Sublime

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (208)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

   The Lie > Notes

   Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section, providing textual citations and block quotations (from Kant, Lacan, and Žižek) that anchor the preceding chapter's argument; it is non-substantive as independent theoretical content but does embed two load-bearing quoted passages—Lacan on desire and Žižek on the categorical imperative.

   we must oppose all attempts to domesticate her [Antigone], to tame her by concealing the frightening strangeness, 'inhumanity', apathetic character of her figure.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.80

   From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > The 'stonny ocean' of illusion

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's transcendental dialectic (the 'logic of illusion') structurally anticipates a Lacanian conception of truth and illusion: truth is not correspondence to an external object but conformity of knowledge with itself (a formal criterion), while dialectical illusion is not a false representation of a real object but an 'object in the place of the lack of an object' — a structure that aligns Kantian transcendental illusion with the Lacanian concept of le semblant.

   the difference between a natural world in which everything seems to be in its perfect place... and a chaotic Nature, full of sudden and unexpected 'eruptions' — between a Nature which makes us feel safe and comfortable (the beautiful) and a Nature which leads us 'beyond the pleasure principle'

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.92

   Good and Evil

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul is structurally a fantasy in the Lacanian sense: it responds to the same impasse as Sadeian fantasy—the incommensurability between the body's finite capacity for pleasure/pain and the infinite demand of jouissance—thereby demonstrating that "Kant with Sade" finds its most precise illustration in the immortality postulate, whose truth is not an immortal soul but an immortal body.

   What Kant really needs to postulate is not the immortality of the soul but the immortality of the body... an immortal, indestructible, sublime body.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.160

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's attempt to supplement the moral law with voice and gaze transforms respect (an a priori, non-pathological feeling) into the superego's law, installing an absolute Other that forecloses the act and pacifies the subject by guaranteeing an inexhaustible lack on the subject's side—a shift that also governs the dialectic of the sublime across the three Critiques.

   this shift of the moral law towards the superego is not without consequences. In fact it governs the whole of the dialectic of the sublime

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.162

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Kant's account of the sublime as a two-moment dialectical structure—an initial anxiety/powerlessness that inverts into an awareness of the subject's supersensible superiority—and uses this to set up the analogy between the logic of the sublime and the logic of the superego.

   the object is apprehended as sublime with a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure

6. #06

   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.

   the feeling of the sublime, the reverse side of which is always a kind of anxiety, requires the subject to regard a part of herself as a foreign body, as something that belongs not to her but to the 'outer world'.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.170

   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 Kant's theory of the sublime can be read as a theory of the logic of fantasy, in which the subject's safe observation of its own annihilation through the 'window of fantasy' reveals the superego structure latent in Kantian ethics — while simultaneously opening the question of whether a non-superego ethics (Lacanian ethics) is conceivable.

   The sublime, on the other hand, is explicitly a senseless form; it is more of an incarnation of chaos (the eruption of a volcano, a turbulent ocean, a stormy night ... ). It appears as pure excess, as the eruption of an inexplicable 'jouissance', as pure waste.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.180

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The status of the law > Notes

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/references section listing bibliographic citations for the chapter "The status of the law" — it is non-substantive scholarly apparatus with no independent theoretical argument.

   Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary gives the following example: 'Films easily go from the sublime to the ridiculous.'

9. #09

   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'.

   the sublime image of Antigone 'between two deaths' attracts our desire and has the effect, at the same time, of arresting it: fascinated with this image, we hesitate, saying to ourselves: 'we won't go any further'.

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.211

    Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > What shall we do with Oedipus?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Oedipus' topological unlocatability in *Oedipus at Colonus* — his literal impossibility of being 'situated' — enacts his status as a remainder/outcast that is ultimately transformed into a sublime object through the mechanism of the Other's mirror: the lack constitutive of the sublime is restored by showing Oedipus' disappearance only through its effect on the king of Athens, converting the abject leftover into an agalma.

    This moving Oedipus around in an attempt to situate him is repeated once again at the end of the play, this time in a more sublime manner. Here the concern is with the 'topology' of Oedipus' death, which transforms the outcast into a sublime object, into an agalma

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.227

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'terror' as a political-ethical form operates through a forced logic of subjectivation—compelling the subject to choose in a way that simultaneously constitutes and destroys her as subject—revealing a structural homology between radical terror and the ethical Act, and showing that the closest approach to the ethical Act may require the transgression of the universal moral law itself.

    Antigone, once she enters the realm 'between two deaths', appears in all her sublime splendour, but Sygne de Coufontaine carries us still further.

12. #12

    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.

    instead of the splendour of the sublime image, we get a 'grimace of life' (Lacan): Sygne's face twisted by a compulsive tic signalling 'no'.

13. #13

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.265

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "realization of desire" operates through an infinite measure (the logic of negative magnitude and endless metonymy) that can only be articulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement, and she uses the parallel between Kant's postulates and Lacan's ethics to show that the Act (as in Antigone) dissolves the divided subject by transposing it wholly to the side of the object—thereby distinguishing desire from jouissance and opening onto a "modern" ethics adequate to a symbolic order in which the Other's non-existence is itself known.

    while Antigone is a sublime figure, she is not by any means a subject who experiences the feeling of the sublime.

14. #14

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.270

    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.

    As in the case of the sublime, the 'true' infinite (the infinite of the unconditional) is evoked here in the violence done to our imagination by the representation of the totality of a series (of conditions).

15. #15

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.277

    Index

    Theoretical move: This is the index of Zupančič's *Ethics of the Real*, a non-substantive navigational apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any independent theoretical argument.

    sublime, the image/figure 180, 1 99, 214, 233-4, 253, 258 Kant's notion of 67, 1 48-60

16. #16

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.79

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

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

    the availability of photography radically revises the idea of art as a single object consumed under special circumstances and imparting an almost spiritual air of uniqueness

17. #17

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliography/further reading section listing secondary works on ego psychology, object relations, linguistics, feminism, post-structuralism, and queer/gay-lesbian studies; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument.

    Foucault's term for select human beings attempting to make beautiful or sublime works of art out of their lives

18. #18

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.32

    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.

    it does enable us to experience the sublime in everyday life, as the concluding chapter shows... The staying power of capitalism, its resistance to critique, is inextricable from its production of sublimity, which gives it the power to satisfy.

19. #19

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.78

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE > THE P UBLIC OBSTAC LE TO PR I VAC Y

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis, by revealing that the subject's satisfaction is constituted by the obstacle (the public world) rather than by overcoming it, offers a structural counter-logic to capitalism, which systematically misrecognizes the obstacle as merely a barrier to private enjoyment rather than as the object-cause of desire itself.

    The object-cause of desire—that is, the obstacle to the object of desire renders the latter sublime and thus desirable.

20. #20

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.202

    THE TR IP BE YOND NARC I SSI SM

    Theoretical move: Love is theorized as exceeding both narcissism and desire by enacting a traumatic encounter with the other's irreducible singularity, and this disruptive structure is then contrasted with capitalist "romance," which domesticates love into an investment fantasy organized around the ideology of the soul mate as perfect commodity.

    The lover embraces the most unflattering characteristics of the beloved and treats them as sublime indexes of the beloved's worth.

21. #21

    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 sublime gives the subject the capacity for enjoyment by convincing it that its life is not simply a series of empty physical processes.

22. #22

    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... the sublimity of the commodity, its tendency to give social relations a theological hue.

23. #23

    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 sublimity of the commodity for the producer emerges when the commodity realizes the creation of value... a miracle takes place; something emerges out of nothing.

24. #24

    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.

    The commodity form has this distance, and it endows the commodity with its sublimity. Once we traverse the distance and acquire the commodity, we experience the profound disappointment… of the sublime becoming quotidian.

25. #25

    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.

    Both capitalism and Kant bring the sublime into the field of immanence—for capitalism it moves from the king to the commodity and for Kant from the stars above to the moral law within—but neither goes far enough in this revolutionary act.

26. #26

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.245

    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 oriental object is hard-to-reach and thus sublime, which is why it arouses the desire of the orientalist.

27. #27

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.251

    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.

    The commodity doesn't promise a false sublime and then fail to deliver an authentic version. No, its form of promise and failure constitutes the nature of the sublime.

28. #28

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.269

    . THE P SYC HIC C ON STIT U TION OF PR I VATE SPAC E

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it locates the analyst's function in identification with objet a (rather than the Other), marks the objet a's theoretical advance over the object of desire in Seminar X, and frames symptom-enjoyment as a political strategy of resistance to ideological interpellation, while grounding these claims in readings of Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Marx, and Habermas on the public/private distinction.

    The package as a limit gives the product a sublimity that it otherwise doesn't have.

