Sublimation as Desublimation

Sublimation-as-desublimation is Žižekian-Zupančič's reframing of the Lacanian concept of sublimation operative in the register of love-as-drive. In classical Lacanian theory (following Seminar VII), sublimation is defined as the operation of "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — a topological maneuver by which a contingent, ordinary object comes to occupy the vacant place of das Ding without being identical to it. Zupančič's move in the-shortest-shadow-nietzsche-alenka-zupancic (p.184) inverts the usual reading: rather than producing elevation or ennoblement, love-sublimation achieves its effect through desublimation — not a degradation of the sublime object into the banal, but a structural dislocation. The sublime object is decentered from the source of jouissance, severed from the site of enjoyment that secretly animated its elevation. This dislocation is precisely what "humanizes" jouissance: it converts raw, inaccessible drive-enjoyment into something that can function as an object of desire.

The mechanism here turns on the distinction between drive and desire, and on the specific temporality Zupančič attributes to love conceived as drive. Where desire circles around the constitutive inaccessibility of das Ding — maintaining the "right distance" from the impossible Real — love-as-drive introduces a "time warp" in which the impossible Real happens rather than perpetually receding. The desublimatory effect is thus not a failure of sublimation but its radical accomplishment: by dislocating jouissance from its anchoring in the sublime object, the operation makes jouissance itself available as an object of desire. Sublimation, paradoxically, completes itself only by undoing the sublime object's centrality — hence sublimation as desublimation.

This concept appears once, in the-shortest-shadow-nietzsche-alenka-zupancic (p.184), and operates as a specification — and partial inversion — of Lacan's canonical account of sublimation in Seminar VII, where the operation is defined in terms of das Ding. There, sublimation elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing, preserving the structural distance between the subject and the inaccessible Real. Zupančič's sublimation-as-desublimation retains the topological logic (an operation concerning the structural place of the Thing) but redirects its vector: instead of filling the void of das Ding with an elevated substitute, it disarticulates the sublime object from the jouissance that sustained its elevation, thereby opening the Real of enjoyment to the economy of desire. This makes the concept a critical extension of both das Ding (whose structural place is being reorganized) and Drive (the logic of love-as-drive, in which the circuit of satisfaction does not endlessly defer but produces a real effect). It also implicitly engages Fantasy: if fantasy is the frame that coordinates desire by screening off the Real, then sublimation-as-desublimation describes a moment where that screen is restructured — not traversed in the analytic sense, but decentered enough that jouissance enters the field of desire. The concept is therefore positioned at the intersection of sublimation theory, the love/drive nexus, and the question of how the impossible Real can be "humanized" without being domesticated into banal object-choice.

The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the TwoAlenka Zupančič · 2003 (p.184)

the best way to define (love-) sublimation is to say that its effect is precisely that of desublimation... desublimation does not mean 'transformation of the sublime object into a banal object'; it implies, rather, a dislocation or a decentering of the sublime object in relation to the source of enjoyment.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it makes a precise negative distinction — desublimation is not degradation ("banal object") — and then replaces degradation with a topological term: "dislocation or decentering." This preserves the structural register of Lacanian sublimation (everything turns on positional relations, not qualitative changes) while relocating the operative relationship: the key term "source of enjoyment" (i.e., jouissance) reveals that what sublimation-as-desublimation restructures is the binding between the sublime object and jouissance, not the object's symbolic status per se.