (lack vs. excess, distance vs. identification, signifier-transformation vs. animal play) and engaging with Bergson/Morreall on disinterestedness, Kierkegaard on Christendom, and Kubrick on the formal necessity of comedy over drama for certain subject-matters.

     Investment in a specific object or event removes us from the everyday and enables us to reach a form of transcendence.

404. #404

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the Ego Ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishing it sharply from sublimation, and identifies conscience as the psychic agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—an agency whose regressive form reappears in paranoid self-scrutiny delusions and whose normal operation underlies dream censorship.

     Sublimation is a process involving object-libido, and consists in a drive latching on to a different goal far removed from sexual gratification... To the extent, therefore, that sublimation has to do with drives whereas idealization has to do with objects, the two concepts need to be clearly distinguished from each other.

405. #405

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud elaborates narcissism as the economic ground of self-feeling, arguing that the ego's libidinal economy—structured by the tension between primary narcissism, ego-ideal, and object-cathexes—determines both psychic health and the dynamics of love, repression, and social feeling (guilty conscience as displaced homosexual libido).

     In the case of the paraphrenic illnesses, we can better understand the concomitance within the ego-ideal of ideal-formation and sublimation, the retrogression of sublimations, and the re-formation of ideals.

406. #406

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Falstaff-Hal and Rosalind-Orlando dynamics in Shakespeare as allegorical demonstrations of how imaginative play can disrupt the repetition compulsion of paternal authority (superego) and the regressive pull of maternal wish-fulfilment (id), positioning Shakespeare's therapeutic imagination as an alternative to Freud's resigned acceptance of fate's harsh reductions.

     Rosalind puts all of her energy and humanizing, therapeutic force into teaching Orlando that love is more than anything one can readily comprehend, at least once the exercise of wit has taken it beyond Freudian-style reductions.

407. #407

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the structural-dynamic thesis that the psyche's tripartite division (id, ego, superego) must be articulated with the dualism of Eros and the death drive, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido as the energetic medium that links drive-fusion/de-fusion to the pleasure principle and to the indifferent displacements characteristic of the primary process.

     the uninhibited sexual drive itself and the goal-inhibited and hence sublimated drive-impulses deriving from it

408. #408

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     This psychic processing activity achieves extraordinary things with regard to the inner discharge of excitations that are incapable of direct external release

409. #409

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of the unconscious reveals an irreducible cycle of repetition, submission, and authority-seeking that underlies all politics, love, and therapy, and that the analyst — like Shakespeare's Falstaff — must strategically occupy the position of the primal father/authority in order to work through, rather than merely repeat, these foundational fantasies.

     In sane politics, as in sane love, the old archetypes still preside, though in sublimated forms.

410. #410

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego/ego-ideal is the structural heir to the Oedipus complex, formed through identification with the repressed paternal obstacle, and constitutes the psychical site of conscience, morality, and religion—thereby answering the charge that psychoanalysis neglects man's 'higher' nature by locating that higher presence in the ego-ideal's phylogenetically inherited structure.

     The battle that had previously raged in the nether depths, but had never come to any final resolution through a rapid process of sublimation and identification, is now carried on at a higher level

411. #411

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation by contrasting conversion hysteria (which largely confines its defence to repression) with obsessional neurosis (where libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase, superego harshness, and reaction-formations constitute a distinct and more elaborate defence structure), proposing that the castration complex drives both and that the difference lies in constitutional/temporal factors affecting the genital organisation of the libido.

     the sublimation of anal-erotic components clearly plays a role in it.

412. #412

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud defends the libido theory's explanatory validity against Jung's claim that it fails with dementia praecox, arguing that the ego-drive/sexual-drive antagonism remains the most productive hypothesis for psychoanalytic work, even while acknowledging its biological rather than purely psychological grounding.

     he can easily have sublimated it into a heightened interest in the divine or natural or animal realm without falling victim to an introversion of his libido onto his fantasies

413. #413

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator/editor footnotes to Freud's "The Ego and the Id," clarifying terminological and conceptual issues around das Ich/das Es, the bodily ego, the id as libidinal reservoir, the Oedipus complex, and related matters — it is primarily philological and exegetical rather than advancing an independent theoretical argument.

     a construct actively, purposely built out over and above them in order to disguise or – in effect – to sublimate them

414. #414

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's structural dependence on the superego reveals how sublimation and identification produce a de-mergence of drives, unleashing the death drive within the superego and making morality itself a lethal product of psychic catabolism; fear of death and consciential fear are thus retraced to castration fear as their core.

     every such identification is in the nature of a desexualization or even a sublimation. Now it seems that when such a conversion process occurs, a de-mergence of drives takes place as well.

415. #415

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that narcissism and object-love constitute two fundamentally different libidinal economies whose interaction explains the gendered asymmetry of erotic fascination, the structure of parental love, and the various paths to object-choice — showing narcissism to be not merely a developmental phase but a persistent force that shapes object-relations throughout life.

     there is also a tendency when faced by the child to suspend all the cultural accretions that we ourselves came to accept only in the teeth of opposition from our narcissism

416. #416

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's encounter with lost objects produces identification as a structural residue, and that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex specifically generates the super-ego/ego-ideal as a precipitate of those identifications — establishing the super-ego as an internal agency that actively opposes the rest of the ego and is constitutively linked to sublimation, narcissism, and bisexuality.

     whether this is not perhaps the standard path to sublimation; whether all sublimation doesn't perhaps take place via the medium of the ego, which first transforms sexual object-libido into narcissistic object-libido, in order perhaps then to set it a different goal.

417. #417

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud dismantles the notion of an inherent "drive towards perfection" by reducing it to the structural tension produced by repression, and repositions sexual drives (Eros) as the true life-drives that oppose the death drive, introducing a rhythmic antagonism at the heart of organic life rather than a teleological development.

     All the sublimations and reaction-formations and surrogate-formations in the world are never enough to resolve the abiding tension

418. #418

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that sublimation operates through the ego's desexualization of id-libido, which paradoxically places the ego in the service of the death drive against Eros; and that secondary narcissism is constituted by this withdrawal and internalization of object-libido, while the death drive's silence amidst life's clamour is only held in check by Eros's disruptive demands.

     sublimation routinely takes place via the medium of the ego... this conversion [of object-libido] into ego-libido entails a desexualization, an abandonment of sexual goals.

419. #419

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freud's theory of Eros is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion rooted in the lost maternal object, narcissism, and submission to authority—such that erotic life, political life, and the compulsion to repeat are all expressions of the same libidinal economy governed by the super-ego and the drive to restore an originary, impossible object.

     Love for authority sublimates Eros, makes it less immediately perceptible, often because Eros, under such conditions, is homosexual and therefore anxiety-provoking.

420. #420

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical-to-practical pivot, arguing that the emerging church's apophatic and deconstructive theology must be embodied in liturgical praxis rather than remaining abstract, and that authentic community formation resists universalization in favor of local, organic particularity.

     Ikon resembles more an optician's surgery, which helps the eye become more receptive and sensitive to light, rather than a painter's studio, which would offer images for the sight.

421. #421

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > The secret

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-philosophical pivot: rather than choosing between Wittgenstein's injunction to silence and the evangelical imperative to speak of God, Rollins synthesizes them via the Christian mystical tradition into an "a/theological" stance where the unspeakable is precisely what compels speech, framing this as a rediscovery rather than an innovation.

     By speaking with wounded words of their wounded Christ, these mystics helped to develop, not a distinct religious tradition, but rather a way of engaging with and understanding already existing religious traditions

422. #422

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     the ritual of burning... Every time a piece of paper with an 'X' appears, it is burnt, unread

423. #423

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Corpus Christi*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological move that displaces propositional truth (orthodoxy) in favour of transformative, relational truth (orthopraxis), arguing that the encounter with God occurs in and through the body of the neighbour—a claim enacted liturgically through parable, Sufi poetry, and Holocaust testimony, all of which converge on the Lacanian-resonant dissolution of a self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter.

     While Zvi lied in order to survive, in lying he told the most profound truth of all. For in Zvi, the Messiah did visit that woman.

424. #424

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     the believer ought to be seen as the poem, parable and salt of God in the world rather than God's proposition to the world.

425. #425

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The saying of nothing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic theological discourse operates as a "powerless" or apophatic speech-act that does not colonize the divine with logos but instead creates a sacred clearing in which the divine can address the subject — inverting the evangelistic model from answer-provision to question-opening, and theorizing language as the medium through which its own limits are enacted.

     The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath.

426. #426

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *A/theism*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances an "a/theistic" theological position arguing that authentic Christian faith requires the simultaneous affirmation and negation of every concept of God — a structural movement of naming and de-naming that mirrors the Lacanian logic of lack, where no signifier can adequately capture the Real of the divine.

     our images of God, important as they are, are at best icons that allow us to contemplate the mysterious presence of God, and are at worst idols which take the place of God

427. #427

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prosperity*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

     He then claims that this champagne and chocolate cake is the true body and blood of Christ... nobody moves. After a prolonged and difficult pause

428. #428

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Judas*

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical/performative critique of self-legitimating religion, arguing that genuine faith requires radical self-critique — a "self-lacerating" identification with the betrayer (Judas) rather than the righteous — and that this prophetic, self-subverting structure is internal to authentic Christian discourse itself.

     facile religion can act as a justification of our actions and as a means of being comforted by the feeling that our lives are meaningful

429. #429

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Theology and the voice of God*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that theology should be understood not as human discourse that defines God, but as the site where God speaks into human discourse — a shift from idolatrous representationalism to a responsive, a/theological posture that acknowledges the irreducible excess of the divine over any tradition's understanding of it.

     we do not *do* theology but are rather overcome and transformed by it: we do not master it but are mastered by it.

430. #430

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *A/theology as transformative*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a/theology understood iconically treats religious traditions and spiritual disciplines as pragmatic wisdom aids to transformation rather than fixed formulas or abstract doctrines, thereby navigating between fundamentalism and humanism by acknowledging that conceptual constructions always express the subject while still pointing toward a genuine encounter with the divine.

     it provides a way of avoiding idolatrous talk in favour of heartfelt praise. In this iconic understanding, our thoughts concerning God are directed towards God in love rather than enslaving God with words.

431. #431

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Nourished by our hunger*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a structural inversion of the classical "God-shaped hole" motif: rather than lack preceding and awaiting fulfillment, the void is constituted *by* the encounter with God — making absence itself the positive form of presence, and desire the evidence of having found rather than the sign of not yet finding.

     Faith, in this rendering, can thus be described as a wound that heals

432. #432

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prodigal*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that divine revelation operates through a third mode beyond anonymity and adequacy — "hypernymity" — in which God's superabundant presence overwhelms understanding and is experienced as absence, such that desire/longing for God is itself the sign of God's (hyper)presence rather than God's absence.

     'Prodigal' explores this idea of over-abundant revelation by exploring how God's participation with the world is so luminous that all our attempts at rendering God present to the mind or experience turn out to be wounded, provisional and inadequate.

433. #433

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Service description*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-liturgical argument that genuine faith requires dwelling in radical uncertainty (Holy Saturday) rather than instrumentalizing God for existential security — faith forged in the void of divine absence transcends reward/punishment logic, enacting a form of desire that is unconditional and non-transactional.

     Faith does not die here, rather it is forged here.

434. #434

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Advent*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a liturgical enactment of the shift from orthodoxy as propositional belief to orthodoxy as transformative practice, using the Advent/Incarnation narrative to theorize how the subject must empty itself (undergo a kind of ego-death) to become a dwelling-place for truth, structuring this through the homology between Mary's womb and the subject's receptive void.

     In order to make that space for Christ in our lives, we must commit ourselves to mending broken relationships and to living in such a way as to seek justice and mercy

435. #435

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Letting go*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theological argument that authentic Christian practice requires ego-dissolution rather than correct belief or moral effort, drawing on Eckhart's mystical kenosis to argue that the subject must empty itself so that divine love can flow through it — positioning self-surrender as the condition of possibility for ethical transformation.

     we will not merely sit around describing God to the world, but rather, we will become the iconic spaces in which God is made manifest in the world

436. #436

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *From knowledge to love: reading from right to left*

     Theoretical move: The passage redefines 'orthodoxy' by etymologically inverting its traditional reading—from 'right belief' to 'believing in the right way' (i.e., in the way of love)—thereby dissolving the binary opposition between orthodoxy and heresy, and arguing that genuine religious knowledge is inseparable from loving praxis rather than propositional correctness.

     we must judge our various traditions according to whether they tend towards freeing their congregation from their burdens, helping to transform them into more Christlike individuals.

437. #437

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.16

     POWERS OF HORROR > BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS

     Theoretical move: Kristeva deploys Lacanian categories (repression, foreclosure, jouissance, objet petit a, the Other) to argue that abjection constitutes a logic of exclusion that precedes and exceeds the Freudian unconscious, operating through a "border" structure rather than through negation, thereby challenging the conscious/unconscious dialectic and positing a pre-objectal, affect-laden mode of subjectivation anchored in the Symbolic Other.

     a defensive position to be established—one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration

438. #438

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.21

     POWERS OF HORROR > AT THE LIMIT OF PRIMAL REPRESSION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva theorizes abjection as the "object" of primal repression—a pre-subjective, pre-objectal residue that precedes and conditions narcissism, the sign, and sublimation, positioning it topologically between the somatic symptom and the sublime, and showing how it erupts as a narcissistic crisis whenever secondary repression's symbolic resources are overwhelmed.

     Sublimation, on the contrary, is nothing else than the possibility of naming the prenominal, the pre-objectal, which are in fact only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal.

439. #439

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva

     POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED

     Theoretical move: Kristeva maps abjection as the generative underside of all religious structuring, arguing that successive historical forms of the sacred (pagan, monotheistic, Christian) are differentiated by the specific mode in which they handle abjection, and that art inherits this cathartic function when religious forms collapse.

     the artistic experience, which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity.

440. #440

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.32

     POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > OUTSIDE OF THE SACRED, THE ABJECT IS WRITTEN

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that great modern literature (Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Céline) constitutes the privileged site where abjection is symbolized and traversed, and that the aesthetic act of speaking/writing the abject—at the boundary of the symbolic construct and primal repression—performs a catharsis that simultaneously discloses and partially redeems what escapes signification.

     Celine's journey… will also encounter rhythm and music as being the only way out, the ultimate sublimation of the unsignifiable

441. #441

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.35

     POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > BORGES

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that literature's proper "object" is the abject itself—figured through Borges's Aleph as the impossible real toward which the repetition-compulsion drives—and that writing enacts a sublimation of abjection without consecration, substituting for the sacred's former role at the limits of social and subjective identity.

     contemporary literature...propounds, as a matter of fact, a sublimation of abjection. Thus it becomes a substitute for the role formerly played by the sacred.

442. #442

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.37

     POWERS OF HORROR > CATHARSIS AND ANALYSIS

     Theoretical move: Kristeva uses the Lacanian linkage of abjection to the saintliness of the analyst as a pivot to genealogize 'catharsis' through Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Aristotelian poetic catharsis—unlike Platonic purification—works by immersion in and repetition of the abject rather than its elimination, and that this rhythm-based discourse of the body is the only viable analogue to analytic practice.

     Aristotelian catharsis is closer to sacred incantation... Through the mimesis of passions—ranging from enthusiasm to suffering—in 'language with pleasurable accessories,' the most important of which being rhythm and song... the soul reaches orgy and purity at the same time.

443. #443

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.41

     POWERS OF HORROR > PHILOSOPHICAL SADNESS AND THE SPOKEN DISASTER OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that analytic speech achieves a "poetic" catharsis by passing through abjection rather than sublating or purifying it, positioning the analyst's mimetic identification with the analysand as the site where Freudian jouissance disrupts the Kantian-Hegelian tradition of ethical consciousness that would reduce defilement to normative sadness and silence.

     it is the equivalent, for the analyst as well as for the analysand, not of purification but of rebirth with and against abjection

444. #444

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.47

     POWERS OF HORROR > SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia is an "abortive metaphor of want" — a drive-level substitute for the unnamable void that precedes objectal relation — and that language itself functions as a founding fetish that both enables and forecloses the full traversal of that want, making writing the privileged (if not analytic) site for metabolizing abjection.