29. #29

    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.

    commodifi cation creates transcendence in a wholly immanent universe, and this is the source of sublimity.

30. #30

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.24

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

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 1907 "compromise formation" theory of the obsessional symptom through a Lacanian lens, the passage argues that religious ritual is structurally identical to neurotic symptom-formation: it is simultaneously repressive and gratifying of primitive drives, and this double function—not wish-fulfillment or superego guilt—is the deepest psychoanalytic account of the stubborn attachment underlying religious practice.

    the worshipper is elevated to a sublime experience of loving union and forgiveness precisely by means of the fixing the attention upon the spectacle of a naked, bleeding body

31. #31

    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.

    The parallel with Kant's philosophy even extends to the notion of the sublime. Sublimation is achieved, Lacan says, when 'the object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing.'

32. #32

    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.

    he puts the emphasis on the way the aura of the beautiful erects a defensive buffer of protection from it. He therefore points to 'beauty rising up, such as it is projected at the extreme limit in order to stop us from going any further toward the heart of the Thing.'

33. #33

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.86

    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.

    War was a great and terrible force, an all-consuming fury that laid waste to cities, a great rolling catastrophe of destruction that feasted on blood.

34. #34

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.97

    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.

    The truly sublime moment, the moment at which the crowd responds by madly waving white handkerchiefs, was when the matador, rather than suddenly jumping to one side to avoid being gored... accomplished the same end by a deft, almost nonchalant swivel of his hips.

35. #35

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.106

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers

    Theoretical move: The philosophical revolution initiated by early Greek thinkers (from Thales onward) constitutes a sacrilegious transgression against the mythopoetic ethos by replacing the unknowable sacred void behind appearances with conceptually knowable first principles — a move that Heidegger reads as the "oblivion of Being" and that the passage reframes as the birth of metaphysical dualism and disenchantment. Socrates's condemnation is reread as the guardians of archaic culture punishing this desecration of the sacred unknown, though Socrates's own profession of ignorance gestures back toward the mythopoetic reverence for unknowable depths.

    men who still revered the silent testimony of the myths to an unknowable reality both sublime and terrible

36. #36

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.108

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers > Woman as Symptom

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Greek misogyny was structurally bound to the archaic experience of the sacred as abyssal and terrifying: woman functioned as the privileged symptom of the unmastered Real—simultaneously origin of life and index of death—such that masculine heroic identity constituted itself precisely through the attempt to dominate and exclude the feminine as the embodiment of formless, unlimited, natural force.

    Nature for the Greeks was a murk of dark and deadly powers. The idea of trying to draw closer to nature would have struck most Greeks as the equivalent of crawling into a barrel filled with scorpions.

37. #37

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.114

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Judaism represents the religion of the signifier par excellence, in that the Jewish covenant structurally enacts the Lacanian logic of das Ding: it installs the human subject in a permanent, unanswerable relation to the unknown desire of the Other, making love and fear inseparable and grounding religious experience in constitutive unknowing rather than imaginary domestication.

    Toward the end of Anxiety, not long after offering a discussion of the sublime effect of the nearly closed eyelids of Buddha statues...

38. #38

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.117

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transition from Greek polytheism to Abrahamic monotheism marks an intensification of the encounter with das Ding: where pagan myth distributed and mitigated the abyssal real across a plurality of anthropomorphic gods, Yahweh concentrates it into a singular, directly addressing Subject who properly inaugurates the Lacanian big Other.

    Only after praying for a moment beneath the sheltering canopy of the tallith, as if gathering himself before venturing a more direct contact with the awful majesty of the divinity, does the Jewish worshipper make bold to enter the sanctuary.

39. #39

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.143

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > The Strangest God

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity performs a radical inversion of the established logic of divinity—power, glory, hiddenness—by presenting a God who appears fully in degradation and weakness, and whose sacrificial logic reverses the direction of sacrifice found in pagan and Jewish traditions, culminating in the commandment of love as the singular reduction of all law.

    What is revealed is the very opposite of everything anyone ever thought about the nature of the divine. In Christ, the strength and majesty of God is inseparable from his shockingly obvious weakness.

40. #40

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.174

    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.

    The resulting regime was a culture of sublime egoism, embodied in legendary figures... Judaism is unquestionably the great religion of the symbolic, the worshipful sublimity of the Word.

41. #41

    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.

42. #42

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.182

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View? > Along the Path of the Fourth Prophet

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Islam, like Christianity before it, enacts a symptomatic defensive closure against the radical opening toward das Ding that its own mystical and ethical traditions intimate: it re-transcendentalizes the divine (al-Ghaib, Allah's ineffability) and amplifies the letter of the Law, thereby countermanding the Jesusian gospel of love and the neighbor, making Islam the strongest rival to Christianity as the religion most tensed between an opening toward das Ding and defenses arrayed against it.

    the ineluctable unknown of al-Ghaib is an indispensable part of the awe-struck posture of submission that is so central to Islam and also arguably the core of the Muslim sense of the sublime.

43. #43

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.206

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > Sex and the Sacred

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the two sides of the religious phenomenon—opening onto das Ding versus symptomatic defense—are gender-relative, mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation: the masculine logic of exception underwrites phallic jouissance and doctrinal/hierarchical religion, while the feminine logic of the non-all underwrites Other jouissance and a radical, kenotic Christianity; this allows a gendered re-reading of das Ding and a reinterpretation of divinity as unknowing, loving, and structurally aligned with the feminine.

    this new assertion of the universal, asserting the sublime unity of the divine and the human alluded to by the mystics, is to be aligned with Lacan's logic of the feminine.

44. #44

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

    <span id="part4.htm_page195"></span>03: THE STAIN OF PLACE

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Laura Oldfield Ford's *Savage Messiah* enacts a counter-hegemonic practice of anachronism and drift against neoliberal biopolitical identity, deploying the spectral residues of defeated subcultures (punk, rave, squatting) as weapons in a struggle over time and space against Restoration London's enclosure of the commons.

    where once there were 'fridge mountains and abandoned factories' out of Tarkovsky and Ballard, a semi-wilderness in the heart of the city

45. #45

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

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

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys Derrida's hauntology as a diagnostic concept for late capitalist cultural pathology, distinguishing two temporal vectors (the no-longer and the not-yet) and arguing that hauntological music's melancholia constitutes a political refusal to accept capitalist realism's closure of futurity.

    No matter what the causes for this temporal pathology are, it is clear that no area of Western culture is immune from them.

46. #46

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

    *<span id="Chapter25.htm_page233"></span>Handsworth Songs* and the English Riots

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses *Handsworth Songs* and Patrick Keiller's Robinson films as cultural-political evidence that neoliberalism's "privatisation of the mind" has decomposed collective political subjectivity since the 1980s, and that struggles are never definitively won but can be (re)constituted — implicitly theorising cultural avant-garde practice as a site of resistance to ideological closure.

    one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavenged spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs.

47. #47

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

    <span id="Chapter23.htm_page214"></span>Postmodern Antiques: *Patience (After Sebald)*

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses Sebald's literary practice and Gee's documentary adaptation to develop a cultural-critical argument about "easy difficulty" as a conservative aesthetic strategy, and pivots to Nolan's cinema to theorize how ontological indeterminacy (rather than mere epistemological unreliability) is produced through the systematic violation of self-imposed rules.

    the landscape turned out to be too energising, its sublime desolation proving to be fallow ground for gloomy psychological interiority.

48. #48

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

    <span id="Chapter18.htm_page172"></span>Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

    Theoretical move: Fisher and Foxx develop a theory of hauntology-adjacent aesthetics through the figure of derelict, overgrown urban space and found-object/collage art-making, arguing that low-fidelity, amateur, and accidental forms of cultural production (Ed Wood, super-8, sampling) can prefigure or surpass avant-garde concepts, while also tracing an affective register of eerie calm and 'radiance' that cuts against media acceleration.

    A vision of longing and nostalgia tinged with fear... The radiance I sometimes refer to occupies this sort of area.

49. #49

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

    <span id="part4.htm_page195"></span>03: THE STAIN OF PLACE

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Laura Ford's *Savage Messiah* is best understood not through the exhausted discourse of psychogeography but through hauntology: the staining of place with intense temporal moments, where the residues of foreclosed collective futures (rave culture, post-1979 hopes) haunt neoliberal London and open possibilities for rupture and collective resistance.

    Here in the burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts, the lost citadels of consumerism one might find the truth, new territories might be opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia.

50. #50

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

    <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that postmodern culture suppresses not darkness but luminosity/the numinous, and that certain minimalist electronic music (Foxx, Budd) succeeds in rendering a haecceitic, depersonalised encounter with the numinous that operates as a release from identity — a melancholic grace that ego psychology actively forecloses.

    encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy?

51. #51

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

    <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

    Theoretical move: Fisher theorizes a specific mode of hauntological aesthetics organized around crackle, functional/background culture, and found audio objects: these practices make temporal dislocation audible and tactile, staging the impossibility of genuine loss (and thus of genuine presence) under digital conditions while evoking anonymous, depersonalized memory.

    the ensemble – at first indistinct shadows in a Turner-esque squall – only gradually emerge from the cloud of crepitation.

52. #52

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

    <span id="Chapter8.htm_page110"></span>London After the Rave: Burial

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Burial's music instantiates hauntology as a sonic practice — mourning lost futures rather than a lost past — distinguishing it from dubstep's foreclosure of spectrality, and positioning the album as an elegy for the rave continuum's crushed utopian promise.

    The effect is as heartbreakingly poignant as the long tracking shot in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) that lingers over sublime objects-become trash.

53. #53

    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.

    a ferocious expressionism, a portal to the outside

54. #54

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

    *<span id="Chapter25.htm_page233"></span>Handsworth Songs* and the English Riots

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the radical Green perspective in Keiller's *Robinson in Ruins* produces a properly dialectical confrontation between capital and ecology as two competing totalities, and that ecological catastrophe furnishes an image of life-after-capitalism that a neoliberalism-colonised political unconscious cannot — connecting this to speculative realist philosophy's contemplation of extinction and Jameson's concept of radical incommensurability between human time and historical duration.

    speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime

55. #55

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.318

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.

    Plato only told us things that remain very easy to handle within the ethics of jouissance because they have allowed us to trace out the barrier that the Beautiful constitutes at the place of the supreme Good.

56. #56

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.86

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > THE EYE AND THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: Lacan positions Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project—from the regulatory function of form in the Phénoménologie de la perception to the unfinished Le Visible et l'invisible—as the philosophical tradition's arrival point for thinking the relation between truth, appearance, and the gaze, thereby setting up the limit that Lacan's own account of the gaze must move beyond.

    setting out from an aesthetic world, it is determined by an end given to being as sovereign good, thus attaining a beauty that is also its limit

57. #57

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.39

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Platonic dialogue *Meno* — specifically its theory of reminiscence and the figure of the slave who 'rediscovers' knowledge — to isolate the function he calls the "subject supposed to know" as a structural presupposition of every question about knowledge, linking this to the problem of the analytic act and the unthought end of the training analysis.

    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.

58. #58

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.192

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex and the Name-of-the-Father function as logical zero-points (analogous to Peano's axiom of zero) that ground the series of natural numbers, and that the "murder of the Father" is the hysterical substitute for rejected castration; he then pivots to show that the superego — originating from the mythical primordial father of *Totem and Taboo* — issues the paradoxical impossible command "Enjoy!", which is the hidden motor of moral conscience.

    If the word sublime can have an ambiguous meaning, it is indeed here. Since moreover it is not for nothing that the last monumental images... of Akhenaton, are images that are not simply castrated but quite bluntly feminine.

59. #59

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.22

    On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > COMPLEMENT

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes his seminar's opening address on love as actually being about 'stupidity' (la bêtise), and argues that analytic discourse, uniquely among discourses, does not flee stupidity but rather approaches and produces it—grounding this in the non-existence of the sexual relationship as the indisputable truth that conditions the discourse.

    Discourses always aim at the least stupidity, at sublime stupidity, for 'sublime' means the highest point of what lies below.

60. #60

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the concept of "stupidity" (la bêtise) as the constitutive condition of analytic discourse and the *encore* drive, while Recanati's intervention develops a Peircean semiotic account of repetition—arguing that repetition is grounded in an irreducible impossibility (the hole between object and representamen), which structurally mirrors Lacan's claim that there is no sexual relationship as the unspeakable truth conditioning analytic discourse.

    Discourse always aims at the least stupidity, what is called sublime stupidity, because that is what sublime means: it is the highest point of what is below.

61. #61

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.117

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation must abandon the register of beautiful, logical sense in favour of a poetic-equivocal resonance grounded in the witticism: it is the capacity to extinguish a symptom—not logical articulation or aesthetic beauty—that validates an interpretation as true, pointing toward a practice founded on economy rather than value.

    the first thing would be to extinguish the notion of the Beautiful. We have nothing beautiful to say.

62. #62

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

    **XIV** > **XX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan completes his close reading of Sophocles' *Antigone*, tracing how the play's dramatic escalation — through the chorus's hymn to mankind, the punishment decree, the appearance of Tiresias, the hymn to Dionysus, and the catastrophic finale — consistently orbits the limit-concept of *Ate*, and how the Greek term *ïmeros enargês* (desire made visible) names the specific quality of desire that erupts at the moment of Antigone's condemnation, linking the ethical stakes of the tragedy to the broader Lacanian analysis of desire and the beautiful.

    I hope that that will take no more than half of my time, and that I will be able to speak afterwards about what Kant has to say on the subject of the beautiful.

63. #63

    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.

    sublime love, 259

64. #64

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

    **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.

    The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire... is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon where it is identified with the experience of beauty - beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth.

65. #65

    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.

    I would like today to ask someone to speak about the beautiful... that something is the definition of the beautiful and the sublime as articulated by Kant.

66. #66

    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.

    something that has been expressed by almost all of them... that there is a certain relationship between beauty and desire... the beautiful has the effect, I would say, of suspending, lowering, disarming desire.

67. #67

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.306

    **XIV** > **XXII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a theory of the beautiful as the signifier of a limit-point between life and death, situating it alongside a shame-function (Aidōs) as barriers to jouissance, before concluding that analysis ends not at the Sovereign Good but at the experienced desire of the analyst — a desire that cannot desire the impossible — and that drive arises as the effect of the signifier's mark on need.

    the beautiful has nothing to do with what is called ideal beauty. It is only on the basis of the apprehension of the beautiful at the very point of the transition between life and death that we can try to reinstate ideal beauty

68. #68

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    **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.

    Is it that which, as a result of the fluctuations of the whole Christian adventure, we have come to call sublime love?

69. #69

    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... The moving side of beauty causes all critical judgment to vacillate, stops analysis, and plunges the different forms involved into a certain confusion or, rather, an essential blindness.

70. #70

    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 direction taken by our research on the subject of the beautiful and, I would add, the sublime. We haven't yet extracted from the Kantian definitions of the sublime all the substance we might.

71. #71

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.304

    **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.

    it being precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man's relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash.

72. #72

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.319

    **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 blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

    doesn't it seem that she is protected by a sort of sublime figure of modesty… She is surely the sublime object

73. #73

    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).

    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.

74. #74

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.291

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine to push beyond the ethical limit marked by Antigone's beauty — the "between two deaths" — arguing that Sygne's sacrifice, which ends in an absolute refusal of meaning (the "no"), goes beyond ancient tragedy's evil-God function and beyond beauty itself, indexing a new form of human tragedy organized around a desire adjacent only to the reference of Sade.

    the endpoint that is respected even by Sade, as I indicated last year - that endpoint being beauty that is unaffected by affronts - is gone beyond here

75. #75

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.20

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.

    I designated this guidepost as beauty insofar as it dresses up - or rather functions as a final barrier to access to - the final or mortal thing

76. #76

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.122

    <span id="page-106-0"></span>A Tragic Fairy Tale of Evolution: Zupancič , ̌ Zapffe, and Other Monsters > Hopeless Monstrosity of Evolution

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that evolution is constitutively monstrous and entropic rather than adaptive and progressive, using Goldschmidt's hopeful monster hypothesis and Gould's punctuated equilibrium to ground a "tragic tale of evolution" in which variation/disruption is primary and selection/ordering is merely a secondary effect — a move that extends Zupančič's and Zapffe's pessimist insights into a post-Darwinian ontology of universal maladaptation.

    Their monsters are defined as negative figures of sublime disproportion and excessive creative power.

77. #77

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > CHAPTER I. The Discipline of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure reason, when operating in the transcendental sphere beyond empirical or intuitive constraints, requires a negative discipline—not to add positive knowledge but to systematically expose and restrain its inherent tendency to overstep the limits of possible experience, producing a "negative code of mental legislation" as the proper method of the Critique.

    it has, in fact, hitherto escaped this humiliation, only because, in presence of its magnificent pretensions and high position, no one could readily suspect it to be capable of substituting fancies for conceptions, and words for things.