     One might then view writing, or art in general, not as the only treatment but as the only 'know-how' where phobia is concerned. Little Hans has become stage director for an opera house.

445. #445

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.54

     POWERS OF HORROR > DEVOURING LANGUAGE > PHOBIC NARCISSISM

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia reveals how the paternal metaphor's failure—rather than any object-relation failure per se—leaves the drive without an object, cathecting symbolicity itself as a substitute; this structure, distinct from narcissism, psychosis, and hysteria, is the template for abjection, which is defined as a revolt entirely within language that makes the subject eminently productive of culture.

     There is language instead of the good breast. Discourse is being substituted for maternal care

446. #446

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.71

     POWERS OF HORROR > PROHIBITED INCEST VS. COMING FACE TO FACE WITH THE UNNAMABLE

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the "feminine" as unnamable otherness is not a primeval essence but a pre-verbal border zone—coextensive with primary narcissism—that precedes the paternal prohibition and the advent of language; poetic language is theorized as an attempt to re-symbolize this archaic, pre-verbal jouissance, while the failure to traverse it opens onto psychosis or perversion.

     Poetic language would then be, contrary to murder and the univocity of verbal message, a reconciliation with what murder as well as names were separated from. It would be an attempt to symbolize the 'beginning,' an attempt to name the other facet of taboo: pleasure, pain.

447. #447

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.88

     POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT? > FEAR OF WOMEN—FEAR OF PROCREATION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that pollution rituals and abjection are socially elaborated responses to the archaic generative power of the mother, functioning to separate the speaking being from the body and secure patrilineal/patriarchal order; the Indian caste system's endogamy is read as a special case where sexual balance is achieved at the cost of multiplying abjective separations elsewhere in the social hierarchy.

     It is only at such a cost that the body is capable of being defended, protected—and also, eventually, sublimated.

448. #448

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.98

     POWERS OF HORROR > HIERARCHY AND NONVIOLENCE

     Theoretical move: Kristeva reads the two Oedipus plays as marking a transition in the logic of abjection: from a mythico-ritual economy of spatial exclusion and purification (*Oedipus the King* / pharmakos) to a symbolic-contractual assumption of abjection as the constitutive not-known of the mortal speaking being (*Oedipus at Colonus*), thereby locating the ground of abjection in sexual difference and the symbolic order rather than in any archetype of purity.

     That amounts to joying in the truth of self-division (abjection/sacred). Here two paths open out: sublimation and perversion.

449. #449

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.100

     POWERS OF HORROR > SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical impurity (tahor/tame) is not simply a demonic force or a divine ordinance, but a "logicizing" of what departs from the symbolic order—rooted in the cathexis of maternal function—which monotheism subordinates to the Law, thereby instituting a "strategy of identity" constitutive of the speaking subject and social community alike.

     Such a logicizing inscribes the demonic in a more abstract and also more moral register as a potential for guilt and sin.

450. #450

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.104

     POWERS OF HORROR > TABOO FORESTALLS SACRIFICE

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that taboo (pure/impure distinction) operates metonymically to sustain participation in the sacred order, while sacrifice operates metaphorically by violently connecting two irreconcilable terms; the priority of taboo over sacrifice is then deployed to theorize biblical abomination as a sublimation of sacrificial murder, making Judaism the religion that substitutes sustained abjection-logic for killing.

     biblical abominations perhaps constitute the logical explicitation of the religious (without proceeding to murderous acts—which become unnecessary when the rules of taboo are disclosed and observed).

451. #451

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.113

     POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY > FROM SEXUAL IDENTITY TO SPEECH AND FROM ABOMINATION TO MORALS

     Theoretical move: Kristeva traces a logical progression in Leviticus whereby material abomination (food, blood, bodily mixing) is sublimated into sexual identity prohibitions and finally into a purely symbolic register, where defilement becomes profanation of the divine Name—the monotheistic One that grounds separation as such and converts impurity from material admixture into symbolic transgression (idolatry, substitution, doubles).

     the text proceeds anew and henceforth will translate the logical motion of blood and food abomination into contents further removed

452. #452

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.116

     POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY > INCEST TABOO

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the incest taboo functions as the originating "mytheme" underlying the entire system of biblical dietary and purity prohibitions, such that abjection — oral, excremental, and corporeal — is structurally inseparable from the symbolic contract, not merely one semantic value among others but its unconscious foundation.

     the prophetic strand that carried that 'mytheme' into full blossoming... the distinction, as Isaiah formulates it, will thoroughly rule the life of Israel

453. #453

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.120

     POWERS OF HORROR > ABOMINATION OF CORPSES WARDS OFF DEATH WISH. TAXONOMY AS MORALS

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical abomination-taboos constitute a structural displacement of sacrifice: where sacrifice binds the subject to the sacred through a killed/fascinating object, abomination operates metonymically to install symbolic law and taxonomy in place of sacrificial logic — a move that channels the death drive into a persecutory "machine" of abjection that simultaneously constitutes the subject of the Symbolic.

     It tempers the fascination of murder; it gets around its desire by means of the abomination it associates with any act of incorporation and rejection of an ob-ject, thing or living being.

454. #454

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.127

     POWERS OF HORROR > *. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI*

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the New Testament enacts a structural transformation of abjection: by interiorizing impurity (relocating defilement from outside the body to inside the speaking subject), Christianity installs a new topology of subjectivity—the inside/outside boundary—that simultaneously reconciles with the maternal/pagan principle and sublates it into the category of Sin, thereby constituting a split, polyvalent speaking subject.

     Satisfied physiological hunger gives way to unsatiable spiritual hunger, a striving for what 'it could possibly mean.'

455. #455

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.129

     POWERS OF HORROR > FROM ABOMINATION TO LAPSE AND LOGIC. FROM SUBSTANCE TO ACTION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Christianity effects a structural transformation of abjection by converting it from a matter of *substance* (the pure/impure dichotomy) into a matter of *action* (sin as act), with the Eucharist functioning as catharsis of the primal oral-devouring fantasy; yet this spiritualization cannot fully sublate the carnal remainder, leaving the subject as a "lapsing" being split between body and spirit—a heterogeneity that is ultimately Real.

     By the very gesture, however, that corporealizes or incarnates speech, all corporeality is elevated, spiritualized, and sublimated.

456. #456

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.134

     POWERS OF HORROR > AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Christian (Pauline) theology transforms biblical abjection into sin by interiorising and spiritualising it — making it a subjectified, drive-laden relation to the Law and the flesh — such that abjection, rather than being expelled, becomes the privileged site of jouissance, sublimation, and mystical communication with the Other.

     the second ('sublimated') one unable to exist without the first (perverse because it challenges Law). One of the insights of Christianity [...] is to have gathered in a single move perversion and beauty as the lining and the cloth of one and the same economy.

457. #457

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.141

     POWERS OF HORROR > AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE > FELIX CULPA: SPOKEN SIN. DUNS SCOTUS

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Duns Scotus's sacramental theology enacts a shift from judicial-punitive abjection to a verbal-covenantal logic, whereby the act of enunciation (confession, spoken sin) becomes the locus of absolution — making *felix culpa* a phenomenon of enunciation rather than moral action, and grounding art as a lateral extension of this same speech-power over abjection.

     art provided sinners with the opportunity to live, openly and inwardly apart, the joy of their dissipation set into signs: painting, music, words.

458. #458

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.144

     POWERS OF HORROR > CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary style operates as a site of abjection that cannot be reduced to thematic content, biography, or politics: through rhythm, carnivalesque polyphony, and an apocalyptic style that hovers between disgust and laughter, Céline transforms the abject into a writing practice that both enacts and momentarily stabilizes the dissolution of the subject — his anti-Semitism being readable as a symptomatic counterweight (a delirium) against the very identity-dissolution that his scription unleashes.

     the open sore of his very suffering, through the contrivance of a word, becomes haloed, as he puts it, with 'a ridiculous little infinite' as tender and packed full of love and cheerful laughter as it is with bitterness

459. #459

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.153

     POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND HORROR

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's narrative, suffering and horror are not merely thematic content but the structural principle of abjection itself: when the subject-object boundary collapses, narrative form disintegrates from linear story into cry, then into poetic violence and silence, while sublimation (writing, music, love) marks the infinitesimal distance that keeps the speaking subject from total dissolution into abjection.

     the path that Celine chose for himself; to stay within horror but at a very slight distance—an infinitesimal and tremendous one, which from the very heart of Celine's essential abomination, distinguishes and inscribes sublime love for a child or, in a space beyond sexuality and analogous to it, writing as sublimation.

460. #460

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.155

     POWERS OF HORROR > ACCOUNTS OF DIZZINESS

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that narrative is the primary social mechanism for domesticating abjection—transforming suffering, dizziness, and bodily horror into communicable form—but that in Céline, writing exceeds narrative by converting the abject body into rhythm and music, thereby achieving a "beyond" of sense that mere storytelling cannot reach.

     the magic of surplus, scription, conveys the body, and even more so the sick body, to a beyond made up of sense and measure.

461. #461

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.157

     POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's writing, suffering and desire collapse into a zone of "debility" where drive overwhelms representation and signification dissolves — a point where desire founders in drive/affect, erasing the distinction between physical suffering, psychic pain, and sexual excess, leaving only a raw inebriation beyond meaning or glory.

     There is no glory in this suffering; it is not an ode: it opens up only onto idiocy.

462. #462

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.161

     POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > INGRAINED CARNAGE

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's writing, abjection and murder are mutually constitutive—abjection is "edged with murder" and murder is "checked by abjection"—and that this carnage, traversing bodily degradation (vomit, excrement, death rattle), climaxes in a momentary sublimation before collapsing back into abjection, making violence the formal engine of Céline's literary style.

     the vision of murder turns sublime, the murderous apocalypse shows its lyrical side before everything founders into vomit, money swallowed as ultimate food, reincorporated excrement

463. #463

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.162

     POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > THE SECOND WORLD WAR

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's scription locates itself at the crest of abjection—where decomposition and composition, suffering and music, abomination and ecstasy coincide—and that his apocalyptic vision is not a philosophical revelation of truth (aletheia) but an exposure of jouissance as History's abject motive, irreducible to any ideological or ontological grounding.

     the frenzy of abjection turns into sinister beauty... a carnival of flames

464. #464

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.165

     POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > A NARRATIVE? NO, A VISION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the abject vision shatters Freudian primal fantasies (Urfantasien) under the pressure of a drive overloaded with hatred/death and a narcissistic wound, locating the paradigmatic scene of abjection not in the primal scene but in childbirth, and further identifies this economy of horror and suffering as the libidinal foundation tapped by Fascism—one that neither theoretical reason nor merely desiring art could address.

     deprived in other respects of its religious sublimation (especially considering the state of bankruptcy of religious codes between the two wars, most particularly in Nazi and Fascist circles)

465. #465

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.166

     POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > I56 SUFFERING AND HORROR

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary practice occupies a privileged position with respect to historical horror: not by representing or resolving it from the outside, but by inhabiting and enacting it through writing, thereby implicating both author and reader within the horror rather than offering protection or clarity.

     Through his scription he causes it to exist and although he comes far short of clearing it up, he throws over it the lacework of his text: a frail netting that is also a latticework

466. #466

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.167

     POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > THE TWO-FACED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's split maternal figure as the structural locus of abjection: the idealized/artistic mother and the suffering/castrated mother together embody the threat that femininity poses to infinity and to the subject's narcissistic integrity, making maternity the privileged site where abjection and scription intersect.

     Ideal, artistically inclined, dedicated to beauty, she is, on the one hand, the focus of the artist's gaze who admits he has taken her as a model.

467. #467

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.171

     POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > LIFE? A DEATH

     Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's identification with Semmelweis as the paradigmatic structure of abjection: the confusion of life/death and feminine/masculine at the bodily threshold (puerperal fever) drives both the writer's vocation and his particular resolution of the Oedipal situation—not through neurotic triangulation but through simultaneous occupation of all three positions (father/son/feminine), making style itself the impossible third party that separates while touching.

     the ephemeral nature of sublimation and the unrelenting end of life, the death of man

468. #468

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.172

     POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > COURTLINESS AFFRONTED

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's amorous code, abjection and courtly idealization are structurally co-dependent: the sublime feminine (figured as ballerina, priestess, Molly) is the necessary obverse of sadistic/pornographic degradation, and this conjunction of opposites reveals that phallic idealization of Woman requires the prior devalorization and parcelization of sex through partial drives.

     the sublime body of the ballerina... angelic idealization; the modesty and lyricism of his writing endow her with the enchanted existence of the great white-draped priestesses

469. #469

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.173

     POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > MY CHILD, MY SISTER

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's idealization of femininity—figured through childlike, sisterly, or angelic women—operates as a phantasmatic defense against abjection: by displacing sexuality onto innocence and carnivalesque ambiguity, the subject defers the abject encounter with feminine sex, while the resulting identity-dissolution (brother/father/satyr) is ultimately resorbed into the grotesque rather than resolved.

     the fear aroused by the sexual desire that women are assumed to have for a man... those the writer allows himself to win over, or even to love, are either lesbians or women playing the role of a sister

470. #470

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.178

     POWERS OF HORROR > CARNIVAL—IN HYSTERICAL FASHION, SOCIETY—IN PARANOID FASHION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's figuration of femininity and paternity as twin poles of abjection: the hysterical/carnivalesque feminine (Gioconda) and the paranoid/social feminine (Henrouille) mark an otherness that cannot be sublimated, while the cartoon father (Auguste/Des Pereires) embodies the bankruptcy of paternal authority and the castration of modern man, together constituting the post-Catholic destiny of a world bereft of jouissance and tipping toward fascist totalitarianism.

     Gioconda and Henrouille, in brief, are shown as the two facets of an otherness that cannot be sublimated—the sexual and the repressed, the marginal and the social.

471. #471

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.189

     POWERS OF HORROR > LOGICAL OSCILLATIONS: AN ANARCHISM

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's pamphlets are structured by two interlocking logics: a rage against the Symbolic Law (religion, reason, abstraction) and a fantasy substitution of a full, immanent, primary-narcissistic Law embodied in Race/Family/Rhythm/Jouissance — and that when this anarchic negativism attempts to totalize, it crystallizes into the Jew as the phantasmatic object of abjection, making anti-Semitism a parareligious formation that intensifies wherever the symbolic code fails to contain abjection.

     the jouissance of so-called primary narcissism's immanence can be sublimated in a signifier that has been recast and desemanticized into music

472. #472

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.194

     POWERS OF HORROR > BROTHER ...

     Theoretical move: Kristeva's analysis of Céline's anti-Semitic fantasy reveals it as a structure of abjection: the Jew is constituted as the unbearable conjunction of Law and Jouissance, brother and father, subject and object, such that anti-Semitic discourse becomes the symptom of its own repressed identification with the abject — a psychoanalytic-structural argument that anti-Semitism is the inverted, possessed servant of the very monotheistic symbolic power it attacks.

     Is that why he expresses the traumatic topoi of that religion—like those of abjection—which religion, to the contrary, elaborates, sublimates, or masters?

473. #473

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.198

     POWERS OF HORROR > IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

     Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's stylistic project as a movement from emotional depth through rhythm and sound toward the void, tracing how the drive to "resensitize language" stages an encounter with an unnameable otherness that traverses abjection rather than merely expressing it — the trajectory being: emotion → melody/rhythm → void.

     Such loving dedication leads the one who writes to an incursion the outcome of which he does not visualize as addition or creation but quite simply as revelation; the point is to bring the depths to the surface, carry emotional identity as far as signifying appearances, raise neural and biological experience up to social contract and communication.

474. #474

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.201

     POWERS OF HORROR > WRITING HATRED

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's deployment of slang and colloquial speech is not merely ideological posturing but a calculated enunciation strategy: by smuggling spoken language into writing, Céline uses the signifier itself to carry an overflow of emotion, producing syntactic and prosodic transformations that downgrade the logical dominant of written language and approach an emptiness of meaning.