78. #78

    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 unity of ends in a moral world (regnum gratiae) grounds teleological unity in nature, making practical reason — not speculative reason — the foundation for the idea of a supreme good and a Primal Being; moral theology must remain immanent, warning against the transcendent misuse that would derive moral laws from the divine will rather than reason's own legislation.

    if practical reason has reached this elevation, and has attained to the conception of a sole Primal Being as the supreme good, it must not, therefore, imagine that it has transcended the empirical conditions of its application

79. #79

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION V. Of the Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God.

    Theoretical move: Kant demonstrates that the cosmological proof of God's existence secretly presupposes the ontological argument it claims to avoid: by grounding necessary existence in the concept of the ens realissimum, it smuggles in an a priori inference from pure conception, revealing the cosmological argument to be a disguised repetition of the ontological one and thus equally illusory.

    Even the idea of eternity, terrible and sublime as it is, as depicted by Haller, does not produce upon the mental vision such a feeling of awe and terror

80. #80

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes a hierarchy—categories, ideas, ideals—in which the Ideal marks the furthest remove from objective reality, functioning not as a constitutive object but as a purely a priori regulative principle that provides reason with a standard for complete determination, serving as archetype and rule rather than achievable reality.

    ideas are still further removed from objective reality than categories; for no phenomenon can ever present them to the human mind in concreto. They contain a certain perfection, attainable by no possible empirical cognition

81. #81

    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 idea of systematic unity functions solely as a regulative principle for the employment of reason in nature; converting it into a constitutive principle by hypostatizing a Supreme Intelligence commits a "perverted reason" (usteron proteron rationis), generating circular arguments and illusions rather than extending genuine cognition.

    we may attribute to this being infinite perfection—a perfection which necessarily transcends that which our knowledge of the order and design in the world authorize us to predicate of it

82. #82

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Polemics.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that Reason must be unconditionally subject to criticism and free polemic, and that while pure reason cannot demonstrate dogmatic propositions (e.g., God's existence, immortality of the soul), it equally cannot be refuted—leaving an irreducible antinomy that, far from undermining reason, is the necessary condition for its self-correction and maturation.

    For what purpose has Providence raised many objects, in which we have the deepest interest, so far above us, that we vainly try to cognize them with certainty, and our powers of mental vision are rather excited than satisfied by the glimpses we may chance to seize?

83. #83

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.56

    chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

    Theoretical move: Against Derrida's phonocentric thesis, Dolar demonstrates that metaphysics harbors a counter-tradition in which the voice—specifically the voice unmoored from logos/text—is figured as dangerous, seductive, and ruinous, establishing a persistent dichotomy of voice and logos that runs from ancient Chinese precepts through Plato and Augustine, and which Lacan inherits rather than invents.

    Up to a point, music is sublime and elevates the spirit; beyond a certain limit, however, it brings about decay

84. #84

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.246

    LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamical sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share the same logic of the limit/exception (foreclosure of existential judgment), and uses this alignment to call for a new, alternative ethics proper to women—an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited"—beyond the superego's logic of exception.

    Kant, speaking of the dynamically sublime, invokes images of threatening rocks, thunderclouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, terrifying images of a mighty and potentially destructive nature that nevertheless have, he says, 'no dominion over us.'

85. #85

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.104

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis fundamentally opposes utilitarianism's ethics by grounding moral law not in reciprocity and shared pleasure but in the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its inaccessible Thing—demonstrating that repressed desire is the cause, not the consequence, of the law, and that true freedom consists in acting contrary to self-interest, even unto death.

    the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its sublime, inaccessible Thing

86. #86

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

    LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Chapter S

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

    Sublime Ferguson on, 98, 1 04 and Kant, 1 18 1 19, 235 236 and sexual differentiation, 213

87. #87

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.109

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

    Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

    the sublime becomes in the nineteenth century a kind of escape from the Gothic overcrowding of the intersubjective world of property relations

88. #88

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: This introductory essay argues that Freud's central theoretical contribution is the concept of erotic and political repetition compulsion — the psyche's conservative drive to re-enact infantile fantasies of perfect love and authority — and that love's pathological character is structurally continuous with transference-love, with the superego's temporary usurpation by the beloved marking the mechanism of falling in love.

    In the 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, say, thunderously assertive

89. #89

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Christianity as a/theistic*

    Theoretical move: Rollins argues that Christianity harbors an irreducible "a/theistic" structure: because all beliefs necessarily fall short of the divine (Hyper-presence), authentic faith must simultaneously affirm and negate its own content, producing a productive tension that is neither agnosticism nor synthesis but the condition of faith itself—a move supported by the apophatic tradition from Pseudo-Dionysius to Anselm.

    Unable to bear its brightness, at once he protects himself by closing his eyes and drawing back from the window. So it is with the soul that is enclosed in the realm of the senses…

90. #90

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *God as hyper-present*

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces "Hyper-presence" as a theological concept that radicalises divine excess beyond both rational understanding AND sensory/experiential grasp, positioning creative worship not as privileged access to God but as a response to God's irreducible overflow — a move that aligns with the apophatic/a/theological tradition (Tillich, Marion, Eckhart).

    God not only overflows and overwhelms our understanding but also overflows and overwhelms our experience.

91. #91

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Iconic God-talk*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "iconic" approach to God-talk — in contrast to idolatry or humanistic irrelevance — preserves transcendence within immanence: the icon is the site where the divine is simultaneously revealed and hidden, and this logic is illustrated by distinguishing lust/indifference from love, where the beloved's face functions as an icon because it both manifests and conceals the other who gazes back.

    Ricky is portrayed as not merely absorbed by Jane's flesh but rather as one who is seeking transcendence within it, loving it while not being enslaved by it

92. #92

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *The un/known God*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that divine transcendence and immanence are not opposing poles but identical: God's radical transcendence arises precisely from an excess of presence ("hypernymity") rather than absence, such that God remains simultaneously revealed and concealed — an "un/known God" that resists full conceptual reduction.

    In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God's incoming blinds our intellect.

93. #93

    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.

    the love object is invariably a 'refound' object—a (never entirely successful) surrogate for the sublime (non)object.

94. #94

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.38

    1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Intimations of Immortality*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real's eruption within the Symbolic constitutes a secular, worldly form of transcendence — not an escape from the world but a deeper immersion in it — that temporarily dissolves sociosymbolic identity and opens access to the subject's singularity precisely through the threat of disintegration, thereby yielding fleeting jouissance and "intimations of immortality."

    the tear in the fabric of the symbolic caused by the real is the hole through which the sublime enters the domain of everyday life

95. #95

    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.

    It no longer contains a little piece of the sublime object... we violate the 'thingness' of things; we deprive them of the sublime kernel that alone can offer us 'real' satisfaction.

96. #96

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.85

    3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Getting Satisfaction*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act (not ceding on one's desire) is the logical point where desire converges with the drive, specifically the death drive, because pursuing desire to its limit necessarily catches up with the drive's proximity to the Thing; this convergence explains why subjective destitution is the radical but not the only expression of Lacanian ethics, and why desire—as the metonymy of being—must be honored to avoid self-betrayal and the contempt that follows from backing away toward the pleasure principle's endless deferral.

    The ethical act can be as 'sublime' as Antigone's 'no' to Creon, but it can also be as 'ordinary' as loving a person everyone else thinks is of the 'wrong' race, religion, gender, or class status

97. #97

    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.

    the sublime, in the Kantian sense at least, is a notion that, by definition, aligns the transcendent with the specter of death, for the mathematical and dynamical sublime are marked by a potentially death-dealing immensity and power.

98. #98

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.210

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

    The truth-event, as well as the process of elaboration that represents fidelity to this event, thus renders 'difference' insignificant by introducing a truth that is universally applicable to everyone concerned.

99. #99

    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 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

100. #100

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.48

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *Carving a Space for Utopian Aspirations*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—rooted in the Real—must be held in productive tension with the Symbolic rather than used to justify a wholesale break from it; genuine transcendence weaves strands of the Real into social existence without fetishizing an "otherworldly beyond," thereby keeping the Symbolic from stagnating while resisting psychic capture.

     We need to be able to transform the 'immortal' energies of the real into a livable (and perhaps at times even a 'sublime') actuality

101. #101

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.83

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Antigone's Act of Defi ance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical status of a Lacanian act depends not merely on its self-destructiveness or transgressive form but on the subject position of its agent (the disempowered) and its orientation toward the Thing/lack; it uses Antigone to demonstrate that genuine singularity, the refusal to cede on one's desire, is what distinguishes the ethical act from its simulacrum.

     what leads Lacan to read Antigone's defiant 'no' to Creon's edict as ethical is not just its self-destructiveness, but also its sublime nobility.

102. #102

     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.

     our increasing inability to invest our surroundings with sublime meaning. This crisis causes us to denounce all hopes for a better future as too utopian.

103. #103

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.272

     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.

     sublime, 24–25 accessibility, 145–47 appearance, 182–84 creativity and, 26 everyday life and, 26 mundane and, 28

104. #104

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.157

     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.

     'any object may be the signifier by means of which that reflection, mirage, or more or less unbearable brilliance we call the beautiful starts to vibrate'

105. #105

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.248

     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.

     beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth . . . Beauty, in other words, ushers us close to the Thing (closer, in fact, than 'the good') while still keeping us at a manageable distance from it.

106. #106

     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.

     They may fall short of the sublime object yet, insofar as they evoke it, they lend meaning to our lives.

107. #107

     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.

     love needs some evidence of transcendence (of immortality, eternity, or infinity) to thrive

108. #108

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.72

     3. *The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "fundamental fantasy" operates at the level of the drive rather than desire, and thus resists the signifier-based talking cure; approaching it triggers aphanisis and the collapse of symbolic identity, generating a nexus between satisfaction and destruction that some critics (Žižek, Edelman) valorize as the liberatory "act of subjective destitution."

     the drive has no patience with deferral: It aims directly at the sublime Thing.

109. #109

     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.

     'real love' is what elevates a regular person into a sublime one—into a worthy ambassador of the Thing—without at the same time erasing everything that is 'human' about him.

110. #110

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.32

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Crisis of Consciousness*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire functions as a defense that maintains a productive distance from jouissance (which the subject is constitutionally incapable of managing), while the drive's surplus enjoyment perpetually destabilizes the subject from within — making the drive a fundamental ontological notion that deepens the crisis of consciousness beyond what Freud's unconscious or Lacan's early linguistic theory alone could account for.

     the sublime Thing of unmediated jouissance... it is—like the Kantian sublime to which it bears a close conceptual relationship—also terrifying, overwhelming, and potentially devouring

111. #111

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.101

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Subject of Truth*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's truth-event — arising from the void (the Lacanian real) of a situation — transforms an ordinary "some-one" into a singular, universal subject of truth (an "immortal"), and maps this structure onto Lacanian concepts of the act, the real, jouissance, and singularity to theorize how the impossible encounter with the real generates unprecedented subjective and ethical possibilities.

     the event introduces a sublime spark of eternity and infinity into an ordinary 'situation' of linear temporality and finitude

112. #112

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.144

     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.

     It makes the sublime appear in the most commonplace of objects. In this sense, sublimation is not merely a matter of artistic innovation but also, on a much more basic level, of inducing the Thing to materialize within the mundane weave of everyday life.

113. #113

     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.

     the sublime functions as a fantasmatic underlining of our passive reconciliation to the oppressive restrictions of the normative order.

114. #114

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.262

     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.

     accessibility of the sublime, 145–47

115. #115

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.29

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *Desire, Drive, Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and the drive are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed: both aim at das Ding as their shared (non)object, but the drive is closer to the bodily real while desire is twice-removed via the signifier. Crucially, even the drive is already quasi-social, shaped by the signifiers of the Other, so the desire/drive distinction is one of relative proximity to the Thing—not nature versus culture.

     it is because the subject cannot have the sublime object that it is driven to look for its luster in more mundane substitutes

116. #116

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.199

     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.

     love as raw passion could be said to represent the kind of innovative energy that I have, in the course of this book, aligned with the possibility for new possibilities.

117. #117

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.187

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Overproximity of the Object*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sublime love-object's overproximity to the Thing triggers anxiety and a defensive resort to fantasy: fantasy's function is to tame the Real dimension of the other by rendering it safely familiar, but in doing so it risks obliterating the very singularity that makes the other desirable.

     the beloved who manages to capture the echo of the sublime object also manages to capture something about the repulsive 'real' Thing that threatens to engulf, devour, subsume, or subjugate.

118. #118

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.215

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *But Still . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Badiou's and Žižek's neo-Marxist universalism by arguing that their attempt to situate universality within event-specific "voids" fails to escape hegemonic power differentials, since the naming of the void itself remains a site of contested authority that systematically excludes feminist, anti-racist, and queer struggles.

     This is where we stumble upon an obvious problem, namely that it is difficult to divorce the notion of universality from the realities of hegemonic power.

119. #119

     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.

     the love object can reflect the radiance of the missing Thing. This is why Badiou is correct in arguing that the truth-event of love alters our lives irrevocably.

120. #120

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.181

     8. *The Sublimity of Love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that romantic love is the paradigmatic site where the lost Thing exerts its greatest force: the beloved object functions as a sublime morsel of the real that promises unmediated jouissance, and the idiosyncratic "language of desire" born from primordial loss can either imprison the subject in narcissistic repetition or open onto genuine love and interpersonal generosity depending on whether the subject holds desire alive or forecloses it.

     an object that seems to contain one of these morsels is no ordinary object, but rather a sublime one that appears to capture something about the very essence of the Thing.

121. #121

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.260

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 8**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 8, listing scholarly references (Kant, Butler, Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Lyotard, etc.) without advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

     Thomas Weiskel...concludes the exact opposite; according to his explanation, the mathematical sublime is associated with 'too little meaning,' while the dynamical sublime is characterized by an excess of the signified.

122. #122

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.254

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 5**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 5, providing bibliographic citations and brief clarifying glosses for claims made in the chapter body. It is largely non-substantive but contains several theoretically load-bearing footnotes connecting anxiety, extimacy, consciousness, negation, and desire to specific Lacanian sources.

     In her article on 'The Nuclear Sublime,' Diacritics (Summer 1984), Frances Ferguson speaks of the modern proliferation of rights as producing this experience of 'consciousness impinging on consciousness.'

123. #123

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: Copjec inverts Ferguson's reading by arguing that utilitarianism does not flee *toward* the sublime but rather *from* the superego's obscene law; the utilitarian erasure of interior lack and repressed desire produces claustrophobia, decays the symbolic/auratic relation, and necessarily generates a fantasmatic colonial Other (the veiled subject) as its symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the jouissance it structurally denies.

     the sublime becomes in the nineteenth century a kind of escape from the Gothic overcrowding of the intersubjective world of property relations.

124. #124

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.137

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > **Breast-Feeding and Freedom**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Enlightenment definition of the free subject necessarily generates anxiety by installing a real "double" (objet petit a) within the symbolic, and that the Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful writes the impossibility of "saying it all," thereby protecting the subject's freedom; the reduction of rights to demands (as in the horizontal/historicist model) eliminates desire and the object-cause of freedom, as illustrated by Frankenstein's catastrophic literalism toward the monster's cry.

     Kant thus made the beautiful the signifier of a limit, a barrier against the real.

125. #125

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.118

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that anxiety, as a signal of the overproximity of objet petit a (a "lack of lack"), cannot be met with interpretation but only with the symbolic's repeated, self-differentiating negation of the real — a negation that must operate without naming, thereby making doubt a defense against the real rather than a mark of uncertainty.

     Freud—like Kant, who gave both respect, a signal of moral law, and terror, a signal of the sublime, a special status—sets anxiety apart from all the other affects

126. #126

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **Sexual Difference and the Superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamically sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share a common logic of the limit/exception—wherein a terrifying force is posited as possible but not existent, converting the father into an impossible Real—and concludes by calling for a new ethics grounded in the "not-all" logic proper to feminine sexuation, rather than the superegoic logic of exception.

     Kant, speaking of the dynamically sublime, invokes images of threatening rocks, thunderclouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, terrifying images of a mighty and potentially destructive nature that nevertheless have, he says, 'no dominion over us.'

127. #127

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 4**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing scholarly citations and brief glosses for key theoretical moves in the chapter, including references to Lacan's "Kant with Sade," extimacy, enunciation vs. statement, fetishism, and perversion — but doing no primary theoretical work itself.

     Frances Ferguson, 'The Nuclear Sublime,' Diacritics (Summer 1984), pp. 4–10; despite my disagreements with it here, this is an exceptionally fine article.

128. #128

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

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

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

     what is revealed in the Water Lilies is a vision of the secret, inner communication of things... bound together by sublime affinities.

129. #129

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.20

     <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 > <span id="ch1.xhtml_p18" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 18. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Monet's Pursuit of the “Enveloppe”

     Theoretical move: By analysing Monet's Series paintings and his pursuit of the 'enveloppe' — the invisible illuminative medium that conditions all appearance — Boothby constructs a philosophical prologue to psychoanalytic theory: the claim that the true subject of any scene is not the object itself but the imperceptible conditions that bring it to presence, establishing an ontological relativity that will underwrite the Lacanian account of the unconscious as an unthought ground of thought.

     with the Cathedrals we realize again how the enveloppe is less an image than a kind of sublime idea.