     Celine's plan to smuggle spoken language into writing thus becomes the meeting place of a thematic, ideological commitment with an enunciation that attempts to downgrade the logical or grammatical dominant of written language

475. #475

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.207

     POWERS OF HORROR > SEGMENTATION: INTONATION, SYNTAX, SUBJECTIVITY

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's colloquial syntactic "segmentation" (theme/rheme displacement, binary intonation) is not regression to pre-symbolic stages but an *over-syntacticism* — a surplus charging of enunciative processes on top of normative syntax — through which the subject of enunciation is constituted and the death drive is symbolically integrated.

     writing 'like the common people' is a contrivance, an unwritten provision, the result of stubborn work with and through syntax aimed at 'having sentences slightly fly off their handle.'

476. #476

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.214

     POWERS OF HORROR > SEGMENTATION: INTONATION, SYNTAX, SUBJECTIVITY > ELLIPSES: THREE DOTS AND A SUSPENSION

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's late-novel syntax stages a structural condensation of enunciation and statement—where intonation, ellipsis, and exclamatory noun phrases replace the predicate relation and lexical signification, making affect itself the carrier of subjective position, and thereby marking a "return of the repressed" at the level of the statement that borders on drive and abjection.

     An absorption of work, a withholding of effort, a deletion of abstraction, so that thanks to them but without stating them, and through them, an affect bursts out

477. #477

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.215

     POWERS OF HORROR > THE LAUGHTER OF THE APOCALYPSE

     Theoretical move: Kristeva identifies Céline's "comedy of abjection" as the literary-stylistic limit-form of abjection: a laughing apocalypse without god, in which exclamatory suspension encodes an affective ambivalence at the level of enunciation itself, and where jouissance and horror coincide in a style that dissolves all ideological support.

     We are familiar with the sublime laughter, the astral laughter of Dante's comedy in which the body, joying in a 'successful' incest, is fully celebrated

478. #478

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.218

     POWERS OF HORROR > POWERS OF HORROR

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that literature is the privileged signifier of abjection—the "ultimate coding" of civilizational crises—and that the psychoanalyst, positioned in the void, is the rare contemporary witness capable of demystifying the sacred horror underlying religious, moral, and political power, precisely through an "abject knowledge" that is undermined by forgetfulness and laughter.

     literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word.

479. #479

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

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Becoming a Movement

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Descartes's move from externally-caused passion to internally-generated emotion as a transition from natural causality to the causality of freedom, wherein subject and object of movement become indistinguishable and the will constitutes a 'practice of truth' — a firm, non-revisable mode of action grounded in the soul's self-relation, setting up the question of how this practice reconciles with fatalism.

     The move from passion to internal emotion is thus the move from one natural order of causation... to another one: from being moved to being the cause of movement

480. #480

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.64

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > From Fortune to Providence

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues, via Descartes, that true rationalism requires fatalism: the affirmation of divine providence (absolute necessity) is the only consistent way to abolish fortune and hope, because it enables proper judgment by revealing the dialectical structure of the necessity of contingency and the contingency of necessity.

     I gain 'complete satisfaction' even when something bad happens to me.

481. #481

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

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

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

     a nonpathological interest is essentially interesting. It interests everyone, yet its object is subtracted.

482. #482

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.128

     Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > <span id="unp-ruda-0016.xhtml_p127" class="page"></span>Absolute Knowing, Absolute Fatalism

     Theoretical move: Absolute knowing is recast as "absolute fatalism" and "absolute comedy": it is the impossible-yet-necessary self-assumption of what makes knowledge impossible, a sacrificial move in which reason surrenders itself to its own constitutive limit, thereby distinguishing truth from knowledge and collapsing the distinction between knowing and unknowing.

     It is therefore interesting that Hegel himself utilizes the language of sacrifice when speaking about absolute knowing: 'To know one's limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself.'

483. #483

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.49

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desire (Differently)!

     Theoretical move: By reading Descartes's *Passions of the Soul*, the passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of passion/desire but a *different use* of desire: the subject must distinguish externally caused passions from self-caused volitions and, through adequate judgment, redirect desire rather than abolish it—thereby establishing a "different mode of desire" as the very form of freedom.

     the chief use of wisdom lies in its teaching us to be masters of our passions and to control them with such skill that the evils which they cause are quite bearable, and even become a source of joy.

484. #484

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.162

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny I: The Fate of the Genitals

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" is not biological determinism but a retroactive logic: it is culture and repression that transform the meaningless anatomical placement of the genitals into an inescapable fate, such that repression and the return of the repressed coincide, making cultural progress itself the source of irreducible conflict.

     this meaningless reminder will as such have a determining impact on our fate... mankind's cultural achievement generates a meaningless fact that will have become a reminder of something that culture is unable to sublate.

485. #485

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Driven Destiny Makes a Voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive *is* destiny (Triebschicksale = tautology), because drives are the constant, inescapable force that determines the subject from within, and the four modes of drive-destiny (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are defense formations that never abolish what they defend against—meaning psychoanalysis is a rationalist theory of psychical determinism that collapses the distinction between fate and will.

     (4) they can be sublimated.

486. #486

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

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

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

     we have the sublimatory capacity to raise more or less any object to the dignity of the Thing. But Lacan's quintessential paradigm of sublimation is courtly love.

487. #487

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.153

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary components of the objet a function as decoys that eclipse das Ding, and that sublimation—the uniquely human capacity to create meaning from lack—can be perverted into a destructive accumulation of false objects, generating an ethical obligation to distinguish between objects that carry the Thing's echo and mere lures.

     the uniquely human capacity to sublimate generates not only meaning, but also heaps and heaps of 'stuff' in which we can lose ourselves

488. #488

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.37

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

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

     In chapter 7, I spell out the implications of this in relation to sublimation and human innovative capacity. Here it suffices once again to refer to sublimation's close cousin: the sublime.

489. #489

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.134

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

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

     This, in some ways, is the classical definition of sublimation but, as we will see in the next chapter, Lacan develops the issue to the point that sublimation is no longer a matter of artistic, scientific, or intellectual exertion but, quite simply, synonymous with human life as such.

490. #490

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.20

     *Introduction* > *What Sublimation Can Do*

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

     Lacan's account of sublimation illustrates that we are not merely the passive recipients of cultural meanings, but have the power to actively reformulate these meanings.

491. #491

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.169

     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.

     We live in a cultural moment where it is easy to fall into the crisis of sublimation—where it is easy to become resigned to the idea that what we choose to believe in, or to do, ultimately makes no difference whatsoever.

492. #492

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.140

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation—the elevation of mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing—is structurally grounded in the constitutive lack introduced by the signifier: it is precisely because the Thing resists symbolization that the subject becomes an inexhaustible creature of signification and creative capacity, with lack and the possibility of filling it arising simultaneously.

     sublimation raises the object 'to the dignity of the Thing' (1960, 112). It, in short, infuses mundane objects or representations with the nobility, brilliance, and incomparable worth of the lost Thing.

493. #493

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

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation*

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

     Lacan also views sublimation—our capacity to raise mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing—as a matter of ethics

494. #494

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.166

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

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

     both betray the ethics of sublimation. Both seek to separate the sublime from the signifier, for to equate the sublime with what escapes signification is merely the flipside of insisting on the inherent impossibility of inspired forms of meaning production

495. #495

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

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

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

     If I have devoted the second half of this book to an examination of Lacan's 'ethics of sublimation,' it is because I believe that this ethics offers a sophisticated theory of both personal and social transformation.

496. #496

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

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

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

     What distinguishes it from less pathological (more creative) varieties of sublimation is that the latter mobilize the signifier whereas the symptom, as I have observed, arises from the subject's failure to do so.

497. #497

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

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

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

     If the beauty of sublimation consists of its power to conjure up new ideals by raising objects (and representations) to the dignity of the Thing, the decline of our ability to sublimate implies that we become more and more tightly enslaved to already existing ideals

498. #498

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.252

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

     Theoretical move: This notes section develops a series of theoretical positions linking Das Ding, lost object, courtly love, and the enigma of the Other's desire to show how love operates as a vehicle for the subject's approach to the Thing—always fleetingly—and how love's interpellation can momentarily suspend ordinary socio-symbolic identification.

     Sexual love, in other words, allows the subject to (always fleetingly) approach 'the place' of the Thing.

499. #499

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.148

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

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

     sublimation—and the bourgeoning of creativity that sublimation implies—only becomes possible to the extent that the drive persists, to the extent that the subject's 'drive destiny' is, precisely, not overcome.

500. #500

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.271

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

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

     sublimation, 7 courtly love, 169–70 crisis of, 155–56, 238 cultural meanings and, 8 drive and, 136 ethics and, 148

501. #501

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.159

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

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

     Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals how far he is from valorizing a transcendent (or death-driven) 'real' beyond worldly semblances. It shows that it is through such semblances—the various objects we cathect to—that we attain jouissance

502. #502

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.163

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

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

     what makes the ethics of sublimation ethical is that it is driven by the longing to find ever-new ways to approach the Thing, which means that it by definition accepts the variable nature of the object

503. #503

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.246

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *6. The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes to a chapter on sublimity and love, develops the theoretical relationship between Das Ding, sublimation, the drive, jouissance, and the Real, arguing that aesthetic and sublimatory processes mediate our proximity to the Thing while the drive's satisfaction lies in its perpetual circling rather than attainment.

     works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to represent them. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate.

504. #504

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

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

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

     Lacan's analysis of sublimation gives us an additional way to approach the question of manageable jouissance, for it implies that the very fact that we are barred from the Thing makes it possible for us to gain little bits of jouissance within the confines of symbolic existence.

505. #505

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.197

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

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

     raising the beloved to the dignity of the Thing does not necessarily overshadow his 'actual' reality, but rather allows us to discern this reality from a previously unexplored viewpoint

506. #506

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.269

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

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

     sublimation and, 142–43 / love and, 169–70 / pleasure principle and, 134–35 / reality and, 151–52

507. #507

     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.

     sublimation is, by definition, 'characterized by a change of objects'… Sublimation, Kristeva specifies, protects the subject from being overwhelmed by sadness by weaving a hypersign around and with the depressive void.

508. #508

     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.

     Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals that the signifier is by no means equivalent to the Other's hegemonic law—that there are ways to break our servitude to the Other.

509. #509

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.195

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

     Theoretical move: Love, as a form of sublimation, does not dissolve the sublime dimension of the beloved but rather makes it 'appear' within everyday life by preserving the constitutive gap between the banal and the sublime object—the beloved is always 'split' between what 'is' and what is 'more than,' and it is this non-coincidence that generates surplus satisfaction and keeps love in motion.

     love, like other forms of sublimation, makes the sublime 'appear' within the framework of everyday life.

510. #510

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.164

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

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

     sublimation is a matter of ethics 'insofar as it is not entirely subordinated to the reality principle, but liberates or creates a space from which it is possible to attribute certain values to something other than the recognized and established common good'

511. #511

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.186

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Paralysis of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic love arrests sublimation's ethical-innovative force by converting the object into a static emblem of self-completion, and it does so through a domesticated relation to the objet a — deploying it as a predictable screen that protects the subject from the jouissance (and terror) of the Thing itself, revealing the repetition compulsion as a rigid crystallization of desire's language.

     it arrests the sublimatory impulse. It overpowers sublimation's ethical (innovative) force—the force that rides the open-ended thrust of desire

512. #512

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.176

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

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

     Lacan concurred with Heidegger that confronting the nothingness (lack) at the heart of human life was anxiety producing, but he went on to theorize sublimation as something that both resulted from anxiety and offered an effective means of binding it.

513. #513

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

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

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

     if we keep raising such an object to the dignity of the Thing and if we find it difficult to forgo this object even when we, rationally, know that we 'should'

514. #514

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

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

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

     they do not impede our sublimatory impulse, but merely allow us to better manage it by offering us a number of steady summits of cultural meaning... one could propose that the ego ideal succeeds where the ideal ego fails because it chooses sublimation over narcissism.

515. #515

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.143

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

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized not merely as artistic practice but as a universal human operation: by elevating an ordinary object (the matchbox) to the dignity of the Thing, sublimation allows a trace of Das Ding—and of forbidden jouissance—to materialize within everyday life, even though the elevated object remains a substitute that can never deliver the Thing-in-itself.

     Lacan quickly transitions from a consideration of artistic practice in particular to an analysis of sublimation as a general condition of human life.

516. #516

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.231

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

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

     one of Zupančič's most noteworthy contributions to contemporary theory is her analysis of sublimation as a matter of creating space for values that are not recognized by the reality principle.

517. #517

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.263

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

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

     sublimation and, 169–70

518. #518

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

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

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

     the elevation of the love object to the dignity of the Thing can result in intense aggression towards the object.

519. #519

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

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

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

     One reason I have focused on sublimation so strongly is that it is easier for us to grasp the dangers of coming too close to the Thing than it is to appreciate those of stifling its echo by holding it too far.

520. #520

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.250

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

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

     sublimation 'aims at the Real precisely at the point where the Real cannot be reduced to reality.' It 'opposes itself to reality . . . in the name of the Real. To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to 'realize' it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real'

521. #521

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

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

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

     The task of sublimation is to curtail this scattering. Because the subject cannot endure the direct impact of jouissance, but can only handle its 'reflection,' sublimation transforms the drive for the Thing into a desire directed at various objets a.

522. #522

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.201

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

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

     I have offered different ways to read Lacanian ethics, gradually working my way from the ethical act to the ethics of sublimation.

523. #523

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

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

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

     the ethics of sublimation... whether we are talking about the ethical/divine act or about transcendent forms of sublimation

524. #524

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.191

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

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

     to the extent that love is a particularly gripping form of sublimation, its capacity to make the sublime 'appear' in the realm of concrete, everyday reality is even more robust

525. #525

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.123

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

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

     using the Lacanian definition of sublimation, that psychoanalysis 'raises' the unconscious and the woman's desire 'to the dignity of the Thing.'

526. #526

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.77

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

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

     Functionalism, in the form of architectural purism, peaked, then, in a rending of clothing.

527. #527

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.279

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that relinquishing the demand to know—including the unknowable reasons behind a loved one's suicide—paradoxically enables a deeper form of love and presence; the void opened by death becomes the very condition for renewed intimacy, structurally paralleling Lacanian insights about lack as constitutive of desire and the Real as that which always escapes symbolization.

     Oliver's death has left me somehow larger, more soulful, with a greater capacity for love and for savoring life... grief has hollowed me out, increasing my capacity to be open to my own feelings and those of others, as when a musical instrument is made by carving out the insides of a gourd.

528. #528

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.271

     **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a phenomenological meditation on grief and renewal, deploying the tension between the death drive's pull toward silence/oblivion and an irrepressible life-force that persists despite — and through — catastrophic loss, figured through the image of the turtle's head re-emerging after violence.

     Somewhere in the brokenness of my soul a new life is slowly preparing itself... I can feel the stir of something new, a new strength in my hands, a deeper breath in my lungs.

529. #529

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.242

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c18_r1.xhtml_page_239" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="239"></span>*18*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a clinical-autobiographical move in which the analysand's attempt to assume total guilt is itself identified as a defensive maneuver—a neurotic alibi that reinstates ego-mastery against the more destabilizing analytic revelations of self-deception and hidden aggression, while simultaneously raising the question of the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation when applied to another's life and death.

     I'm embarrassed by the grandiose framing that I'm giving the whole story—my life as Homeric epic—but I can't help feeling that I've finally disentangled the threads of my own part in Oliver's death.

530. #530

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.9

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes the Death Drive as the most contested and rejected concept in Freud's metapsychology, then argues that rehabilitating it—by reconceiving the grand opposition between Eros and death down to the microincrements of psychical operation—is the central theoretical task of the book.

     the epochal struggle between love and destructiveness described at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents

531. #531

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.255

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Between the Look and the Gaze

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Lacan's triadic structure of the gaze (subject / visual object / gaze as third locus) with Sartre's dyadic "look," Boothby argues that the objet a operates as an invisible third term within the scopic drive, functioning precisely through its unattainability to perpetually re-energize visual desire rather than satisfying it.

     The beauty of the face gets repainted over the hole opened up by the Thing. In Lacanian terms, the eye triumphs over the gaze.

532. #532

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.3

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian metapsychology is coextensive with psychoanalytic theory as such, and that its central—if problematic—pillar is the concept of psychical energy, which undergirds everything from displacement and condensation to repression, narcissism, and the dual drive theory; the repeated attacks on metapsychology are therefore nothing less than attacks on the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis itself.