130. #130

     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="chapter003.html_page_49"></span>The biblical parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bible has a "parallactical structure" — analogous to the wave/particle duality of light — whereby the divine source is never directly captured by its textual manifestations but is instead indicated by the contradictions, fractures, and excesses within the narrative itself, making any totalising reading impossible.

     the conflicting images that we encounter within the Bible continually remind us that the source of this living work is not captured in our petty observations.

131. #131

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.98

     <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 develops a theological argument that the ethical demand of God is immanent to worldly acts of love and solidarity with the suffering—not transcendent authority—and then enacts this via the parable of Judas, whose betrayal is reframed as a destined, self-sacrificial mission necessary for redemption, inverting the usual moral condemnation of the act.

     It is in the face of the suffering child or the flesh of a tortured man that the ethical demand of God is written.

132. #132

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.142

     <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 divine logic of the kingdom of God inverts worldly power structures: God is encountered not at the apex of a celestial hierarchy but in weakness and lowliness (the Incarnation, the hungry stranger, the imprisoned), and this paradoxical powerlessness constitutes a revolutionary force more potent than worldly strength. A retelling of the Prodigal Son is introduced as a narrative vehicle for this theological inversion.

     this revolution is not won through brute strength, but through weakness. The Incarnation is a beautiful representation of this idea, for in the Incarnation we witness the rupturing of the human world by the divine world.

133. #133

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.215

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

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

     bathos— the literary device by which attempts at sublime discourse lapse into ridiculous utterances, producing the rhetorical effect of anticlimax.

134. #134

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.66

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" (which closes off the human within its limits), Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" by demonstrating that human finitude is always already a *failed* finitude—a finitude with a structural hole—whose Lacanian name is objet petit a, and whose topology is best rendered by the Möbius strip: immanence that generates an other side without ever crossing to it.

     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.

135. #135

     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.

     an act of reattaching this significance to the piece of the Real whose veiling has produced the effects of the sublime Meaning.

136. #136

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.190

     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.

     in tragedy, it appears as the je ne sais quoi, the mysterious singularity that endows a particular (tragic) destiny with a sublime radiance

137. #137

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.215

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the phallus functions as the signifier of castration not because anatomy is destiny, but because an anatomical peculiarity comes to incarnate a pre-existing symbolic impasse — the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment — and psychoanalysis, by disclosing this contingent linkage, dethrones the phallus from necessity to contingency and reveals human sexuality as itself the problematic junction of nature and culture.

     which acquires the aura of a sublime Mystery precisely against the background of and because of that symbolic impasse

138. #138

     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.

     That voice will return later in life with every experience of what the eighteenth century called the sublime – in Wagner and Beethoven, say, thunderously assertive, as though they were rendering the thoughts of Jove

139. #139

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

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

     music and the sublime [here](#scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1461)

140. #140

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.117

     **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 sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

     in eroticism also, there is only a small step from the sublime to the ridiculous

141. #141

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for the chapter "Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute," providing citations and brief theoretical asides. The substantive theoretical moves appear only in the footnote annotations (notes 9, 10, 21, 28, 30), not in the citations themselves.

     Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Indianapolis: Hackett 1987, par. 23 … par. 27.

142. #142

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.210

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Hegelian Repetition

     Theoretical move: By mapping Hegel's theory of repetition onto the Möbius strip, Žižek argues that repetition does not merely confirm contingency but dialectically sublates it into necessity, and that this movement only achieves its full force when it reaches "concrete universality"—where the universal appears as one of its own species, exemplified by the rabble as the repressed universal of bourgeois society—thereby marking Hegel's decisive step beyond Kantian transcendentalism.

     You—this empirical person, full of defects—are you, the sublime object of love

143. #143

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

     **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.

     This notion of sexual difference is elaborated through a close reading of Kant's antinomies of pure reason and the concomitant distinction between mathematical and dynamic Sublime.

144. #144

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.69

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the constitutive gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal in Kant is not a limitation but the positive condition of freedom and ethical subjectivity; freedom exists only "in between" the two domains, and the Hegelian Real is precisely this gap itself—rather than the inaccessible noumenal Thing of the Kantian Real—making the Kantian transcendental turn the founding move of philosophy as such.

     This tiny edge distinguishing the two is the edge between the sublime and the horrible: god is sublime for us from our finite perspective, but experienced in itself, god would turn into a mortifying horror.

145. #145

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

     mathematical sublime [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1361), [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1362)

146. #146

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.115

     **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.

     the tension that characterizes the Sublime is immanent to sexuality, it designates its immanent antagonism, it is not a tension between sensuous sexuality and another 'higher' dimension.

147. #147

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.173

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that cyberspace does not dissolve the Symbolic Order but intensifies it, and that the Oedipal structure, castration, and the death drive form a parallax unity rather than a sequence—jouissance is what makes a human animal "properly mortal," while a "downward negation of negation" characterizes modernity as the failure even to fail.

     one is tempted to propose the proto-Kantian notion of the 'cyberspace Sublime' as the magnitude of messages and their circuits which even the greatest effort of my synthetic imagination cannot encompass/comprehend

148. #148

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section, mostly non-substantive, but contains two theoretically load-bearing asides: (1) a distinction between the Kantian sublime and the "nuclear sublime" as a force irrepresentable within phenomenal reality; (2) a claim that psychoanalysis already *is* synthesis (not its opposite); and (3) a characterization of Hegelian reconciliation as an irreducible parallax between triumph and resigned defeat.

     the sublime effect of a nuclear explosion cannot reside in this because there is no moral noumenal domain evoked in a negative way when we witness it. What there is, however, is the idea of a force that is irrepresentable within the frame of our phenomenal reality

149. #149

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.111

     **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: The passage argues that Kant's mathematical/dynamic antinomies and the two modes of the Sublime (mathematical/dynamic) structurally mirror Lacan's formulas of sexuation, and proposes correcting Kant by relocating sexual difference *inside* the Sublime itself rather than between the Sublime and the Beautiful — sex is constitutively sublime because failure and attachment to an impossible-real Thing are definitive of human sexual experience.

     For Lacan, sex is as such sublime, not only in its 'sublimated' (cultivated) form but in its most basic human form: it is sublime because failure and attachment to an impossible-real Thing are constitutive of human sexual experience.

150. #150

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries (I–L) with page cross-references; it carries no independent theoretical argument.

     sublime [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1192), [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1193)

151. #151

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.446

     **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.

     What we have here is the effect of sublime at its purest: the momentary suspension of meaning which transposes the subject into another dimension in which the prison terror has no hold over him.

152. #152

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.18

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the gap between subject and Absolute should not be overcome but transposed into the Absolute itself—following Hegel's move of showing that the subject's lack is simultaneously the lack in the Other (substance's self-disparity), a structure Žižek identifies as the speculative core of both Hegel's idealism and Christianity's kenotic theology, and which he claims is what makes Marxism truly materialist rather than idealist.

     feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which appears: no matter how fragile and deceptive this beauty is at the level of substantial reality, what transpires in/through the moment of Beauty is an Absolute

153. #153

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.25

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

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

     the Absolute is rendered in the Sublime through the very failure to be represented properly

154. #154

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxist/Schelling reproach against Hegel—that he resolves antagonisms only in thought—can be redeployed *in Hegel's favor*: Hegelian dialectics does not dissolve antagonisms but enacts a 'parallax shift' that recognizes antagonisms positively. This is developed via Kant vs. Hegel on the ontological proof, where Hegel's true move is not idealist dissolution of reality into notion but something more subtle about the gap between notion and existence as a mark of finitude.

     The passage from Kant to Hegel is thus much more convoluted than it may appear

155. #155

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.

     there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding

156. #156

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek, via Sohn-Rethel's concept of 'real abstraction', argues that the commodity-form harbours an unconscious of the transcendental subject: the formal categories of pure reason (Kantian a priori) are already at work in the act of commodity exchange before thought arrives at them, making the symbolic order the external 'Other Scene' where thought's form is staged in advance—and this structural misrecognition is the fundamental dimension of ideology.

     This immaterial corporality of the 'body within the body' gives us a precise definition of the sublime object.

157. #157

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

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

     the Sublime is an object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing. This logic of an object which, by its very inadequacy, 'gives body' to the absolute negativity of the Idea

158. #158

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek traces three periods of Lacan's teaching on the death drive to show how, in the third period, das Ding as the 'extimate' traumatic kernel within the symbolic order redefines the death drive as the possibility of 'second death' — the radical annihilation of the symbolic universe itself — and links this to Benjamin's Theses as the unique point where Marxist historiography touches this non-historical kernel.

     the Sadeian fantasy revealed by the fact that in his work his victim is, in a certain sense, indestructible... It is as though... she possessed another body, a body composed of some other substance, one excepted from the vital cycle - a sublime body.

159. #159

     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.

     In Kant's view, the whole movement which brings forth the feeling of the Sublime concerns only our subjective reflection external to the Thing, not the Thing-in-itself.

160. #160

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the Lacanian Real is defined by a *coincidentia oppositorum*: it is simultaneously the hard kernel that resists symbolization AND a pure chimerical void produced by symbolization itself, and this paradoxical structure is mapped through a series of antinomies (fullness/lack, contingency/logical consistency, presupposed/posed) that align with Hegelian dialectics — particularly the identity of Being and Nothingness — while also grounding Schelling's notion of an atemporal unconscious choice as a structural analogue of the Real.

     That is why the real object is a sublime object in a strict Lacanian sense - an object which is just an embodiment of the lack in the Other, in the symbolic order.

161. #161

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that 'going through the fantasy' reveals the subject as the void/lack in the Other—not a hidden substantial Essence—and that appearance deceives precisely by pretending to deceive (dissimulating dissimulation). This is then mapped onto the Hegelian substance/subject distinction, exemplified through Stalinist and Yugoslav ideological deception, before pivoting to the Kantian Beauty/Sublimity dialectic as a matrix for reading Greek, Jewish, and Christian religion.

     In using the couple Beauty/Sublimity Hegel relies, of course, on Kant's Critique of Judgement, where Beauty and Sublimity are opposed along the semantic axes quality-quantity, shaped-shapeless, bounded-boundless

162. #162

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek opposes Stalinist "evolutionary idealism" (grounded in the big Other of history as teleological accountant) to a "creationist materialism" derived from Benjamin and Lacan, showing that the death drive, retroactive signification, and the logic of objet petit a underpin both Benjamin's revolutionary rupture and the Stalinist Communist's "sublime body between the two deaths"; he further distinguishes the classical Master's performative legitimation from the totalitarian Leader's circular self-legitimation through the non-existent "People," arriving at a Lacanian definition of democracy as the structural emptiness of the place of power.

     beyond his ordinary body, a sublime, ethereal mystical body personifying the State

163. #163

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx and Freud share a fundamental homology in their interpretative procedures: both move beyond unmasking hidden content (latent dream-thought / labour-value) to analyze the secret of the *form itself* (dream-work / commodity-form), and that this formal analysis—rather than hermeneutical content-extraction—is the true theoretical contribution common to both, grounding Žižek's project of reading Hegel through Lacan for a theory of ideology.

     the 'quilting point' (le point de capitan: 'upholstery button'), sublime object, surplus-enjoyment

164. #164

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

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

     The wreck of the Titanic therefore functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing.

165. #165

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.222

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Woolf's novels stage a Hegelo-Lacanian ontology in which subjectivity is constituted by irreducible negativity and the interruptive structure of memory, contra Deleuze's notion of Becoming as anti-memory; Clarissa's "flowers of darkness" and Septimus's dissolution together demonstrate that the evacuation of subjective lack (the Deleuzean line of flight) leads not to liberation but to the dead end of pure drive, stripping the subject of the productive reflexivity that iterability and temporal disparity make possible.

     Clarissa's concrete actualization in moments of sublime domesticity is experienced as a continual return from an absolute elsewhere

166. #166

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.166

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

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

     in the pair of the sublime and the gruesome body, the materialist perspective is supposed to be on the side of the gruesome body: the sobering perspective revealing, behind a beautiful and deceptive appearance, the ugly material Real.

167. #167

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

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage from an academic book; it is non-substantive, listing proper names, concepts, and page references without advancing a theoretical argument.

     Burke, Edmund, 227, 228, 233, 237; sublime, 227, 228, 233, 237

168. #168

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.128

     From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus* > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section accompanying a chapter on Kant, Hegel, and Schelling; it contains minimal independent theoretical argumentation, with brief substantive glosses on diabolical evil, the nuclear sublime, psychoanalysis-as-synthesis, and Hegelian reconciliation-as-parallax.

     the effect of the sublime is caused by the discrepancy between the natural violence and the strength of the noumenal moral law: even nature at its strongest cannot adequately represent the noumenal force.

169. #169

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.240

     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.

     the abstract universal [the absolute Idea] which never coincides with itself in anything determinate; on the contrary, its attitude to the particular in general, and therefore to every embodiment also, is purely negative.

170. #170

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.253

     Russell Sbriglia > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical glosses for an extended Lacanian reading of Moby Dick, touching on fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, objet petit a, extimacy, castration, and critiques of object-oriented/flat ontology from a subject-centred perspective.

     Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 206–7 . . . Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 180–81.

171. #171

     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*.

     the sublime object is an 'object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing'; in both cases, we are dealing with 'a miserable little piece of the Real,' a pathetic object that 'fills out the empty place of the Thing as the void'

172. #172

     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.

     sublime, 21, 106, 120n8, 158–59, 215, 227–41, 243n20. See also Burke, Edmund; Hegel. G. W. F.; Kant, Immanuel

173. #173

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.113

     Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian gap between the phenomenal and noumenal is not a limitation to be overcome (as Fichte and Schelling attempt via intellectual intuition) but is itself the condition of freedom and the key to the Hegelian move: Hegel transposes this gap *into* the Absolute itself, so that Being is constitutively incomplete and "subject" names this crack in Being—a move structurally parallel to conceiving Understanding without its Beyond as Reason itself.

     This tiny edge distinguishing the two is the edge between the sublime and the horrible: God is sublime for us from our finite perspective, but experienced in itself, God would turn into a mortifying horror.

174. #174

     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.

     reads Herman Melville's Moby Dick for the ways in which its prescient depiction of Lacanian sublimation renders manifest the latent materialist core of the Hegelian sublime

175. #175

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.268

     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.

     sublime, 21, 106, 120n8, 227, 228, 230–33, 237, 240

176. #176

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.251

     Russell Sbriglia > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a scholarly endnotes section providing bibliographic and argumentative scaffolding for a chapter on Melville, the sublime, and the Hegel-Lacan nexus; it is non-substantive in itself but indexes several load-bearing theoretical concepts (the sublime, fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, Appearance/Suprasensible) as they operate across Kant, Hegel, Žižek, and Lacan.

     the Suprasensible is appearance qua appearance' does not simply mean that the Suprasensible is not a positive entity beyond phenomena, but the inherent power of negativity which makes appearance 'merely an appearance'

177. #177

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.125

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on *The Elephant Man*) advances two key theoretical moves: (1) it revises the Lacanian account of jouissance by arguing that enjoyment is internal to the law rather than requiring transgression, marking a development from Seminar VII to Seminar XX; and (2) it distinguishes objet petit a (constitutive absence) from das Ding (sublime Thing) to argue that Merrick functions as an impossible object rather than a sublime presence, while deploying the Hegelian Beautiful Soul to critique the speculative identity of noble and base attitudes toward Merrick.

     he does not function as a figure of the sublime, though this is what we might expect given his extreme disfigurement. For Lynch, unlike a sublime figure, Merrick does not shatter the field of representation.

178. #178

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.222

     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.

     Comedy materializes and gives a body to what can otherwise appear as an unspeakable, infinite Mystery of the other scene... Comedy needs and plays upon the duality of appearance and truth, of surface and depth.

179. #179

     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.

     he is no longer himself; in the mask, he brings to life the (universal) essence he represents... he is there to represent the essence, has to make us forget his actual self, and see only the sublime character as essence.

180. #180

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.215

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's insistence on the phallus as the *signifier* of castration—rather than its anatomical embodiment—transforms phallic necessity into contingency: by spelling out the link between an anatomical peculiarity and the symbolic deadlock (the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment), psychoanalysis moves the phallus from the impossible-necessary register into the contingent, thereby dethroning it and exposing sexual difference as defined not by presence/absence of castration but by the mode of relation to its universal signifier.

     which acquires the aura of a sublime Mystery precisely against the background of and because of that symbolic impasse

181. #181

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.190

     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.

     in tragedy it appears as the je ne sais quoi, the mysterious singularity that endows a particular (tragic) destiny with a sublime radiance

182. #182

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.150

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject of the unconscious has the structure of a Kierkegaardian apostle—a pure formal function of impersonal Truth rather than an expression of ego or id—and that the "Thing from Inner Space" (which modern art strains toward beyond the pleasure principle) is not the Kantian Thing-in-itself but rather the site of the direct inscription of subjectivity into reality, emerging through fantasy-staging of what is "actually" a rational phenomenon.

     In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own failure, insofar as it refers to the impossible Things.