     More indirect evidence suggests that the other two papers were concerned with sublimation and projection (or paranoia).

533. #533

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.187

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that sacrifice's general function is to establish the operation of the signifier: it pivots between the imaginary and the symbolic by enacting a violation of bodily wholeness (castration logic) that simultaneously founds a system of signifiers, the law of exchange, and the big Other — thereby integrating prior anthropological theories of sacrifice into a single Lacanian account.

     sacrificial practices have generally undergone an evolution from blood sacrifice to practices of offering and oblation and finally to traditions of self-denial and ascetism in which violence has no explicit part

534. #534

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.250

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > "You don't love me . . . you just don't give a shit."

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a—exemplified by the anal object—is not a natural object but is constituted through the demand of the Other, which "colonizes" the body's orifices and transforms biological functions into denaturalized libidinal strivings; drive development across stages is thus not natural maturation but a migration of the objet a driven by the Other's demand.

     the feces become privileged tokens in an exchange of love—excrement as primordial gift. In this way is accomplished a radical 'revaluation of all values.'

535. #535

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.123

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > Circulation in the Psychical Apparatus

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's imaginary-symbolic distinction can be recast as a theory of "circulation" within the psychical apparatus, where clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis) represent specific breakdowns or arrests in this dialectical interplay, and where analytic work consists in repunctuating discourse to restore proper circulation between the two registers.

     Freud assumes that the progress of psychical development tends to move away from the highly specific, perceptual orientation of the primitive drives toward a broader horizon of symbolically mediated behaviors and attitudes characteristic of sublimation.

536. #536

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.180

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p175" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 175. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: By tracing the parallels and divergences between Girard's theory of sacrificial violence/mimetic desire and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the passage argues that Girard's theory of sacrificial dismemberment as the origin of symbolic competence is structurally homologous to Lacan's reinterpretation of castration as the cut that inaugurates the subject's entry into language — a convergence Girard himself failed to recognize.

     Sacrificial practice thus becomes for Girard the prototype of all religiosity and effects the original act of sublimation.

537. #537

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.278

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > How the Real World Became a Phantasy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is the structural condition of both love and reality-testing: it is the paradoxical lost object that simultaneously grounds erotic desire (as what the beloved signifies but does not possess) and the sense of reality (as the constitutive lack that prevents absolute certainty), thereby recasting the Freudian reality principle in genuinely radical terms against ego-psychological adaptation models.

     It is also this illusion that operates in the most successful instance of sublimation. The art object, says Lacan in his definition of sublimation, 'raises the object to the dignity of the Thing.'

538. #538

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.213

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* is not merely Freud's technical term for the unknowable kernel of perception, but the Real core inhabiting the very heart of the Imaginary, thereby redefining the imaginary as the power of the veil (appearance over emptiness) and sublimation as the art of making das Ding simultaneously present and absent — with 'extimacy' as the structural name for this paradox.

     'In every form of sublimation,' Lacan claims, 'emptiness is determinative'… Lacan defines sublimation as 'raising an object to the dignity of das Ding'.

539. #539

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.172

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Oedipal transformation is best understood structurally as a labor of the death drive that deconstructs imaginary identification and installs the child in the symbolic order, linking castration anxiety, superego formation, and jouissance into a coherent Lacanian re-reading of Freudian metapsychology.

     This virtualization of imaginary dismemberment in the agency of the signifier may properly be called an effect of sublimation, indeed what is accomplished by this process can be said to constitute the necessary precondition for any sublimation whatever.

540. #540

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.59

     <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 Gestaltist Ontology of Merleau-Ponty

     Theoretical move: Boothby uses Merleau-Ponty's Gestalt-based phenomenological ontology—centred on the figure/ground structure, the body as field, and "the Flesh"—to build a pre-psychoanalytic philosophical ground in which consciousness is constitutively relational to an indeterminate horizon, thereby preparing the conceptual soil for a regrounded metapsychology.

     The body constitutes itself as a 'zone of not being' in front of which beings can be presented to consciousness.

541. #541

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.178

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p175" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 175. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian perspective can bridge the anthropological divide between violent (immolatory) and non-violent (votive) forms of sacrifice, and that psychoanalysis—particularly via the death drive—offers a unifying framework for understanding ritual killing as a constitutive moment of human subjectivity; a survey of anthropological theories (Smith, Tylor, Hubert/Mauss, Bataille) prepares the ground for this Lacanian intervention.

     traditions of self-abnegation and renunciation in which expectation of recompense was increasingly deferred

542. #542

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.215

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation reveals the drive's true nature precisely because it aims not at the imaginary object but at das Ding (the primordially lost object), and that the non-equivalence of object and Thing is what opens the space beyond the pleasure principle, grounds the Oedipus complex's function, and inverts the Freudian moral law by identifying the Sovereign Good with the forbidden mother-Thing.

     The sublimation that provides the Trieb with a satisfaction different from its aim…is precisely that which reveals the true nature of the Trieb insofar as it is not simple instinct, but has a relationship to das Ding as such

543. #543

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.189

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that sacrifice, read through a Lacanian lens, is not primarily a gift economy (do ut des) but the structural founding act that constitutes the signifier, the lost object, and desire itself (do ut desidero) — making sacrifice the ritual recapitulation of the Oedipus complex's constitutive separation.

     One repeats the gesture of giving up in order to rehearse the possibility of regaining in a new form, just as one must give up the seed, defer eating it, in order to sow and cultivate it for the harvest.

544. #544

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

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

     Sublimation 124, 173, 214, 278

545. #545

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.248

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sacrifice functions to anchor the Other's desire in the symbolic by ceding the real object (objet a), and that this ceding is the very condition of subjective desire — the subject must give up the object in order not to give up on desire, with the two moments of ceding being exactly complementary rather than contradictory.

     Ceding the breast in order to avoid the anxious confrontation with the real of the maternal Thing, the child repeats with the mother the essential gesture of sacrifice to the ancient gods.

546. #546

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.46

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Second naïveté

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "second naïveté" — a post-critical return to devotional engagement with sacred texts — is the proper mode of accessing the primordial transforming Event (the Real) that overdetermines scriptural language, insofar as that Event remains irreducible to any propositional, academic, or descriptive capture, including within the text itself.

     A devotional reading of the story considers it to be an overflowing container of life-giving meaning and, as such, engages in an imaginative interaction with it.

547. #547

     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 > Beyond believe, behave, belong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for inverting the standard Christian order of belief→behavior→belonging into belonging→behavior→belief, grounding this reversal in a radically subjective, unlocalizable 'miracle' of transformation; it draws on a Hebraic model of communal ritual and interpretive wrestling to contend that authoritative, objectified belief actually undermines truth, and recruits Pascal's Wager to show that entering communal practice is the proper site for the miracle of faith rather than doctrinal assent.

     it is this miracle that the church is there to affirm by engaging in creative acts of remembrance concerning this immemorial event

548. #548

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.53

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > From the void without to the void within

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the eschatological kingdom is not a future arrival but a spectral presence already "to come" within the present — an interior void that ruptures the text, the beloved, and the world from within rather than from without — and uses this structure to reframe theological transcendence as radical immanence.

     the mystery of God now dwells among us rather than standing above us... God is neither reduced to the world of objects nor remains in some space utterly beyond the world.

549. #549

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.136

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The faith in christ and the faith of christ

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the tension between the faith *of* Christ (pre-dogmatic, living source) and faith *in* Christ (doctrinal affirmation) is constitutive of Christianity itself, and that this "constrictive" particularity is not a limitation but the very condition of access to the transcendent - the narrow particular site is a privileged opening, not a closure.

     While certain beliefs are affirmed as a means of reflecting upon the faith of Jesus, these beliefs can never take the place of, or fully describe, that faith.

550. #550

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.126

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > An irreligious religion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic religious fidelity requires a perpetual "faithful betrayal" — God as Real exceeds every conceptual, symbolic, or propositional capture, so that true worship is always a response to an irreducible excess that ruptures any naming or systematisation, including Christianity itself.

     the true worshiper attempts to paint the most beautiful pictures imaginable to reflect that happening. It is this heartfelt endeavor to paint the most refined and beautiful conceptual images that speaks of God, not the actual descriptions we create

551. #551

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

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter009.html_page_173"></span>Transformance art

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christian truth exceeds any religious system or conceptual grasp, and proposes "transformance art" as a collective practice that short-circuits belief systems not to install doubt but to open an encounter with an event (the "miracle") that is structurally unintelligible and irreducible to rational dissection.

     The point of transformance art is not simply to short-circuit our beliefs but, in doing so, to uncover and celebrate the truth that is affirmed in Christianity.

552. #552

     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 > What would Jesus do?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an act which appears outwardly as betrayal can, when viewed from the perspective of foreknowledge and divine complicity, constitute the highest act of fidelity — destabilising the binary of betrayal/faithfulness and reframing Judas's act as a structurally necessary, willed sacrifice rather than a simple transgression.

     unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

553. #553

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.101

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The death of God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's 'death of God' is not a metaphysical claim about divine non-existence but a critique of the Cartesian-ideological function of God as a guarantor of cosmic meaning — a function that operates equally in believers and atheists alike, serving as an ideological crutch that forecloses genuine life-transformation.

     Nietzsche looked to a time when people would simply accept the world as it is and create meaning from the raw materials of our everyday activities.

554. #554

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.116

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The truth of faith

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christian truth operates as an event/happening that cannot be objectified or reduced to intellectual affirmation — analogous to 'life' and 'light' which condition experience without themselves being experienceable — thereby distinguishing participatory, undergone truth from propositional or empirical fact.

     God is that which grounds our world and opens a world up to us... the truth affirmed by Christianity is that which breathes life into the darkness and desolation of our own lives

555. #555

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.161

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Communities that embrace the miracle

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christian truth is not a propositional content but an experiential transformation ("miracle") analogous to rebirth, and on this basis proposes reordering ecclesial community around belonging and shared ritual rather than belief-first structures — a move that repositions truth as an approach (demanding liberation/healing) rather than a fixed doctrinal content.

     Christianity, at its best, offers us a community of people who have likewise been knowingly marked by the miracle and who wish to celebrate it through shared rituals such as prayer, meditation, fasting, liturgy, serving the poor, fighting injustice

556. #556

     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 > Reception without conception

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that God's name in the Hebrew Bible functions not as a noun (essence) but as a verb (event/happening), instantiating a mode of divine presence that is received without being conceived — a "presence beyond presence" that resists objectification, naming, and understanding while remaining immanently operative in acts of love and liberation.

     the mystery of God is revealed as an incarnated mystery, that is, the mystery of God is revealed in the midst of God's presence.

557. #557

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.35

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a paradoxical logic of faith in which direct pursuit of reward evacuates the authenticity of sacrifice, while genuine renunciation—giving up desire for the reward itself—is the only path through which wealth (or consolation) is indirectly discovered; this is illustrated through two parables: the pearl of great price and the figure of the blacksmith who offers presence rather than theodicy.

     it is only by renouncing the wealth directly, saying, 'I do not care about what I get from this sacrifice; all I want is you,' that we discover the wealth indirectly.

558. #558

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.15

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-ethical pivot: by collapsing the distinction between Christ and his corporate body (the Church), it makes the community of believers the site where Christ is either manifested or distorted; then, through a parable, it argues that embodied acts of love and solidarity *are* the translation of the Word—that is, that ethical praxis precedes and exceeds textual transmission as a mode of signification.

     it is said to this day that Sophia had actually accomplished her task of translating and distributing the Word of God three times during her life rather than simply once—the first two being more beautiful and radiant than the last.

559. #559

     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="chapter032.html_page_176"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act is self-justifying (its own reward), and that unconditional gift-giving retroactively creates the conditions for its own justification — a logic illustrated parabolically and then extended to a second tale where the heretic's final act exposes the universal guilt of his accusers by demanding an innocent executioner.

     the judge decreed that this heretic must suffer death by fire in order that he might repent before passing to the other side and so escape the eternal flames of hell. Not only would this benevolent sentence bring salvation to the condemned

560. #560

     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="chapter028.html_page_158"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a paradoxical logic of the refused gift — a reconciliation that is achieved not through the acceptance but the rejection of apology — and then dramatizes this through a second-person retelling of the Last Supper that stages a traumatic encounter with Christ's gaze, implicating the reader as Judas and foregrounding the unbearable weight of foreknowledge and betrayal.

     he holds you tight in his arms like no one has held you before... After a few moments, he releases his embrace and lifts the wine that sits before you, whispering, 'Take this wine, my dear friend, and drink it up, for it is my very blood, and it is shed for you.'

561. #561

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.24

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-ethical argument that Christ's teachings of non-retaliation and love of enemies are addressed to the oppressed, not the powerful, thereby implicating the affluent Western reader as oppressor rather than recipient; the accompanying parable then dramatises how unconditional hospitality—giving without reserve—paradoxically preserves the very interiority the adversary seeks to destroy.

     He had given everything to God and knew that these people needed such items more than the church did.

562. #562

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.151

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

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

     Jesus spoke of this kingdom late into the night, painting pictures of heaven until the fire began to turn to ash

563. #563

     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 class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses parabolic fiction to collapse the inner/outer distinction in faith, arguing that authentic belief is legible only through embodied, subversive action, and that the fictional 'alternative universe' functions as a mirror that reveals the reader's actual ideological universe.

     a life that reflected the acts and teachings of Jesus was prohibited

564. #564

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.106

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses two parabolic fictions to argue that apparent betrayal or negation can be acts of fidelity, and that the very concept of God may require its own self-negation — a theological maneuver that structurally parallels the Lacanian logic of the Real as that which escapes every symbolic capture.

     in gratitude to God for helping him complete his lifelong project, he dedicated his remaining years to serving the poor.

565. #565

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.136

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the law constitutively generates the transgression it prohibits, and that only unconditional love/forgiveness—offered prior to repentance rather than contingent upon it—dissolves this dialectical trap; the accompanying parable extends this into a theology of divine power-as-weakness that radically inverts imperial authority.

     Paul does not say, Your behavior is not permissible but rather "Everything is permissible…" (1 Corinthians 6:12b). For, while the law enslaves, love sets people free.

566. #566

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.32

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage advances two interlocking theoretical moves: first, it articulates an "impossible hospitality" as an unconditional gift that structurally exceeds every conditional exchange, using the figure of the welcomed demon to mark the limit-point of the ethical; second, it re-reads the parable of the Pearl of Great Price to argue that the object's "true value" is only accessible through a renunciation of value-logic itself — i.e., desire must give up its attachment to the object's exchange-value in order to encounter the object as such.

     if you renounce the value of the pearl and give up everything simply because you are captivated by its beauty, then, and only then, will you discover its true value.

567. #567

     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="chapter029.html_page_163"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a parabolic/theological mode to argue that divine wisdom, when progressively distilled, reduces to a single operative word—"love"—and that this unconditional love is demonstrated precisely toward figures of failure (Judas), subverting the reader's tendency toward self-righteous identification with the virtuous.

     God demanded that his couriers compress the essential wisdom into a single, encyclopedic book... refined into a single word, and that word was sent out on the lips and life of a messenger

568. #568

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter019.html_page_107"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

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

     What gives birth to the believer stands before all descriptions and remains free from them.

569. #569

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.285

     A Play of Props > **From** *Tuché* **to** *Automaton*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's Irma dream stages a movement from tuché (the traumatic-real encounter) through a fort-da guessing game (metonymic escape via empty speech and symbolic abstraction) to automaton (the insistent return of signs governed by the pleasure principle), such that the symbolic structure of trimethylamine's chemical formula completes the repressive desublimation of the traumatic real — revealing the dream's "secret reality" as the quest for signification as such, not the recovery of traumatic truth.

     the repressive desublimation of these events in more empty speech

570. #570

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.280

     A Play of Props > **Insistent Trauma**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the recursive dream-sequence in Freud's Irma dream operates across three registers of analytic repetition, with the first and most fundamental being *tuché* — the traumatic encounter with the Real that fantasy both screens and preserves, linking imaginary-real dream imagery to symbolic-real formulas through the logic of repetition.

     What Freud sees in Irma's throat, sidesteps in the discourse of his egomorphic peers, returns to in the expression 'propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid,' and eventually sublimates in the chemical formula of trimethylamine is a ghastly representation

571. #571

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

     Fuzzy Math > **Babble Dabble**

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

     the basic task of religious discourse (religieuse Taler) in Kierkegaard's middle work: to uplift through suffering

572. #572

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.197

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

     Theoretical move: Heidegger constructs a hierarchy of speech modes—from *Gerede* (idle talk) through rhetoric and dialectic (*dialegesthai*) to *nous* (pure perception)—arguing that *dialegesthai* occupies a structurally intermediate position that passes through inauthentic discourse toward genuine uncovering (*aletheuein*), without ever fully achieving the pure seeing of *theoria*, thus making authentic philosophical speech a perpetually incomplete task of cutting through concealment.

     dialegesthai possesses an immanent tendency toward noein, toward seeing [Sehen].

573. #573

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.273

     A Play of Props

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the alliterative chain "propyl, propyls…propionic acid" in Freud's Irma dream is not mere phonetic noise but a quilting point that crystallizes the therapeutic passage from empty speech to full speech, and that the concept of repetition—as theorized by both Freud and Lacan—is the key to unlocking this bridge between their otherwise distinct analyses.

     cannot help but interject, returning the dream to this horrific centerpiece albeit from the safe, sublimated distance of 'organic chemistry.'

574. #574

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.66

     4. > Affects and Conatus's Variability

     Theoretical move: The passage develops Spinoza's theory of the conatus as the ontological ground of affective life, arguing that affects are not defects of a mind-body split but variations of intensity in a single ontological tendency shared by mind and body—thereby displacing the Cartesian passion/action dualism and recasting desire, joy, sorrow, and wonder as modulations of the power of acting rather than states of a subject.

     Wonder comes to appear as the fundamental and most important joyful passion. Surprise and astonishment solicit the power of acting in a very creative way.

575. #575

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou

     5. > Conclusion > In his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze affirms:

     Theoretical move: This passage, a quotation from Deleuze on Spinoza via literary and artistic examples, argues that affect names a zone of indetermination prior to natural differentiation — a nonhuman becoming that dissolves fixed identities — functioning here as a theoretical counterpoint or interlocutor for the broader argument about self and emotional life.

     from the moment that the material passes into sensation as in a Rodin sculpture, art itself lives on this zone of indetermination.

576. #576

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.123

     9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Freud's unresolved metapsychological tension around unconscious guilt—an affect that cannot, by his own theory, be unconscious—showing how this problem drives the concepts of negative therapeutic reaction, moral masochism, the superego's sadism, and civilizational guilt, while Johnston argues that the phenomenon of "misfelt feelings" is the best way to make sense of Freud's compelled but hedged positing of an unconscious sense of guilt.

     the superego represents what one might risk characterizing in roughly Hegelian terms as a symptom of the cunning of civilization's reason, an especially efficacious sublimation in which aggression . . . is 'turned inward'

577. #577

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.186

     12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's Seminar VII account of beauty and *pudeur* (shame) as parallel defensive veils over the Real of death-tinged sexuality to argue that Lacanian metapsychology implicitly allows for unconscious affect, a position the passage then bridges to Damasio's neuroscientific three-stage model (nonconscious emotion → nonconscious feeling → conscious feeling) as a framework for resolving Lacan's underdeveloped affect theory.

     an aesthetic sublation or sublimation of suffering unto death covers over doomed-to-rot sexed skin in the gleaming sheen of art's mercifully distracting, cathartic pleasures.

578. #578

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.240

     13. > The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy > Psychoanalysis: Are There Unconscious Feelings?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud and Lacan's shared thesis—that affects are always conscious and the unconscious is constituted by signifiers/representations, not affects—runs into paradox through the concept of "misfelt feelings" (guilt, anxiety), and that this psychoanalytic topology of drive, representation, and affect is now challenged by neurobiology's discovery of an emotionally competent, symbolically active brain.

     The vicissitudes of the drives—'reversal into its opposite, turning round upon the subject's own self, repression, sublimation'—assume a place other than the cerebral topography.

579. #579

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.286

     13. > Inde x > affects (*continued*)

     Theoretical move: This index passage maps the book's theoretical terrain by cross-referencing key psychoanalytic, philosophical, and neuroscientific concepts around affect, unconscious affect, autoaffection, and the body-mind connection, revealing how the text triangulates Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology with neuroscience and Continental philosophy.

     affects, unconscious … as misfelt feelings, 94–95

580. #580

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

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

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

     Passage à l'art ali umetnost kot dejanje. Drugi del: sublimacija in ljubezen

581. #581

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.137

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Against Bergson's binary of mechanical vs. vital, Zupančič argues that the drive (as "indestructible life") is constitutively produced *through* repetition rather than being a prior vitality that repetition merely expresses—thereby positioning comedy as an introduction to the psychoanalytic insight that life is the gap opened by repetition itself, and that all drive is ultimately death drive.

     by objectifying this dead-letter-driven life itself, by producing it as an object (as comedy does), we do not mortify it even further, or glorify this mortification. Instead, we get a chance to break out of the mortifying spell of the latter.

582. #582

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.220

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "phallic signifier" is not a gesture of phallocentrism but of desublimation: it reattaches the mystery of the Phallus to the piece of the Real whose veiling produced sublime Meaning, and comedy is the human practice that structurally performs the same move—materializing the "behind" as a finite, trivial object rather than an infinite abyss, thereby showing that castration always arrives in a concrete form, not as pure lack.

     To call the signifier of castration the 'phallic signifier' implies both a real and a conceptual desublimation of the mystery of the Phallus.

583. #583

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.124

     part iii

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

     comedy is a constant reversing of the two series: now we laugh at a (physical) slip that undermines dignity, now we laugh at a dignity that strives to control such slips at all costs

584. #584

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.37

     part i

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

     All that can remind us of the actual existence of the actor behind the mask (for instance, his bodily functions, slips, and so on) is disturbing to the effect of representation; it is bad representation, bad performance.

585. #585

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

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

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

     Tragedy is essentially the work of sublimation, in the precise sense of elevating a singular subjective destiny to that place of the symbolic structure that constitutes its blind spot, its inherent impasse.

586. #586

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.57

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Zupančič challenges the dominant "metaphysics of finitude" reading of comedy—which treats the genre as a celebration of human limitation and acceptance—by arguing that comedy is materialistic not because it anchors us in dense, finite reality but because it gives body to the contradictions and impasses within materiality itself, revealing that the human is always in excess of its own finitude.

     comedy always moves in both directions: not only from pure discarnate spirit to its material, physical conditions, but also from the material to forms of pure discarnate intellect, wandering around quite independently.

587. #587

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

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator's notes and editorial annotations to Freud's "The Ego and the Id," clarifying key terminological and conceptual issues including the Ego/Id distinction, the bodily ego, identification, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, and drive de-merging — but does not itself advance a theoretical argument beyond philological and translational clarification.

     a construct actively, purposely built out over and above them in order to disguise or – in effect – to sublimate them

588. #588

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

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freudian erotic theory is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion: libidinal life is structured by the unattainable lost (maternal) object, narcissistic fascination, and the superego's demand for punishment, such that the compulsion to repeat past fixations makes genuine erotic liberation—and by extension political freedom—structurally impossible.

     Love for authority sublimates Eros, makes it less immediately perceptible, often because Eros, under such conditions, is homosexual and therefore anxiety-provoking.

589. #589

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

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's precarious position between id, super-ego, and external world is structured by a dynamic of drive de-mergence: sublimation and identification unleash destructive drives within the super-ego, turning morality itself into a product of the death drive's catabolism, while castration fear is identified as the nuclear core of all anxiety (consciential, fear of death, neurotic).

     Now it seems that when such a conversion process occurs, a de-mergence of drives takes place as well. After sublimation, the erotic component no longer has the strength to annex all the destructive capacity that has been added to it

590. #590

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

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego/ego-ideal is the heir to the Oedipus complex, formed by internalizing the paternal prohibition and thus perpetuating both individual and phylogenetic inheritance within the psyche; this move simultaneously grounds religion, morality, and the social sense in the dynamics of identification and repression rather than in any transcendent 'higher nature'.

     The battle that had previously raged in the nether depths, but had never come to any final resolution through a rapid process of sublimation and identification, is now carried on at a higher level.

591. #591

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

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     If writing – which consists in letting fluid flow from a tube onto a sheet of white paper – has acquired the symbolic significance of coitus, or if walking has become a symbolic surrogate for stamping on the body of mother earth, then both activities, writing and walking, are abandoned

592. #592

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

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat, rather than being simply suppressed, must be harnessed via the transference as a controlled "playground" that converts acting-out into remembering; the working-through of resistances — not mere identification of them — is the decisive therapeutic operation that distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion.

     Theoretically speaking, one can equate it to the 'abreacting' of the emotional quanta pent up through repression that hypnotic treatment entirely depended on for its success.

593. #593

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

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the sexual drives (Eros/life-drives) are conservative forces that restore and prolong life by opposing the death drive's drive toward dissolution, while dismissing any innate "drive toward perfection" in favour of explaining cultural striving as the result of repression and the irresolvable tension it produces.

     All the sublimations and reaction-formations and surrogate-formations in the world are never enough to resolve the abiding tension

594. #594

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

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's sublimation of object-libido into ego-libido constitutes secondary narcissism and operates paradoxically against Eros by desexualizing it, while the death drive's relative silence means life's noise comes primarily from Eros and its ongoing battle with the pleasure principle—a configuration that ultimately vindicates the fundamental dualism of drives.

     If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, then it may also be termed sublimated, for it would still be firmly adhering to Eros's central objective of being a unifying and binding force

595. #595

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

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud tests his death drive hypothesis against biological science, finding partial but ultimately inconclusive support from Weismann's soma/germ-plasm distinction, and concludes that even if the physical manifestations of death are a late evolutionary acquisition, the underlying drive-processes oriented toward death could be operative from the very beginning of organic life—thus preserving the conceptual distinction between death drives and life/sexual drives.

     we prefer to succumb to an implacable law of nature, the majestic 'Avάγχη ['necessity'], rather than to a chance event that might well have proved avoidable

596. #596

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

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the dynamic economy of narcissism by mapping the reciprocal flows between ego-libido and object-libido: self-feeling (self-esteem) rises and falls with narcissistic investment, the ego-ideal mediates this economy by imposing repression on object-choice, and the social/mass dimension of the ego-ideal is grounded in redirected homosexual libido and guilty conscience.

     in the case of the paraphrenic illnesses, we can better understand the concomitance within the ego-ideal of ideal-formation and sublimation, the retrogression of sublimations, and the re-formation of ideals that occurs in certain circumstances.

597. #597

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

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's identifications with lost objects—culminating in the Oedipus complex's resolution—produce a differentiated agency within the ego (the super-ego/ego-ideal), and that this mechanism of converting object-libido into narcissistic libido via identification is the general pathway for sublimation and character formation.

     whether this is not perhaps the standard path to sublimation; whether all sublimation doesn't perhaps take place via the medium of the ego, which first transforms sexual object-libido into narcissistic object-libido, in order perhaps then to set it a different goal.

598. #598

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

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Falstaff and Rosalind as exemplary figures of a psychoanalytically-inflected imagination that resists both the regressive superego (Falstaff's demystification of paternal authority) and the oceanic id (Rosalind's complication of erotic reduction), arguing that Shakespearean imagination offers an alternative to Freud's resigned acceptance of civilizational constraint.

     Rosalind puts all of her energy and humanizing, therapeutic force into teaching Orlando that love is more than anything one can readily comprehend, at least once the exercise of wit has taken it beyond Freudian-style reductions.

599. #599

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

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of group psychology and repetition compulsion reveals all political life—liberal and authoritarian alike—as structured by transference onto leader-figures descended from the primal father, and that the therapeutic response (working-through rather than repeating) mirrors the dynamics staged in Shakespeare's Falstaff/Hal scenes, making literary play a potential rival to psychoanalytic cure.

     in sane politics, as in sane love, the old archetypes still preside, though in sublimated forms

600. #600

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

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud defends the libido theory's biological grounding and its methodological priority in psychoanalytic work against Jung's claim that its failure to explain dementia praecox (schizophrenia) invalidates it for the neuroses, insisting the antagonism between ego drives and sexual drives remains the productive working hypothesis derived from analysis of transference neuroses.

     he can easily have sublimated it into a heightened interest in the divine or natural or animal realm without falling victim to an introversion of his libido onto his fantasies, or a reversion of his libido to his ego.

601. #601

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

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the ego-ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishes it sharply from sublimation, and then derives the superego/conscience as the agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—thereby also accounting for paranoid self-scrutiny, dream censorship, and the role of narcissistic libido in self-feeling.

     Sublimation is a process involving object-libido, and consists in a drive latching on to a different goal far removed from sexual gratification… To the extent, therefore, that sublimation has to do with drives whereas idealization has to do with objects, the two concepts need to be clearly distinguished from each other.

602. #602

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

     Introduction

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

     In the father's voice, the child senses a power that unerringly protects and guides. That voice will return later in life with every experience of what the eighteenth century called the sublime – in Wagner and Beethoven

603. #603

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

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, arguing that the distinguishing mechanism of obsessional neurosis is libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase (driven by the castration complex against the Oedipus complex), accompanied by drive de-mergence, a uniquely harsh superego, and reaction-formations in the ego — contrasting with hysteria's simpler reliance on repression alone.

     the sublimation of anal-erotic components clearly plays a role in it

604. #604

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

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud recapitulates his dualistic drive theory (Eros vs. death drive), articulates their fusion and de-mergence as the dynamic mechanism underlying libidinal regression, ambivalence, and neurotic phenomena, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido that operates as a qualitatively indifferent energy serving the pleasure principle across both ego and id.

     It includes not only the uninhibited sexual drive itself and the goal-inhibited and hence sublimated drive-impulses deriving from it

605. #605

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.28

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectical Materialism is Immaterialism**

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that genuine dialectical materialism is paradoxically "immaterialist": it holds that every actual interaction must be sustained by a virtual background (vacuum fluctuations, the big Other, normative structures), and that purely relational virtual entities—though they have no substance of their own—are nonetheless real agents that resist reduction to "really existing" material practices, thereby redefining materialism against both naïve substance-ontology and pure flux/relationism.

     when a group of people fight for communism, they of course know that this idea exists only through their engagement, but they nonetheless relate to it as to a transcendent entity that regulates their lives and for which they may even be ready to sacrifice their lives.

606. #606

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.337

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Towards a <span id="scholium_35_towards_a_quantum_platonism.xhtml_IDX-1843"></span>Quantum Platonism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for a "Quantum Platonism" in which the Idea (eidos) is not an abstract universal but the virtual field of variations that subtends reality—itself always a partial, collapsed version of an impossible whole—and that this structure, visible in Kieslowski's eidetic film variations, Freud's reconstructed fantasy, Benjamin's translation theory, and Picasso's cubist distortion, is homologous to the Lacanian futur antérieur of the Unconscious and to Hegel's Understanding as the power of separation.

     a good portrait of a person resembles more the person than this person itself: a good painting of a woman supplements the woman's photographic reality with its transcendental field of virtualities

607. #607

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.423

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "empty ritual" — one whose traditional content is lost and whose artificiality is fully acknowledged — can be more authentically operative than an immersive, "authentic" one, and uses this case to construct a four-term Greimasian matrix of ethical gestures organized around the axes of negative/positive and ritual/non-ritualized act, while also distinguishing hegemonic false universality from the authentic universality embodied by those excluded from the hegemonic order.

     it may be shit, but shit works in its very minimal gesture of withdrawal from life engagement

608. #608

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.294

     **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.

     in Freudian terms, death drive and creative sublimation are intricately linked

609. #609

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.322

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Badiou's "positivism of Truth-Event" by insisting that the Death Drive—understood as radical (self-relating) negativity rather than any ontic positivity—is the primordial opening that makes an Event possible, and that sexuality (as the site of this void) cannot be reduced to the order of Being but is already a "brush with the Absolute" that love merely supplements, not elevates.

     the passage from sex to love is in its entirety located within the "immortal" space of sublimation. Love does not elevate sexuality to the level of the Absolute, love supplements the deadlock of our brush with the Absolute that is sexuality.

610. #610

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.6

     **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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a programmatic argument that dialectical materialism must be reconceived as a formal materialism of unorientable surfaces—without substantial matter or teleological development—and that sexuality (understood as radical negativity following Lacan) is the privileged site where the parallax gap between ontology and the transcendental is redoubled and thus our sole contact with the Absolute, with topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) providing the structural vocabulary for this redoubling.

     the sublime Madeleine is a fake: the murderous Gavin Elster dressed up Judy, a common girl, to look like Madeleine

611. #611

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.311

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_31_the_ethical_mobius_strip.xhtml_IDX-326"></span>The Ethical <span id="scholium_31_the_ethical_mobius_strip.xhtml_IDX-606"></span>Möbius Strip

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip structure of the ethical-political—where opposites coincide such that following either liberal humanism or emancipatory engagement to its conclusion reverses into the other—reveals that contemporary ideology presents oppressive unfreedom as freedom and destruction as remedy, making the Heydrich example the paradigm case where "universal" ethical action requires overcoming immediate compassion toward the neighbor.

     when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become 'entrepreneurs of the self,' acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses

612. #612

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.389

     **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: The passage argues that true freedom paradoxically coincides with necessity—through a dialectical reading of Luther's Protestantism and Lacan's objet a, Žižek contends that radical freedom emerges not from unconstrained choice but from the unbearable situation of predestination where one must choose without knowing which choice is predetermined, thereby collapsing the opposition between freedom and determinism.

     good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works … It's not 'act as if you are good, do good works, and you will become good,' it is 'only if you are good can you do good works.'

613. #613

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.217

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Seven Deadly Sins

     Theoretical move: Žižek maps the seven deadly sins onto a structural grid (Self/Other axis, three triads) and identifies acedia/sloth as the paradigmatic unethical attitude in the Lacanian sense—a compromise on desire (céder sur son désir)—arguing that the only truly ethical act is one that does not sacrifice desire even at the cost of death.

     acedia is thus the opposite of Zeal… Lacan's 'do not compromise your desire' definitely imposes the second choice as the only ethical one.

614. #614

     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 > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via a dialectical reading of the Universal/Particular relation, that sexual difference is not a difference between two species-identities but a constitutive antagonism that cuts within each sex, making every particular sexual identity a failed attempt to resolve an irreducible deadlock—and that ideologies of gender fluidity or "unlearning gender" evade rather than confront this constitutive impossibility captured in Lacan's "there is no sexual relationship."

     **Chunk also engages:**

615. #615

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is reframed as a formal rather than content-based phenomenon: an activity becomes "sexualized" when it is captured in a distorted circular temporality identical to Freud's death drive, while Sade's attempt to eliminate that circularity paradoxically de-eroticizes sexuality into a post-human mechanism.

     he endeavors to dismiss all obstacles and detours and pursue pleasure in the most direct way possible, the result is a totally mechanized cold sexuality deprived of all twists and turns that we associate with eroticism proper.

616. #616

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **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 deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

     The standard notion of sublimation is here turned around: it is not a sublimated figure of AIDS, AIDS itself is a piece of our common reality which draws its power of fascination from the fact that it gives body to our fear of It.

617. #617

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.442

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Philippe Petit's high-wire act and Prokofiev's return to the USSR as parallel figures of "the Act" — a gesture combining meticulous planning with abyssal purposelessness — to argue that simple beauty produced under conditions of terror is not mere escapism but ideology at its most efficient, precisely because it is "homogenizable" (not identical) with the dominant order while retaining its own coherent artistic greatness.

     Petit's act was an act of courage, and an act of beauty in which the extreme tension magically turns into inner peace and beauty.

618. #618

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.116

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" reverses the common reading: Sade is the closet Kantian, not vice versa, because jouissance—like the moral law—operates beyond the pleasure principle and beyond pathological self-interest. This homology between drive/desire and the ethical act grounds a "critique of pure desire" that re-reads the Kantian sublime as immanent to sexuality itself, identifying feminine jouissance with the mathematical sublime's non-all structure and masculine sexuality with the dynamic sublime's constitutive exception.

     Lacan's definition of the sublime: 'an object elevated to the level of the Thing,' an ordinary thing or act through which, in a fragile short-circuit, the impossible Real Thing transpires… it is in this sense that sublimation is not the opposite of sexualization but its equivalent

619. #619

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.14

     **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

     Theoretical move: The passage maps the book's structural architecture (theorem/corollary/scholia) as a self-enacting ontological form, and closes by defending the "thwarted identity" of the Real—the irreducible gap between transcendental space and reality—against both new realist critics and the ideological "fine art of non-thinking" that converts the symbolic into image and forecloses genuine thought.

     The task of thinking is not to simply fill in this symbolic hole but to keep it open and render it operative in all its unsettling force.

620. #620

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.129

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

     Against the standard idea of sexuality as some kind of instinctual vital force which is then repressed or sublimated through the work of culture

621. #621

     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.

     a believer as empty subject ($) is sacrifice (of all substantial content, i.e., it emerges through what mystics and Sade call the second death)

622. #622

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.346

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

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

     he only deploys how, in the process of culture, the natural substance of sexuality is cultivated, sublated, mediated—we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage

623. #623

     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 > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kant-to-Hegel move requires understanding the form/content gap as itself reflected back into content as "primordial repression," and maps this onto Lacan's sexuation formulas (form = non-all, matter = universal with exception), ultimately driving toward the cross-cap as the topological figure adequate to a radical antagonism irreducible to the Möbius strip.

     the emotional excess that cannot express itself directly in the narrative line finds its outlet in the ridiculously sentimental musical accompaniment or in other formal features.

624. #624

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.437

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Milner's symmetrical opposition between language and lalangue by reordering their relationship: language is primary (constituted by a traumatic "wound" or symbolic castration), while lalangue is secondary—a defense that attempts to fill or obfuscate the constitutive lack of language through homophonic enjoyment. The subject of the signifier belongs to the death drive, while lalangue aligns with life and pleasure.

     What we call 'culture' is, at its most elementary, an attempt to cope with this trauma.

625. #625

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.447

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Prokofiev and Shostakovich as aesthetic case studies to argue that the Sublime in music operates through the gap between form/content and that artistic integrity is measured not by the success of transcendence but by the formal traces of its failure—the blocked emergence of an inner "Thing"—while Shostakovich's formal mutations register historical trauma (Leninism into Stalinism) at a structural rather than hermeneutic level.

     the frustration of a desire for cathartic release into some supremely positive state of being, where meaning—musical and supra-musical—is transparent, un-ironizable: in short, a domain of spiritual 'purity.'

626. #626

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.418

     **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: Through a close reading of Wagner's *Parsifal* — framed against historicist contextualization — Žižek argues that the opera's central ethical and libidinal drama turns on the obscene superego-jouissance of the father (Titurel as père-version), hysterical feminine subjectivity (Kundry), and the paradox of a wound that is simultaneously the mark of corruption and the source of immortal life-energy; Parsifal's salvation-gesture is grounded not in simple purity but in hysterical identification with the very suffering he refuses.

     Wagner's unique achievement is that he brings together three aspects of the vessel out of which blood pours: the pagan notion of Grail as the mythic source of divine life-energy; the Christian notion of the cup in which Christ's blood was collected; the notion of wound as the eternal sign of corruption

627. #627

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.2

     **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

     Theoretical move: Žižek proposes "dialectical materialism of a failed ontology" (DM2) against Stalinist DM1, arguing that the theoretical space of dialectical materialism is topologically "unorientable" — structured like a Möbius strip or cross-cap — because antagonism is not the struggle of external opposites but the constitutive self-contradiction of an entity with itself, a minimal reflexivity (gap, mediation, failure) that cuts through every immediate unity, including sexuality.

     when religion or any other belief in an Absolute fails, unbridled hedonism imposes itself as a way to some kind of ersatz Absolute (as was the case with Sade)

628. #628

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Malabou, argues that Hegelian sublation must culminate in a self-sublating 'speculative abrogation' — a release of the object into its own being — and that Absolute Knowledge involves a radical passivization of the subject, displacing the Kantian model of active synthesis in favour of the object's autopoietic self-deployment.

     the very sublation of art itself in the philosophical sciences (in conceptual thought)… frees it, allows it to gain autonomy and stand on its own. Is this not the very definition of the birth of modern art proper, an art no longer subordinated to the task of representing spiritual reality?

629. #629

     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.

     The 'heroism of flattery' is a notion that deserves to be interpreted on the same level as that of 'voluntary servitude'; it announces the same theoretical deadlock: how can 'flattery' ... obtain a properly ethical status.

630. #630

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology functions through a surplus-enjoyment generated by renunciation itself (structurally homologous to Marxian surplus-value), and that this enjoyment must remain concealed to operate—since ideological form is its own end; further, it theorizes how ideological fields achieve unity through the 'quilting' function of the point de capiton (nodal point), which arrests the sliding of floating signifiers and retroactively fixes their identity.

     it is this renunciation, this giving up of enjoyment itself, which produces a certain surplus-enjoyment

631. #631

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.

     the saint, on the contrary, occupies the place of objet petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.

632. #632

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the Hegelian move from Substance to Subject not as constipated retention (Adorno's critique) but as excremental release: the subject is the 'barred substance'—emptied of all content through absolute negativity—which in Lacanese maps onto the split subject ($), and this logic of 'letting go' governs Hegel's philosophy of nature, theology, and art.

     Is, consequently, the Hegelian conceiving/grasping not a sublimated version of digestion?

633. #633

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology operates not at the level of false consciousness (knowledge) but as an unconscious fantasy structuring social reality itself — a "fetishistic inversion" that persists even under cynical distance — and supports this with a Lacanian account of belief as radically exterior and materialized in social practice rather than interior and psychological.

     Kafka's universe is not a 'fantasy-image of social reality' but, on the contrary, the mise-en-scène of the fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality itself.

634. #634

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.243

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian sublime—understood as the Idea's immanence to the phenomenal as pure negativity—converges with Lacanian sublimation (elevating an object to the dignity of the Thing via anamorphosis/objet petit a), and uses this convergence to reread Ahab's transcendentalism in Moby Dick as a fetishistic disavowal of the nothingness of the Ideal rather than a genuine pursuit of the transcendent.

     As Lacan defines it in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, sublimation is the process whereby an object is 'elevated to the dignity of the Thing.'

635. #635

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.173

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

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

     Enjoyment is thus the very means of production of the signifier that eventually kills it off; this signifier interposes itself between the (signifying) enjoyment and the hole/gap at the place of which the latter appears.

636. #636

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.24

     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 Lacanian *objet petit a*, a 'less than nothing' that, in its reinforcement of both the Hegelian thesis that 'substance is also subject' and the Freudian insistence on the insistence of immaterial matter(s), underscores the shortcomings of new materialist and realist attempts

637. #637

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.122

     From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's positing of the *intellectus archetypus* functions as a necessary but purely subjective presupposition: the gap between finite intellect (*intellectus ectypus*) and divine intuition is not symmetrical but structured as universal-versus-particular-species, and the *intellectus archetypus* must remain an unproven, non-contradictory idea whose very status as pure presupposition is constitutive of our sense of reality—foreshadowing the Lacanian distinction between the Symbolic order's necessary illusion and the Real as chaotic in-itself.

     there would be no gap between Is and Ought in intellectual archetypus

638. #638

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.49

     Mladen Dolar > Freud's Materialism

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Freud's departure from scientific materialism is not a rejection but a radicalization of it: by pushing mechanism, determinism, monism, reductionism, and scientism to their outermost consequences, psychoanalysis discovers a crack or inner break within each—a 'less than nothing' that persists without ontological substance—thereby converging, by an entirely different route, with Hegel's 'substance is subject.'

     psychoanalysis has always been accused of reducing everything to sexuality as an alleged firm base from which one can scrutinize the seemingly more elevated realms of human endeavor.

639. #639

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.245

     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*.

     Distorting and stretching, raising and elevating objects: this is the language of Lacanian sublimation. For both Hegel and Lacan, the sublime object is an 'object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing'

640. #640

     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.

     sublimation. See Lacan, Jacques

641. #641

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.28

     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.

     Ahab's sublimation of Moby Dick—his elevation of 'a dumb thing'... to the dignity of the Thing—simultaneously inverts this Kantian logic by positing the transcendental as immanent to the material

642. #642

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.269

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     sublimation, 21, 228, 235–41

643. #643

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.229

     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.

     Clarissa sees her parties as 'an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps'

644. #644

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.30

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Capitalist Produdion a nd Human Re produdion

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's constitutive lie—its temporal narration of an originary, atemporal loss—paradoxically reveals the truth of castration by staging it as visible; crucially, the passage argues that the loss intrinsic to sexed reproduction (castration) and the loss demanded by capitalist production are structurally identical, and that fantasy's staging of the impossible object can render this connection visible and thereby open a radical political potential.

     Henry fantasi zes his head becoming material for an eraser because it allows him to imagine himself playing a part in the elimination of the materiality of the signifier.

645. #645

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Laura Palmer's ethical act in *Fire Walk with Me* consists in embracing the death drive (figured by the ring's circular absence) against phallic authority (figured by BOB/the letter), and that this act—possible only once Laura acknowledges the lack in the Other—constitutes the film's privileged ethical position, one the spectator is invited to share.

     Ethics here means embracing the absence of an outside, the recognition that 'There's no place left to go,' no elsewhere where we could imagine things are better. Adopting this position, one finds the outside within the inside, the infinite within the finite.

646. #646

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.44

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that *Dune* does not fail Hollywood conventions but hyper-conforms to classical Hollywood narrative structure, and in doing so exposes the traumatic underside of fantasy: full immersion in fantasy's logic reveals that its promised jouissance is identical with ultimate horror, thereby disclosing the ontological (rather than merely empirical) antagonism that the social order normally conceals.

     In fantasy, one enjoys beyond the signifier and the order of meaning, which is why fully accessing this enjoyment forces one to recognize its identity with the ultimate horror.

647. #647

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.120

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that fantasy has an ethical dimension—not as escapism but as the very site of freedom—by mapping Kant's two Critiques onto Lynch's filmmaking: the first Critique's anti-fantasmatic stance gives way, as does Lynch's early ambivalence, to a Kantian practical reason whose moral law identifies fantasy as the locus of autonomy that exceeds the symbolic order and makes the ethical act possible.

     cinema is the privileged site for facilitating such acts because its very form involves the public screening of private fantasy.

648. #648

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.129

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > 5· The Absence of Desire in WHd at Hearl

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it distinguishes Lynch's critique of publicly displayed enjoyment from Oliver Stone's (Lynch diagnoses a failure of fantasy-commitment rather than excess fantasy); it defines fantasy's structure as predicated on the initial loss of the impossible object; and it links the appearance of freedom/lawlessness through the signifier to its dialectical reversal into necessity.

     Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 167

649. #649

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.58

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

     Theoretical move: The collapse of the idealized father-figure in *Blue Velvet* ruptures the fantasy structure and creates an opening for desire, figured by the detached ear and Dorothy's apartment as a void; Dorothy's "pure desire" — desiring nothing — is shown to be the constitutive absence around which male fantasy (and subjectivity itself) orbits, making her not the site of fantasy's success but of its failure.

     Dorothy's desire is a pure desire: it desires nothing, and it refuses to satisfy itself with any pathological object.

650. #650

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.215

     <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.

     there is obviously something different about the sublimation involved in turning id into ego or superego (i.e., turning from 'pleasure' to 'reality') and that involved in the sublimation that leads to full satisfaction of the drives.

651. #651

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.139

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > *Masculine!F eminine-Signifier!Signifierness*

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that sexual difference is grounded in a structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine modes of alienation in language: men are defined by the signifier of desire (Φ) and take the object (a) as partner, while women are defined by "signifierness" (the being of the signifier beyond signification) and take the phallus and S(Ⱥ) as partners—a dissymmetry so radical it forecloses any writable sexual relationship.

     The Other jouissance involves a form of sublimation through love that provides full satisfaction of the drives... 'Desexualized libido' seems closely related to Lacan's asexual, Other jouissance.

652. #652

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.134

     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.

     The other path-that of sublimation-is particular to those characterized by feminine structure.

653. #653

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.67

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" that makes finitude a Master-Signifier closing off the infinite, Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" grounded in the Lacanian insight that human finitude is always-already a *failed finitude* — a finitude with a constitutive hole — whose materiality is objet petit a, and whose topology is best captured by the Möbius strip as the figure of immanent transcendence.

     This is the kind of totalization that Kant discusses in his theory of the sublime: that of encompassing an endless series in one intuition, whereby representation succeeds by its very failure.

654. #654

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.231

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section providing scholarly citations and brief elaborations; it is non-substantive in terms of primary theoretical argumentation, though it alludes to several key theoretical touchstones (Hegel on the comic, Freud's 'famillionairely', the Voice as object, sublimation, and the subject-behind-representation).

     Passage à l'art ali umetnost kot dejanje. Drugi del: sublimacija in ljubezen

655. #655

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.164

     Repetition

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that repetition is not merely a comic technique but constitutive of the comic genre itself, and uses Marx's *Eighteenth Brumaire* to distinguish between "good" repetition (productive of the new), "bad" repetition (farce/empty repetition perpetuating the same), and a third form—pure compulsive self-differentiating repetition—which opens onto a comic dimension irreducible to farce.

     a stubborn attempt to do something against all odds, which, because of its repetitious character, leaves the realm of the heroic and enters a territory closer to the comic not because it keeps failing, but because it keeps insisting

656. #656

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.220

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's deployment of the "phallic signifier" is a desublimating move—not a phallocentric idealization but a demystification that reattaches the symbolic function of the phallus to the Real of castration; comedy is then positioned as the cultural practice that performs an analogous desublimation, materializing the "infinite passion" of the subject in a finite, concrete object, thereby illuminating that Lacanian castration always arrives in a particular, embodied form rather than as pure lack.

     To call the signifier of castration the 'phallic signifier' implies both a real and a conceptual desublimation of the mystery of the Phallus.

657. #657

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.37

     part i

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

     All that can remind us of the actual existence of the actor behind the mask (for instance, his bodily functions, slips, and so on) is disturbing to the effect of representation; it is bad representation, bad performance.

658. #658

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

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

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

     Tragedy is essentially the work of sublimation, in the precise sense of elevating a singular subjective destiny to that place of the symbolic structure that constitutes its blind spot, its inherent impasse.

659. #659

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.58

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against both Christian-humanist and postmodern "metaphysics of finitude" readings of comedy, Zupančič argues that comedy is materialistic not because it reconciles us to human limitation but because it gives body to the contradictions and impasses of materiality itself — showing that what is "human" exists only in an excess over itself, which means finitude is always already "corroded" by a passion incommensurable with it.

     comedy sees the turning of materiality into pure spirit and of pure spirit into something material as one and the same movement, driven by a difficulty inherent to materiality itself.

660. #660

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.4

     Contents

     Theoretical move: This is a table of contents for Žižek's *The Parallax View*, organizing the book's theoretical architecture around three "parallax" registers (stellar, solar, lunar) that traverse ontology, subjectivity, and politics. It is non-substantive filler content.

     The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

661. #661

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.195

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary techno-scientific developments—brain-machine interfaces, digital virtualization, and posthumanist projects—threaten the very gap of finitude that, for Kant and Freud alike, grounds human creativity and the Symbolic order; Žižek mobilizes Lacan's "point of the apocalypse" (saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance) as the theoretical framework for diagnosing this threat, and then tests Nietzsche's eternal return against it to expose the limits of both Nietzschean and posthumanist thought.

     the distance between 'mere thought' and causal intervention in external reality enables us to test the hypotheses in our mind and, as Karl Popper put it, let them die instead of ourselves

662. #662

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.277

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophy of finitude constitutes an "ontology of provisory existence" that structurally mirrors Cartesian provisional morality, but that Heidegger's great political temptation—and error—was to collapse the irreducible parallax gap between ontological truth and ontic order, leading to an illegitimate displacement from individual being-toward-death to communal sacrificial fate.

     the 'essential sacrifice' as the 'comradeship amongst soldiers at the front': 'its most profound and only reason is that the proximity of death as sacrifice brought everyone to the same annulment, which became the source of an unconditional belonging to the others.'

663. #663

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.251

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

     only in humans is what originally served as an instrument or indicator elevated into an end in itself. In art, for instance, the display of attributes turns into an activity which brings satisfaction in itself.

664. #664

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.157

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the parallax structure—a purely formal minimal difference that inscribes the subject's gaze into the perceived object—is the shared logic of aesthetics (Richter, Pizarnik, Kalevala), psychoanalytic topology (objet petit a, death drive, sublimation), and political philosophy (Hegel's 'compromise' with post-Thermidorian reality vs. Hölderlin's Beautiful Soul), thereby grounding the concept of 'Good as the absence of Evil' and of creative silence in a unified parallactic ontology.

     the death drive and sublimation are strictly correlative: the death drive has first to erase the murmur of the Real, and thus open up the space for sublime formations

665. #665

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.77

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

     Theoretical move: By reading Mrs. Robinson (and analogous figures like Julia in Brideshead Revisited) as ethical subjects rather than corrupt seducers, Žižek argues that an apparent prohibition sustaining promiscuity—keeping one person "pure" through one's own corruption—constitutes a genuine ethical act, thereby instantiating the dialectical structure of concrete universality where the particular sacrifice secretly upholds the universal.

     she is corrupt and promiscuous, maybe there is still a chance for her if she sacrifices what matters most to her, her love for Ryder

666. #666

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.312

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary politics is fundamentally a biopolitical regulation of jouissance rather than emancipatory politics proper, tracing this through liberal ideology's fantasmatic disgust, the symmetry between fundamentalism and liberal hedonism, and the paradox of the superego imperative to enjoy—where permitted jouissance becomes obligatory jouissance—culminating in a reading of The Matrix as staging the co-dependence of the big Other (Symbolic) and the Real.

     Freud's 'naive' reflections on how the artist expresses embarrassing, even disgusting, intimate fantasizing in a social context by wrapping it up in a socially acceptable form—by 'sublimating' it, offering the pleasure of the beautiful artistic form as a lure

667. #667

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.88

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's account of the fall from innocence to sin must be supplemented by a Schellingian-Lacanian correction: Prohibition does not disturb primordial repose but resolves a prior, more terrifying deadlock created by primordial self-contraction (sinthome), yielding a three-stage sequence of anxieties that grounds a properly materialist theory of subjectivity and ethical engagement.

     the ultimate Meaning of sacrifice is the sacrifice of Meaning itself

668. #668

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.358

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

     Theoretical move: Žižek proposes a fourth, materialist reading of the crucifixion (God repaying his own debt to humanity) to expose the theological truth concealed by the three standard versions, and argues that only a comprehensive materialism—not liberal tolerance or religious fundamentalism—can sustain a genuinely ascetic, militant ethics capable of judging fundamentalism on its own terms.

     Instead of trying to redeem the pure ethical core of a religion against its political instrumentalizations, we should ruthlessly criticize this very core—in all religions.

669. #669

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.300

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's four discourses map the historicity of European modernity—with the Master's discourse coding absolute monarchy, University/Hysteria coding biopolitics and capitalist subjectivity, and the Analyst's discourse coding emancipatory politics—while complicating Miller's claim that contemporary civilization itself operates as the Analyst's discourse, and then pivoting to show how global reflexivization paradoxically generates brute, "Id-Evil" immediacy resistant to interpretation.

     a violence not grounded in any utilitarian or ideological reasons... hatred of the Otherness, with the global reflexivization of society

670. #670

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.82

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Kierkegaard's theology as the limit-point of idealism to stage a materialist inversion: whereas idealism projects closure onto a transcendent God correlative to an "open" ontology, materialism holds that the "All" is itself non-All and contingent; Kierkegaard's desubstantialized God and his structure of "infinite resignation" (Versagung) are then read as a secretly Lacanian operation in which the sacrificial loss of everything yields not a reward but the loss of the Cause-Thing itself.

     sacrificial renunciation cannot be part of an exchange with God—we sacrifice all (the totality of our life) for nothing.

671. #671

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.126

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: The passage redefines the human-animal distinction not as one between man and beast but as an *inherent* difference within the human itself: between the human and the "inhuman excess" of drive that is constituted by the body's colonization by the symbolic order through the sinthome. The properly human task is then a Christological-sublimatory one—transforming the modality of this excess rather than suppressing it.

     is not our task—the properly Christological one—to change the modality of our being-stuck in a mode that allows, solicits even, the activity of sublimation?

672. #672

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.355

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

     it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

673. #673

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.169

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.

     against the false appearance that this gesture is also aimed at psychoanalysis (is not the point of the notion of 'sublimation' that the allegedly 'higher' human activities are just a roundabout, 'sublimated' way of realizing a 'lower' goal?)

674. #674

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.95

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

     Symbolic norms are impossible(-to-follow), yet necessary.

675. #675

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.155

     20

     Theoretical move: Spielberg's films deploy a recurring fantasy structure in which the initially failed or absent father is redeemed as a capable paternal authority, thereby domesticating the traumatic gaze and shielding the subject from the real—a move that ultimately serves an ideological function by covering over the gaps in ideology with the illusion of protection.

     he reaches out to his son Indiana (Harrison Ford) and pulls him out of a chasm to safety, displaying concern for his son instead of for the Holy Grail—the now-accessible impossible object—lying just beyond Indiana's reach.

676. #676

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.106

     **The Banality of Orson Welles**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Welles's cinema enacts a Hegelian correction of the Kantian logic of the nouvelle vague: rather than sustaining the gaze as an impossibly absent transcendent object (which risks feeding fantasy), Welles renders the object's absence fully present by embodying it in a banal, everyday object, thereby exposing the void at the core of desire and foreclosing fantasmatic resolution.

     those who develop a cinema of desire often fit awkwardly within the world of film… Films structured around desire without the possibility of fantasmatic resolution tend to disturb audiences.

677. #677

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.74

     **Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Michael Mann's films use fantasmatic cinematic excess to make visible the Kantian ethical subject — one whose freedom and subjectivity emerge precisely through an unconditional, excessive devotion to duty that refuses symbolic identity, aligning enjoyment with duty rather than with the satisfactions the symbolic order offers.

     In the act of discarding this fantasy, Frank evinces his complete freedom. Subsequently, he is able to kill Leo and his henchmen because he is free to risk himself, no longer weighed down by concerns about his symbolic identity or by his fantasy of future enjoyment.

678. #678

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.200

     **Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that historical narratives inevitably serve a fantasmatic function—justifying present ideological structures—but that certain filmmakers (notably Resnais) deploy the cinema of fantasy to allow an encounter with the impossible historical object precisely by marking the failure of the look, thereby transforming history from a validation of the present into an interrogation of it.

     Such a narrative transforms the impossible historical object—the trauma of the Holocaust into a tool for justifying a contemporary position.

679. #679

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Nietzsche, that nihilism results not from negativity per se but from its insertion into the truth/appearance topology, which collapses the structural gap sustaining desire; she then maps this onto Lacanian concepts (desire, jouissance, the Real) and proposes a non-dialectical "double affirmation" as the only way out of nihilism.

     In discussing the Lacanian notion of sublimation, I have already highlighted this danger: the danger involved in the gesture of simply separating the 'object of satisfaction' from the 'satisfaction as object'

680. #680

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.170

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič articulates a Nietzschean "double affirmation" (amor fati as affirmation of both necessity and contingency) and then pivots to Lacan's claim that love-as-sublimation humanises jouissance by making it condescend to desire, using the logic of comedy—where the Real appears as a minimal difference between two semblances rather than behind appearances—as the structural model for this movement.

     Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire.

681. #681

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.164

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" means transgressing Nothingness as the structuring centre of moral dialectics—not abolishing negativity but relocating it from an external, unattainable limit to an internal, minimal difference—and that this move (illustrated via Lacan's Achilles/tortoise reading and Malevich's Suprematism) inaugurates a logic where truth is inherent to appearance, and where necessity is experienced as grounded in contingency rather than in purposive will.

     Malevich's creations 'beyond Nothing' do not simply finish with Nothing once and for all.

682. #682

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.130

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.

     It is the very formal structure of the reference to Nothingness that enables us to overcome the stupid self-contained life rhythm, in order to become 'passionately attached' to some Cause—be it love, art, knowledge or politics

683. #683

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.87

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation is not a surrogate for drive-satisfaction but *is* drive-satisfaction, and that the Real is located in the interval between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction-as-object; collapsing this gap in either direction (fetishism or Don Juan's hyper-realization) generates the superego injunction to enjoy. She then pivots to Nietzsche's figure of the "middle" (noon/midday) as a non-synthetic beyond that parallels this Lacanian logic of constitutive duality.

     Lacan insists that sublimation *is* the satisfaction of the drive. The link between sublimation and drive actually enables us to formulate more precisely the nature of the duality that we discerned at the very core of sublimation.

684. #684

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "event Nietzsche" constitutes a philosophical act analogous to Malevich's avant-garde artistic act: both locate the inner, inherent limit of their respective discourses and activate it as a site of creation, producing an implosion rather than a mere expansion—a vacuum of silence from which the event emerges.

     to locate the point of the inner limit, or inherent impossibility, of a given discourse (philosophical or artistic), and to activate this precise point as the potential locus of creation

685. #685

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.180

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the comic paradigm—unlike the tragic/sublime—constitutes the proper structural analogue of love: both work through a "parallel montage" of two semblances whose non-coincidence produces the Real as a gap-become-object, rather than incorporating the Real as an inaccessible Thing circled by sublime friction. Love's miracle is preserving transcendence within accessibility, not sublimating the banal into the inaccessible.

     The miracle of love is not that of transforming some banal object into a sublime object, inaccessible in its being—this is the miracle of desire. If we are dealing with an alternation of attraction and repulsion, this can only mean that love as sublimation has not taken place.

686. #686

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.184

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love, conceived as drive rather than desire, operates through a "time warp" logic in which the impossible Real happens rather than remaining structurally inaccessible; this enables love to "humanize jouissance" through a sublimation-as-desublimation that dislocates the sublime object from its source of enjoyment, thereby making jouissance itself an object of desire.

     There are two different concepts of sublimation in Lacan's work. The first... defined in terms of 'raising an object to the dignity of the Thing.' And then there is another concept of sublimation... the 'true nature' of the drive is precisely that of sublimation.

687. #687

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.81

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

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is redefined not as a turning-away from drives but as the creation of a space in which what is excluded by the reality principle—objects elevated to the dignity of the Thing—can be valued; this space is identified as the very gap that prevents reality from coinciding with itself (the Real), whose closure produces a Superego imperative of enjoyment rather than liberation.

     To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to 'realize' it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real.

688. #688

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.78

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern "hedonism" is structurally grounded in the ascetic ideal (passive nihilism), and pivots to the Lacanian concept of sublimation—understood as the creation of new values by "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing"—to show that what Kant dismisses as mere pathological desire can carry the same structure as moral duty, thereby reframing the ethics of desire against Kantian moralism.

     sublimation must be considered as a 'problem of ethics.' Sublimation is an ethical problem for one fundamental reason: 'it creates socially recognized values.'

689. #689

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.93

     **Vicissitude**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's taxonomy of drive vicissitudes — reversal into its opposite (change of aim or content), turning round upon the self, repression, and sublimation — as modes of defence against the drive, with the theoretical pivot being the distinction between transformation of *aim* versus transformation of *object* or *content*. The second half of the passage is a non-substantive bibliography of sources.

     Observation shows us that a [drive] may undergo the following vicissitudes: – Reversal into its opposite. Turning round upon the subject's own self. Repression. Sublimation.

690. #690

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.23

     **Demand** > **Drive** > **Enjoyment/***Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized as a structural excess irreducible to the pleasure principle—a paradoxical satisfaction-in-dissatisfaction that inextricably binds pleasure and pain, is constituted in relation to the symbolic limit (rather than merely through its transgression), and marks the subject's foundational disconnection from the symbolic order, functioning as the only measure of human freedom.

     A mode of enjoyment that does not in any sense redeem negativity; it sublimates it. That is to say, it transforms an ordinary object causing displeasure into a thing which is both terrible and alluring.

691. #691

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.32

     **Fantasy** > **Form**

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots between Hegel's account of how consciousness's experience generates new objects "behind its back" and Žižek's transposition of this logic into cinematic form: just as the in-itself emerges for us but not for consciousness, cinematic form operates beneath narrative meaning as a proto-real level that communicates with itself, constituting the proper density of the cinematic experience.

     beneath the level of meaning – spiritual meaning, but also simple narrative meaning – we get a more elementary level of forms themselves communicating with each other

692. #692

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Sublimation, Jouissance, and “Real” Satisfaction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against collapsing desire into the drive (as Žižek does), contending instead that a second, non-alienated form of desire—one that approaches but does not merge with the drive—is the basis of Lacanian ethics and provides the subject with "real," partial satisfaction through sublimation acting as a shield that transmits tolerable doses of jouissance.

     it is because sublimation acts as a shield against self-destruction that the subject has access to bits of satisfaction—morsels of the real—that it would not otherwise be able to attain.

693. #693

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.13

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Real Communism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's communism is grounded not in a positive vision of emancipated production but in privileging the encounter with the Real and the commons over capitalist fantasy, and that this political project is underwritten by a Hegelian-Christian logic of divine self-division and a theory of belief-through-the-Other that exposes the disavowed religious investment in liberal ideology.

     Christianity is the first religion to conceive of God's self-division and emergence from the beyond... into the finite world.

694. #694

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.249

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that political emancipation requires a move beyond the Master Signifier toward S(A) (the barred Other), and that this "subtraction" is only achievable through the psychoanalytic process of working-through and traversal of the fantasy — with writing itself (as in Sade's case) serving as the privileged site where the subject approaches the position of objet petit a and begins to transcend the symbolic order.

     the Sadean libertines persistently fail in realizing their fantasy of absolute destruction, yet Sade-the-man did not stop writing

695. #695

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.20

     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.

     Lacan's dictum that sublimation—and therefore the ethics of psychoanalysis—is a matter of raising a mundane object to 'the dignity of the Thing.'

696. #696

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.277

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Salvaging Our Dignity

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek, the passage argues that the objet petit a—by arresting the infinite sliding of the signifier and fixing the subject to its fundamental fantasy—is an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity and individuality, positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire faithful to das Ding rather than to the master's morality or the Other's desire.

     the allegiance to the Thing that we showcase through our sublimatory efforts introduces a code of ethics that is drastically different from what he describes as 'the morality of the master'

697. #697

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.229

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

     the elevation of a rather common biological fact to the level of an impossible Thing.

698. #698

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

     For Lacan, sexual drive as such relies on sublimation: sublimation elevates an ordinary worldly object to the level of the impossible Thing—this is how sublimation sexualizes an ordinary object.

699. #699

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Boothby](#contents.xhtml_ch14a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Boothby's reversal of the ontic/ontological assignments of *objet a* and *das Ding*: *objet a* is ontological (as object-cause of desire that structures reality through subtraction), while *das Ding* exceeds the entire ontic-ontological distinction as a "trans-ontological" trace of what the ontic was before disclosure — and this logic extends to the subject itself, which is ultimately also a supposition rather than a positive given.

     It is quite appropriate for Boothby's text to conclude this volume since it focuses on what I see as the basic philosophical (or post- or anti-philosophical) dimension of Lacan's thinking.

700. #700

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.282

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     What can save us from this deadlock is sublimation in which a mundane object is raised to the dignity of the Thing

701. #701

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > The Dignity of the Thing

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's insistence on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and worldly objects, the passage argues that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing—is not mere idealization but a genuine "realization" of the real within reality, and that "not giving way on desire" means choosing the singularity of one's jouissance/sinthome rather than automatically switching to the register of the drive.

     sublimation is what makes the real 'appear' within reality: it 'realizes'—renders tangible—a little piece of the Thing

702. #702

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.242

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" as a three-ring itinerary, arguing that Žižek's key theoretical contribution is to foreground the more implicit and disturbing second principle—that Kant is the truth of Sade (Sade as closet Kantian)—over the better-known first principle (Sade as the truth of Kant), and connects this to the concept of the "second death" as a condition for radical creation ex nihilo.

     Lacan 'purifies' Sade: the sadist Will-to-Enjoy is the exemplary case of a pure, non-pathological desire

703. #703

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Žižek's account of sexuation, arguing that while sexual difference names the incompleteness/trauma constitutive of the subject, Žižek's formalism fails to theorize the body as the extimate site where the signifier's cut produces a split—a gap Butler exploits via social constructivism and which Tomsič's account of the signifier as bodily cut helps to address. The central theoretical pivot is whether the antinomies of sexuation, as the Real of the subject's incompleteness, can ground emancipatory politics without presupposing a binary heterosexual structure.

     Žižek maintains that sublimation is 'not the opposite of sexualization but its equivalent.' Sublimation is our way of making sense of the not-all of sex and ontology.

704. #704

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.269

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > A Case for Sublimation

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's reading that desire is merely a compromise formation and a retreat from the drive, the passage argues that sublimation constitutes the "shared space" where desire can appropriate jouissance through the objet a — not in its mortifying/uncanny dimension but in its sublime dimension — thereby opening a more affirmative Lacanian ethics grounded in desire rather than the destructive act.

     sublimation is precisely the 'shared space' where it is possible—at least to some degree—for desire to appropriate some of the drive's jouissance.

705. #705

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

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

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

     sublimation [here](#response_to_nadia_bou_ali.xhtml_IDX-788), [here](#11_raising_a_mundane_object_to_the_dignity_of_the_thing_.xhtml_IDX-789)

706. #706

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.279

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of desire—grounded in the lost Thing—explains the idiosyncratic, counterproductive, and socially defiant dimensions of desire that ideology critique (à la Žižek) cannot account for, because such desire exceeds the logic of the Other's desire and resists instrumentalization by capitalist-neoliberal imperatives.

     the idiosyncratic cathexes of our desire can thwart our culture's ethos of consumerism by focusing our attention on a particular object to such a degree that we become uninterested in all other objects: inasmuch as a special object outshines all others, it ruptures the logic of capitalism

707. #707

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

     In the lectures on Ethics, Lacan theorized that sublimation is achieved when 'the object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing.'

708. #708

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.113

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **THE SILENT TURN AWAY FROM STALIN**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Stalinism's crimes stem not from an excess of universality but from a *misconception* of universality—the belief that total belonging is a realizable goal—and that the Left's silent retreat from universalism toward particularism after Stalin, rather than theorizing his error, is itself a theoretical and political catastrophe.

     Instead of inspiring suspicion about Marxism's overinvestment in universality, the Stalinist catastrophe should have led thinkers to see the danger of total belonging.

709. #709

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.103

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **NAZI IDEOLOGY**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that dominant interpretations of Nazism (Adorno, Agamben, Arendt, Foucault) misidentify it as a universalizing or biopolitical evil, when in fact Nazism is a reactionary particularist project aimed at destroying the universal—specifically targeting Jews not as bare life but as representatives of universality and the singularity it produces.

     Agamben distances the extermination of the Jews from the act of sacrifice and thus from the realm of traditional politics.

710. #710

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.208

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc3_1" id="conclusion.xhtml_toc3-1"><span id="conclusion.xhtml_pg_207" aria-label="207" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>CONCLUSION</a>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the retreat from universality into identity politics and particularism is not a safe alternative to the dangers of universalist projects, but is itself more murderous and structurally complicit with capitalist domination; genuine emancipatory politics requires reclaiming universality as a constitutive absence (structural lack) rather than a realizable presence.

     The Committee for Public Safety and the NKVD perverted universality into a realizable aim and failed to see it as an absence that informs emancipatory politics.

711. #711

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.117

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **THE POWER OF MICHEL FOUCAULT**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Foucault's particularism — his privileging of concrete local practices over universal categories — is both symptom and cause of the left's retreat from universality, and that this retreat, by misidentifying universality as domination rather than as always-absent and lacking, fatally disarms emancipatory politics and opens the ground for identity politics.

     Suspicion about universality ends up as capitulation to our situation.

712. #712

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.50

     **BRING SEX BACK**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has systematically repressed sexuality — its foundational concern — in favor of object-relations, attachment, and relational frameworks, and that this desexualization constitutes both a clinical failure and a theoretical regression; Lacanian sexuation and Zupančič's reading of the sexual as inherently identity-disrupting are mobilized to diagnose this suppression and call for psychoanalysis to re-engage transgender discourse as a site of productive contestation.

     psychosexuality tends to be thought of as concealing nonsexual, object and self-related conflicts

713. #713

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.120

     **PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT** > **The plasticity of gender**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual identity transcends anatomical plasticity by invoking the death drive as a structural limit to the promise of endless gender transformation — against both Giddens' "plastic sexuality" (freed from the phallus and reproduction) and Butler's performative plasticity, the real of mortality and the drive return as irreducible constraints.

     Candy has the face Roland Barthes saw when he looked at Greta Garbo: a face 'descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light.' To Barthes, Garbo's beauty 'represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.'

714. #714

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.121

     **PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT** > **The plasticity of gender** > She left a note:

     Theoretical move: The passage mobilizes the concept of "plasticity" — drawn from Malabou's reading of Hegel and from the dual etymology of "plastic" (Greek: malleability of form; German: classical beauty) — to argue that beauty functions as a denial of death and a limit to plasticity's promise of endless permutation, while the figure of the transgender body paradoxically comes to embody the contemporary ideal of femininity, exposing the constructed, non-natural character of the phallus-rule that Giddens thought plastic sexuality had escaped.

     In the German, 'plastic' derives from Plastik, meaning 'classical sculpture,' an art presenting beautiful forms and harmonious arrangement of visual stimuli.

715. #715

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.125

     **PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT** > **Sex is a joke of nature**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual difference is irreducible to either anatomy or social construction—sex must be symbolized and gender embodied—and that this irreducibility is tied to the death drive, castration, and the sinthome; a clinical case (Stanley) and aesthetic examples (Antigone, Trecartin) are deployed to show that trans subjectivity engages an ethical rather than merely imaginary relation to beauty, mortality, and singularity.

     the aim is to put the death drive at center stage in the place of the drive to be beautiful

716. #716

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.132

     **THAT OBSCURE OBJECT**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Schreber's transsexual delusion—its simultaneous preoccupation with beauty, feminine jouissance, and excremental voluptuousness—to argue that Lacan's objet petit a (as object-cause of desire) is the theoretical instrument needed to account for the libidinal interchangeability of feces/baby/penis that Freud detected but could not fully theorize through drive objects alone.

     The obsession of Judge Schreber with this erogenous shit can be paralleled with the curious role played by beauty and aesthetics in his transsexual delusion.

717. #717

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.135

     **THAT OBSCURE OBJECT**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces a Freudian-Lacanian theory of the drive's object through ethnographic and clinical material, arguing that the partial objects (feces, money, gift, baby, penis) form an interchangeable series grounded in anal erotism, and that Lacan's objet petit a — as always-already lost — is the structural culmination of this series, introducing castration as the condition of any object relation.

     Bourke's remark calls up the use of 'sublimation' in psychoanalysis. The equivalence that Bourke proposes between excrement and its substitute appears explicitly in Freud's prologue when he describes a child's coprophilic interest that falls victim to the effects of repression, and as a result of education the interest will shift to other objects.

718. #718

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.142

     **FREUD'S SCATALOG** > **Beauty and the beast**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between beauty and disgust in sexuality cannot be resolved at the level of anatomy or sublimation alone, and that Lacan's objet petit a provides a superior framework for understanding why an object appears attractive or repulsive — situating the excremental, the phallic, and the beautiful within the logic of desire rather than in any intrinsic quality of the object.

     It can, however, be diverted ('sublimated') in the direction of art, if its interest can be shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a whole.

719. #719

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.150

     **THE ART OF ARTIFICE**

     Theoretical move: The transgender body-as-art-project illustrates how writing on the body functions as a sinthome — a structural supplement analogous to Joyce's use of art — such that the trans experience of bodily transformation makes visible a universal "curative" role of writing that Lacanian clinical practice can generalise beyond trans patients to the broader question of embodiment and the symptom.

     it illustrates perfectly and accurately the function of art as a lifesaver... an art similar to that of actual artists is to be found in transsexual artificiality.

720. #720

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.152

     **CLINIC OF THE CLINAMEN**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's engagement with Joyce's writing marks a decisive theoretical pivot: rather than "applying" psychoanalysis to art psychobiographically, Lacan derives from Joyce a new definition of the symptom as *sinthome* — a creative knotting of the three registers that provides an organization of jouissance and becomes the basis for identification, reorienting the aim of the cure from symptom-removal to identification with one's sinthome.

     Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile... results from sublimated homosexual tendencies, incestuous wishes, and Leonardo's phallicization of the mother.

721. #721

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.20

     **INTRODUCTION** > **The moment is now** > **Transitions**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of the sinthome—redefining the symptom as a singular invention enabling one to live rather than a repressed signifier to be decoded—opens a post-Oedipal, post-phallic framework for thinking sexual difference and offers positive clinical outcomes for trans analysands, extended by the author's proposed "clinic of the clinamen."

     This trajectory could become an artistic endeavor, a body of work. Then, an art similar to that of actual artists is to be found in transsexual artificiality.

722. #722

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.9

     What Is Sex? > <span id="page-7-0"></span>Series Foreword

     Theoretical move: The series foreword argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis functions as a privileged instrument of "short-circuit" reading — a critical procedure that cross-wires a major text with a minor conceptual apparatus to decenter it and expose its unthought presuppositions, rather than merely reducing it to a lower cause.

     What such a reading achieves is not a simple 'desublimation,' a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause

723. #723

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

     What Is Sex? > <span id="page-9-0"></span>Introduction

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation demonstrates that satisfaction in non-sexual activity is identical to—not a substitute for—sexual satisfaction, which forces a properly philosophical and ontological re-examination of what sex *is*; sex is reframed not as a content but as a structural contradiction immanent to reality itself, making it the privileged "position" from which psychoanalysis theorizes the real.

     the point is not to explain the satisfaction in talking by referring to its 'sexual origin.' The point is that the satisfaction in talking is itself 'sexual.'

724. #724

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Quandary of the Relation

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "there is no sexual relation" should not be ontologized into a gloomy fact about reality, but understood as the very condition that generates ties and discourses; the non-relation, mediated by objet petit a as its objective counterpart, produces an "object-disoriented ontology" that links the sexual to emancipatory politics at a structural, not merely thematic, level.

     culture is not simply a mask/veil of the sexual, it is the mask or, rather, a stand-in for something in the sexual which 'is not.'

725. #725

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.109

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Freud's trajectory in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"—from the monism of the death drive, through the Eros/Thanatos dualism, to a monism of sexual drives—in order to show that the Lacanian death drive is not a separate drive but the inherent negativity (the gap/void) around which every partial drive circulates, with objet petit a functioning as the "crust" that sticks to this void and makes repetition possible.

     all great sublimations (such as art), go out of their way and embrace some alterity, difference, the Other (or at least a scent of the other).

726. #726

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.151

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel

     Theoretical move: Sexuality (as linked to the unconscious) constitutes a short circuit between ontology and epistemology: the lack at the heart of sex is not a contingent missing piece of knowledge but a structural incompleteness of being itself, and the unconscious names the inherent link between sexuality and knowledge in their shared fundamental negativity. The 'dream's navel' figures this gap where the lack in knowledge coincides with a lack in being.

     it is not simply because we are curious about sex, or because we sublimate the lack of sex with a passion for knowledge.

727. #727

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that capitalist realism supersedes postmodernism by making the outside of capitalism unthinkable, replacing the dialectic of subversion/incorporation with 'precorporation' - the pre-emptive formatting of desire - such that even authentic resistance is absorbed before it can constitute itself as such.

     Cobain's death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions.

728. #728

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

     Theoretical move: Fisher introduces 'capitalist realism' as a historically specific ideological condition—deeper than postmodernism—in which capitalism's totality forecloses the imaginability of any alternative, rendering cultural and political exhaustion not a mood but a structural feature of late-capitalist subjectivity.

     In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.

729. #729

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Marxist Supernanny

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys the failure of the Paternal Function in late capitalism as the diagnostic lens for a broader critique of neoliberal hedonism, arguing that a 'paternalism without the father'—drawing on Spinoza rather than deontological Law—is needed to reconstruct public culture, resist capitalist realism's affective management, and reconnect structural cause (Capital) to symptomatic social effects.

     it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults, assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and intellectually demanding