183. #183

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.111

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Comedy of Incarnation

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the standard critique of fetishism (which reduces the fetish to a contingent object filling an empty structural place) misses the "Hegelian performative" dimension whereby the big Other's empty place is constitutively correlated with an excessive partial object — castration names not merely the gap between element and empty place, but the very emergence of that place through a cut; this logic extends to a critique of the philosophy of finitude (including a Lacanian variant), which is countered by the obscene immortality of objet petit a / death drive as the true materialist infinite.

     there is something sublime in exclaiming 'Look! The world spirit itself is riding a horse there!', but also something inherently comical

184. #184

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.166

     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.

     The Kantian sublime itself is grounded in this gap: it is the very experience of the impotence and nullity of man (as a part of nature) when he is exposed to a powerful display of natural forces that evokes, in a negative way, his greatness as a noumenal ethical subject.

185. #185

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.388

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

     Theoretical move: This notes section makes several concentrated theoretical moves: it maps the three meanings of "subject" onto the RSI triad; it redefines Lacan's anti-philosophy as an infinite (Kantian) judgment rather than a simple negation of philosophy; it traces the shift in Lacan's conception of the Real from extimate Thing to inherent inconsistency of the Symbolic; and it reads Messiaen's musical structure as isomorphic with Lacan's four discourse-elements, thereby illustrating the elementary signifying structure.

     in the Kantian dialectic of the Sublime, there is no positive Beyond whose phenomenal representation fails: there is nothing 'beyond,' the 'Beyond' is only the void of the impossibility/failure of its own representation

186. #186

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.211

     **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is reframed not as an ethical evasion of the other but as the very condition of an authentic ethical encounter: by imagining the threatening real dimension of the other, the fantasizing subject simultaneously exposes its own real kernel to the other's gaze, making fantasy the site where desire's safe distance collapses and genuine vulnerability becomes possible. Wenders's cinema of intersection stages this structure by juxtaposing worlds of desire and fantasy.

     The position of desire respects the gaze and accords it a sublime status.

187. #187

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

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

     Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

     the first protective barrier is the good; the second is the beautiful or the sublime. This is where the intimate link between sublime beauty and evil (or danger) originally springs from.

188. #188

     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.

     The product of sublimation does not need to be sublime. It can even be anything but sublime (in the aesthetic meaning of the word), but we are still dealing with sublimation... Here, the sublime object is the mask of some unrepresentable Void.

189. #189

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.175

     <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 classical tragic paradigm is perhaps best defined in terms of what Kant conceptualizes with the notion of the sublime. Here, the Real is situated beyond the realm of the sensible (nature), but can be seen, or 'read,' in the resistance of the sensible or of matter, its inflections, its suffering.

190. #190

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.55

     **Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex** > *objet a*

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically theorizes the *objet petit a* as the object-cause of desire — constitutively absent, irreducible to signification, and functioning as the remainder/gap that both inaugurates subjectivity through loss and sustains desire by perpetually eluding satisfaction, thereby distinguishing it sharply from any empirical object of desire.

     the object-cause of desire–that is, the obstacle to the object of desire–renders the latter sublime and thus desirable.

191. #191

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Contradiction** > **Das Ding**

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes Das Ding as the inaccessible core of the mother's desire (an ominous unknown) from objet petit a, contrasting the Thing as an inescapable sublime presence in the visual field against objet petit a as a constitutive absence irreducible to that field.

     The sublime Thing is an inescapable presence in the visual field.

192. #192

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Sublime**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that while capitalism ostensibly operates under a logic of self-interest and utility, the commodity itself generates a paradoxical "capitalist sublime" that depends on a break from utility — thereby inverting Kant's sublime (which bridges self-transcendence to morality) into an immanent, fetishistic form that nonetheless captures subjects through the commodity's inutility.

     The sublime marks the point at which the subject abandons its self-interest, and capitalism refuses to recognize any such point.

193. #193

     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>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.

     taking him as embodying for her the sublime Thing

194. #194

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.6

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a biographical and intellectual-historical introduction to Žižek's career, outlining his trajectory from Yugoslav academia through his embrace of Lacan and Hegel to global theoretical prominence; it is non-substantive in terms of direct theoretical argument.

     Slavoj Žižek burst onto the global theoretical scene with his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in 1989.

195. #195

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.251

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly endnotes section for a chapter on Žižek's interpretation of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," providing bibliographic citations for key arguments about the Kant-Sade relationship, Lacan's ethics, desire, and perversion — it is primarily reference material but indexes the theoretical terrain of the chapter.

     Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)

196. #196

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.238

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: Nobus argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" constitutes the impossible-yet-central nucleus of Žižek's entire intellectual project, and that a rigorous critique of Žižek must reconstruct the coherence of his scattered readings of that essay through a centripetal force mirroring the centrifugal force required to read Lacan's text itself.

     From Žižek's seminal 1989 monograph The Sublime Object of Ideology to his most recent major theoretical interventions

197. #197

     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.

     it makes the sublime appear in the most commonplace of objects; it prompts the Thing's aura to materialize within the fabric of daily life

198. #198

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.270

     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.

     I am interested in the sublime aspects of the objet a rather than solely in its 'uncanny,' even 'horrifying' dimensions.

199. #199

     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."

     beauty rising up such as it is projected at the extreme limit in order to stop us from going any further toward the heart of the Thing.

200. #200

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

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction to *Žižek Responds!*, providing bibliographic references for secondary literature on Žižek and brief editorial glosses on key theoretical commitments (ideology's obscene underside, antagonism, theory's belatedness); it is primarily citational apparatus rather than an original theoretical argument.

     Slavoj Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 45.

201. #201

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.82

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **THE FRENCH INCLUSION**

     Theoretical move: Authentic universality is grounded in a shared, constitutive non-belonging that can never be fully realized; the French Revolution's Terror arose when this universality was betrayed by the drive toward total inclusion and universal belonging, which inevitably produces despotism and demands an enemy, thereby destroying universality itself.

     Naming the king an enemy rather than just a criminal reveals that the universality of the Revolution was not operating here like an actual universal.

202. #202

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.201

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **UNIVERSALISM OR DEATH**

     Theoretical move: The climate crisis is theorized as the structuring absence within every social order, making it the privileged site for recognizing universality; particularist epistemology and capitalism's investment in particularity are exposed as constitutively inadequate to confront it, demanding instead a universalist politics and epistemology grounded in shared lack rather than shared properties.

     The disaster film provides an occasion for Hollywood to turn massive destruction into a spectacle for entertainment. In this sense, we should be suspicious of it, since this is the formula that Walter Benjamin uses to define the aesthetics of fascism.

203. #203

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.141

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's position is stronger than Badiou's: whereas for Badiou the impossibility of the Event is a consequence of the law of ontological discourse, for Lacan being itself is inseparable from its constitutive gap/impossibility (the "minus-one"), so that the wandering excess is not the Real of being but its symptom—a distinction that grounds a non-romantic, formalizing ethics of the Real and a specific theory of the subject as the name of the gap in discourse.

     There is nothing beautiful, sublime, or authentic about the Real.

204. #204

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.88

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-81-0"></span>Realism in Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: Zupančič develops a Lacanian "realism of consequences" against both naïve realism and Meillassoux's correlationism, arguing that the Real is constituted not by matter or mathematical continuity but by the cut that discourse makes in nature—a cut whose reality is indexed by the impossible, i.e., the limit of consistency that discourse encounters. True materialism is grounded in contradiction and split, not in the primacy of matter.

     All Hegel said about the sublime spectacle that was revealed to him is reported to have been: Es ist so (It is so; it is what it is).

205. #205

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.130

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

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

     no less mediated by the window of [our] fantasy than what appears as sublime.

206. #206

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.129

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze converge in treating the death drive as a foundational "crack" around which drives congregate, but diverge crucially: where Deleuze collapses the tripartite topology (original negativity / surplus-enjoyment / signifiers) into a single dynamic movement of pure Difference, Lacan preserves the Real as an irreducible third term whose effect is the subject itself — making subjectivation the very index of an irreducible Real rather than an obstacle to realism.

     in the pair of the sublime and the gruesome body, the materialist perspective is supposed to be on the side of the gruesome body: the sobering perspective revealing, behind a beautiful and deceptive appearance, the ugly material Real.

207. #207

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.143

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's "para-ontology" locates impossibility as internal to being itself (not external as in Badiou's Event), such that an Event is a disjunction of the necessary and the impossible rather than an interruption from elsewhere—and that love, as the paradigm case of the Event, produces a comic coincidence-of-split that generates a "new signifier" capable of sustaining contingency without forcing necessity.

     'real love' is not the love that I would call sublime, the love in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or 'blinded' by an abstract dimension of the loved object

208. #208

     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.

     Cultural treasures – Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica, Pink Floyd's inflatable pig – are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact.