Surplus-jouissance

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (481)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.29

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life

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

   Lacanian psychoanalytic theory contains a notion that captures this Kantian conception of pure form very well: plus-de-jouir, or surplus-enjoyment.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.52

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's transcendental subject occupies the structural position of Lacan's objet petit a — neither phenomenal nor noumenal, extimate to both subject and Other — and that the ethical subject emerges precisely from the coincidence of a lack in the subject (forced choice) and a lack in the Other (no Other of the Other), making freedom the inescapable ground of both freedom and unfreedom.

   we encounter a certain surplus of freedom - or, to put it differently, we encounter a lack in the Other, the lack which manifests itself in the fact that the Gesinnung is an object of choice.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

   The Lie > The Sadeian trap

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Sadeian trap" arises when a subject hides behind a pre-given, ready-made duty to justify (and disavow responsibility for) the surplus-enjoyment derived from his actions — a perverse structure — and that escaping this trap requires recognizing that the ethical subject is not the agent but the agens of the universal, constituting the Law rather than merely applying it.

   the subject attributes to the Other ( to Duty or to the Law) the surplus-enjoyment he derives from his actions

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.128

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

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

   what is at stake for the pervert is not finding enjoyment for himself, but making the Other enjoy, completing the Other by supplying the surplusenjoyment she lacks.

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.158

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of 'respect' (Achtung) is structurally homologous to Lacan's concept of anxiety: both are 'objective' affects without a cause but with an object (objet petit a), both arise from a 'lack that comes to lack' (le manque vient à manquer), and both mark the subject's encounter with what exceeds the order of representation — thereby aligning Kantian drive theory with Lacanian drive theory avant la lettre.

   anxiety is the way the subject experiences the drive, the surplus-satisfaction produced in its circuit - that part of satisfaction that the drive finds 'beyond' the subject.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.195

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that guilt is constituted by the moment when the desire of the Other becomes the subject's own desire (finding surplus-enjoyment in objective necessity), and that Oedipus escapes guilt precisely because his desire is stolen from him from the outset — he is 'robbed of his desire' and given over to the social order in exchange, a structural theft that distinguishes his tragedy from those of Hamlet, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra.

   the instant when the subject takes advantage of what is 'objectively necessary', and finds his surplus-enjoyment therein.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.203

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The death of the Thing

   Theoretical move: Against Coux's reading of Oedipus as failed initiation due to insufficient matricide, Zupančič argues that Oedipus enacts the *most radical* killing of the Thing precisely by naming it (word over force), and that the objet petit a is not a pre-symbolic remainder but the remainder generated by the signifier's own self-referential dynamics — the bone of spirit itself — so that tragedy originates from within fully accomplished symbolization, not from its failure.

   symbolization, in its very perfection and completeness, produces a surplus which 'undermines' it from within by engendering impasses

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.213

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx's riddle exemplifies "knowledge as truth" — a word wagered without guarantee from the Other — and that this act is not transgression but an act of creation that founds a new symbolic order, rendering ethics possible as fidelity to an inaugurating event.

   to illustrate this side of knowledge as it is linked to enjoyment (or, more precisely, to 'surplus-enjoyment', the Lacanian variation on Marx's 'surplus-value')

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.254

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and drive are not opposed but sequentially related: pure desire is the limit-moment at which the subject's fantasy-support appears within its own frame and is sacrificed, marking a torsion from the register of desire into the register of the drive—a passage that constitutes the telos of analytic experience beyond the traversal of fundamental fantasy.

   the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder/surplus of jouissance.

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.278

    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.

    surplus-enjoyment 1 7, 58, 60, 1 15, 182, 1 86, 200-201, 241

11. #11

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.22

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-19-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-1) > **Formalism in Marxism**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that "form" is the central methodological category of Marxism, positioning Marx as a formalist thinker whose attention to the concrete forms of social relations (commodity form, value forms, genre forms) constitutes a politically consequential methodology that bridges aesthetics and political economy—thereby grounding a Marxist film theory.

    Marx added the elaboration of how these apparently subjective experiences constitute the objective system of metaphysics under capitalism, with its orientation toward the future and its deferral of reckoning.

12. #12

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.29

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-19-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-1) > **Marx's norms, Marx's utopian maps**

    Theoretical move: Marx's materialism is not merely descriptive ideology-critique but also projective and normative: immanent critique of capitalism necessarily gestures toward a utopian outside (the inexistent), making Marxism both a theory of determination and a practice of exceeding that determination toward social transformation.

    things will be better when the regime of surplus value does not organize the production of material life itself

13. #13

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.42

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

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Marx's concept of the mode of production as a philosophical-historical schema that relativizes capitalism—exposing its contradictions between abstract and concrete freedom—in order to reveal it as historically contingent and politically transformable, rather than natural or inevitable.

    the basic principle of this mode of production, the accumulation of surplus value.

14. #14

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.116

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-111-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-2) and [Fight Club](#page-5-2)

    Theoretical move: The passage uses *Fight Club*'s opening credit sequence as a formal emblem of the core Marxist problem: the contradiction between aesthetic form and industrial economic production cannot be bypassed but must be crossed like a "scratch," and the film's own cult status and commercial failure-turned-success encapsulate that contradiction in material history.

    More than six million DVD copies sold between 2000 and 2010 . . . making it one of Fox's largest selling home-media items ever

15. #15

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.119

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-111-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-2) and [Fight Club](#page-5-2)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* comprehensively mediates the contradictory capitalist mode of production and performs a Marxist theoretical practice of its own, revealing that cinematic form—not merely plot content—is the primary site through which ideological and political contradictions are worked through, and that transformation of the mode of production necessarily entails transformation of the medium itself.

    a film can be produced for profit but acquire cult status, thereby becoming a tactic of popular meaning-making, a map of social struggle, a prop for new affiliations

16. #16

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.129

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's representation of feminization does not signal reactionary masculinism but rather a positive valorization of social reproduction as the necessary substrate for transforming the capitalist mode of production; and that the film's ideology operates at the level of practice (what characters do) rather than speech (what they say), following the Althusserian/Žižekian definition of ideology.

    a domestic product for cleaning, through cooking, and from the surplus of social reproduction (liposuctioned fat).

17. #17

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.141

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

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

    Fight Club presents Tyler as an alternate personality for Jack as he copes with the personal symptoms—insomnia and numbness—of social traumas of alienation, meaninglessness, the logic of surplus accumulation

18. #18

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.158

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's cinematographic innovations—particularly the IKEA catalog sequence, reverse-tracking CGI shots, and multi-camera construction—formally enact Marxist analytical procedure by foregrounding labor, mediation, and the gap between commodity and its conditions of production, making the film's style itself a materialization of Marxist critique.

    All of these junctures at which more-than-average labor was exerted in the making of the film culminate in some truly memorable and innovative sequences, which in turn deepen the film's mediation of the capitalist mode of production.

19. #19

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud synthesizes competing theories of dream formation by subordinating them to his unified framework of wish-fulfilment and dream-work, then advances the argument by distinguishing the preconscious stream of thought from the unconscious wish that energizes it—establishing that the most complex mental operations occur without consciousness, and that regression and the primary process are the hallmarks of the dream-work proper.

    it then receives a 'surplus of energy'

20. #20

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.18

    P SYC HOANALYSI S OF C APITALI SM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's incompleteness—the very gaps it produces—opens the space for its psychoanalysis and critique, and that previous critical approaches (including Marx's egalitarian critique of surplus value) have been insufficient precisely because they subordinate psychoanalytic insight to a pre-given political verdict rather than letting the analysis of psychic satisfaction drive the critique.

    in the act of laboring, workers don't just produce enough to sustain themselves but rather an excess, and the capitalist capitalizes on this excess in the form of surplus value, which translates into profit.

21. #21

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.28

    FINDIN G SATI SFAC TION UN SATI SF YIN G

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's power resides not in repression or inequality but in its structural production of unrecognized satisfaction through the logic of the promise, and that a genuinely revolutionary act consists in recognizing this immanent satisfaction rather than investing in the promissory fantasy of a better future—a move enabled by the later Freud's shift from repression to repetition and the death drive.

    If we recognized that we obtained satisfaction from the failure to obtain the perfect commodity rather than from a wholly successful purchase, we would be freed from the psychic appeal of capitalism.

22. #22

    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.

    Capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism. No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction.

23. #23

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.34

    MOSE S AND THE PROPHETS

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's staying power derives not from its socioeconomic flexibility but from a psychic structure that mirrors the logic of desire: it promises an ultimate satisfaction through accumulation while structurally ensuring that satisfaction can never be reached, thereby allowing the subject to perpetuate enjoyment through the very failure to realize desire.

    In each case, the failure to accumulate enough is inscribed in the system and is the source of the satisfaction that the system offers.

24. #24

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.39

    THE DI V I SION OF THE OBJEC T

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's psychic appeal is not grounded in human nature but in the alienation from nature produced by the signifier: because signification introduces a constitutive gap between signifier and signified, subjects are structurally oriented around lack and the impossible search for a satisfying object, and capitalism exploits this by presenting the commodity as a contingent — rather than necessary — remedy for the absence that signification installs at the heart of desire.

    We produce or consume additional commodities in order to realize our desire definitively, but we never achieve this realization. In the same way, we use other signifi ers to define a signifier, but they can never do so authoritatively.

25. #25

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.48

    THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist accumulation operates by exploiting the subject's constitutive misrecognition of its own satisfaction: because satisfaction is located in the act of desiring (rooted in loss) rather than in the object obtained, the subject endlessly pursues objects via the fantasy of the Other's desire, and capitalism recruits this structural failure as its engine.

    One continues to accumulate more capital and more objects, but no amount of accumulation can bring satisfaction.

26. #26

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.52

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

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

    capitalism manages to satisfy the subject's unconscious drive to fail

27. #27

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.58

    FAN TA SIZ IN G THE E ND

    Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the constitutive unknowability of the Other's desire by supplying fantasy as both its mystification and its apparent solution—the commodity form oscillates between presenting the Other's desire as enigmatic and as answerable, thereby binding the subject to the capitalist order while keeping belonging permanently deferred.

    The fantasy constantly presents the possibility of full belonging to the subject, but, at the same time, the fantasy must remain an unrealized fantasy.

28. #28

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.62

    FR E E D FROM THE OTHE R'S DE SIR E

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's structural function is not the liberation of desire but its enslavement to the fantasy of the Other's desire, and that genuine freedom—and the real critique of capitalism—lies not in more desire (contra Deleuze/Guattari) but in recognizing that the barrier IS what the subject desires, i.e., that the pleasure principle serves the death drive and the subject seeks loss, not accumulation.

    I must have the new commodity that everyone else must have simply because it is what everyone else must have: this commodity promises a successful answer to the Other's desire. It embodies the promise of fantasy itself.

29. #29

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

    Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

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

    Capitalism allows us to believe that we find satisfaction in what we successfully accumulate and not in our unending pursuit of failure

30. #30

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.87

    THE IM AGE OF NEU TR ALIT Y

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

    Capitalism does not permit anyone to avoid the dissatisfaction that inheres in a universe based on the demand for ever increasing accumulation.

31. #31

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.89

    LIFE DUR IN G WARTIME

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

    the pursuit of self-interest remains a pure presupposition of Smith's philosophy... Once Smith adopts this starting point, the justification for capitalism necessarily follows.

32. #32

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.99

    LIFE DUR IN G WARTIME > SE E IN G TH AT ONE SE E S > O C C UPY THE C R I SI S

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist crises function analogously to the encounter with the gaze in the visual field: they momentarily expose capitalism's non-existence as a natural order, revealing it as a political decision sustained by subjective distortion—an exposure that is structurally fleeting but politically decisive.

    the postcrisis world was 'short on cash and awash with surplus houses, surplus offices and shopping malls, surplus productive capacity and even more surplus labour than before.'

33. #33

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.106

    SAC R IFIC E BEC OMIN G SEC UL AR

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

    Without the act of sacrifi ce, no capitalist would turn a profi t, and no one would fi nd the purchase of a commodity satisfying.

34. #34

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.109

    EV IL , BE THOU M Y G O OD

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

    workers exchange their labor time for a wage... exploitation enters into the relationship through the workers' production of surplus value... During the production of surplus value, workers sacrifi ce themselves for the profi t of the capitalist.

35. #35

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.111

    C ONDITION S OF THE WOR K IN G C L A SS IN THE C ON G O

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that worker sacrifice is not a contingent feature but the structural condition of possibility for capitalist value and enjoyment: exploitation cannot be separated from the commodity form because sacrifice is the very source of value, and capitalism specifically enables the subject to fetishistically disavow the sacrifice that grounds their enjoyment.

    this immiseration—the sacrifi ce of workers' lives—also provides the satisfaction that keeps the psychic investment in the capitalist system going. If capitalism could produce more effi ciently without the workers' sacrifi ce, it would not do so.

36. #36

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.121

    C ONDITION S OF THE WOR K IN G C L A SS IN THE C ON G O > IN V E N TIN G FOR MS OF WA STE

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's psychic motor is not utility but sacrificial jouissance: the modern subject's enjoyment is structured through fetishistic disavowal of sacrifice, and Keynes's discovery that wasteful spending outperforms productive spending confirms that capitalism is organised around the pleasure of useless expenditure rather than need-satisfaction, dismantling the ideological myth of utility from within.

    They prefer to sell Cheetos to bananas because there is more sacrifice—and thus more profit—in the former.

37. #37

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.123

    C ONDITION S OF THE WOR K IN G C L A SS IN THE C ON G O > IN V E N TIN G FOR MS OF WA STE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist ideology rests on a vitalist, tautological logic (Ricardo) that naturalises desire and cannot account for sacrifice; the true test of capitalism is not whether it meets needs but whether it can avow the sacrificial structure it requires to produce satisfaction — a test it fails, opening the door to Bataille's critique.

    The test is rather whether or not capitalism can permit the avowal of the satisfaction that it produces.

38. #38

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.127

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

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

    Every act that we perform in the capitalist system involves us in forms of sacrifice, even if the system renders them invisible. Instead of flying a plane into a building, all one need do to experience the most violent sacrifice is to buy a new iPhone.

39. #39

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.133

    THE P OV E RT Y OF FR E E D OM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism installs the market as a new form of the big Other — a substitute for God — that paradoxically relieves subjects of the burden of freedom by directing their desire, thereby revealing that capitalist freedom is ideologically self-undermining: its most zealous defenders (von Mises, Hayek) inadvertently celebrate capitalism's capacity to rescue subjects from the very freedom they champion.

    capitalism furnishes the freedom to accumulate but determines how that accumulation will take place

40. #40

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.152

    A More Tolerable Infi nity

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Hegel's concept of the "true infinite" (self-limiting, circular) constitutes a more radical anticapitalist critique than Marx's, because it poses an internal limit that capitalism—structurally committed to the "bad infinite" of endless expansion—cannot subsume; this true infinite shares the structure of the psychoanalytic subject.

    The system reproduces itself through an investment in a future that it cannot squarely face… capitalism subsists on nothing but newness.

41. #41

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.157

    A More Tolerable Infi nity > JOUIR S AN S E N T R AV E S

    Theoretical move: Capitalism is structurally committed to the bad infinite — an endless expansion without limit or endpoint — and this structure provides psychic relief from the true infinite by displacing desire onto a perpetually deferred future satisfaction, making the limitlessness of desire the ideological engine of limitless production and consumption.

    Capitalism has the capacity to transform an apparently limited desire into an infi nite one... the consumer can choose from regular chips, wavy chips, sour cream and onion chips, wavy sour cream and onion chips, and so on.

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.159

    THE DIFFIC ULTIE S OF H APPINE SS

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that rational choice theory, behavioral economics, and happiness economics all remain trapped within the Hegelian "bad infinite" — an endless striving for more without internal limit — and that capitalism's attachment to this bad infinite can only be overcome by reconceiving nature not as an external limit (Scylla of finitude) nor as a site of infinite possibility (Charybdis of the bad infinite), but as the internal limit of the social order, which alone can ground a true infinite and genuine satisfaction.

    All of Don's advertising campaigns create an image of happiness that the commodity being sold promises to bring to the consumer, and they include the idea of the infi nite expansion of this happiness.

43. #43

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.173

    Th e Ends of Capitalism

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's privileging of ends over means structurally deflects the subject's attention from the lost object (cause of desire) to empirical objects of desire, producing constitutive dissatisfaction that fuels consumption; psychoanalysis wages an asymmetric counter-movement by restoring the lost object to its central position, thereby reconciling the subject with partial satisfaction and rendering it incapable of capitalist accumulation.

    capitalism relies on the dissatisfaction that follows from obtaining the object of desire to stimulate consumption. If the commodity proves disappointing, the subject will have to buy another, more improved version.

44. #44

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.177

    THE R EC O GNITION OF L AB OR

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's insistence on the final cause (teleological purposiveness) constitutes a systematic disavowal of the means of labor and of unconscious repetition, positioning capitalism as an anachronistic philosophical regime that obscures the satisfaction immanent in pure means—a satisfaction structurally homologous to unconscious desire.

    Without the final cause, capitalism would lose itself in the satisfaction of the pure means and fail to actualize all the potential value that it unleashes.

45. #45

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.180

    THE V IRT UE S OF IN TE R RUP TION

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

    Within the capitalist mode of production, the interruption of productivity becomes a new way of creating surplus value.

46. #46

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

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

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

    The nonproductivity of the revolts was the source of new value for capitalist society.

47. #47

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.192

    LOV E FOR SALE

    Theoretical move: Capitalism transforms love — an inherently traumatic encounter that disrupts the subject — into romance, a commodified and domesticated version of love available for purchase. The dating service serves as the paradigm and synecdoche for this ideological operation: it packages love as a commodity by eliminating its traumatic unpredictability, revealing how capitalism contains love's disruptiveness while exploiting its affective power to sustain subject investment in capitalist relations.

    Like the typical commodity, love always keeps the subject coming back for more... the subject experiences the dissatisfaction associated with having the commodity and seeks a new form of the commodity

48. #48

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.199

    THE TR E E S OF ROM AN C E AND THE FOR E ST OF LOV E

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the distinction between love and romance maps onto the distinction between confronting the lost object (self-divided, non-identical) and the commodity logic of desire/fantasy; romance is capitalism's mechanism for keeping love safe by converting the beloved's self-division into an identifiable, acquirable trait, thereby preventing the traumatic encounter that genuine love requires.

    the equally compelling fantasy of quantity that drives this activity. One believes that accumulating a vast quantity of romantic objects will unlock the secret of the ultimate satisfaction, which is exactly the fantasy capitalism proffers.

49. #49

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.207

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

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

    Within the dictates of capitalism, love becomes profitable even when we don't enter it looking for a profit. The logic of capitalism permeates the disruptiveness of love and transforms it into romance.

50. #50

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.214

    THE C APITALI ST SINE QUA N ON

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's psychic appeal lies not in solving scarcity but in deploying scarcity ideologically to shield subjects from confronting the more fundamentally traumatic excess (jouissance/abundance), inverting the usual association of trauma with lack and grounding a psychoanalytic critique of capitalist ideology.

    All of Freud's patients experienced an overabundance of sexual stimulus that they couldn't integrate into their psychic lives.

51. #51

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.218

    TO O MU C H I S R E ALLY TO O MU C H

    Theoretical move: Scarcity and abundance are not economic facts but psychic structures isomorphic with fantasy: the subject constitutively requires loss in order to achieve satisfaction, which is why capitalism (like fantasy) stages an illusory future abundance while the real enjoyment occurs in the struggle with scarcity, and why every attempt to deliver pure abundance—utopian or otherwise—is self-defeating.

    We find unconscious satisfaction in scarcity, while our conscious thoughts focus on abundance... it is actually the struggle with scarcity that appeals to us.

52. #52

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.222

    THE DIFFIC ULTIE S OF SUSTAININ G SC ARC IT Y

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that economic crises are not merely structural failures of capitalism but expressions of the subject's unconscious investment in sustaining scarcity: as capitalism approaches abundance, subjects recoil because desire depends on the inaccessibility of the lost object, and this psychic necessity of loss structurally reproduces scarcity, thereby propping up capitalism itself.

    We retreat into scarcity to avoid the recognition that we require the object to be lost in order to enjoy it.

53. #53

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.228

    THE NEW GR AV E DIG GE R S

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's persistence is sustained not by ideology or class consciousness but by a psychic investment in scarcity as protection from the trauma of abundance; the political revolution required is therefore not economic but psychic—recognizing that lack and excess are inseparable, so that abundance is not the solution to scarcity but its own traumatic problem, requiring subjects to abandon the fantasy of future enjoyment and confront the satisfaction they cannot escape.

    The revolution starts at the point of excess.

54. #54

    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 sublime inheres in the promise of something extra that the commodity offers to both producer and consumer. This is the purely formal quality of its sublimity.

55. #55

    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 joy of shopping lies in the interaction with a seemingly infinite number of promises of future satisfaction.

56. #56

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.255

    Enjoy, Don't Accumulate

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

    The sacrifices that accumulation demands provide satisfaction because it recreates our experience of loss, but no one who is bent on accumulation can recognize the role that loss plays.

57. #57

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

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

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

    the very irrationality of the sacrifice can constitute the source of its appeal... The inability to see sacrifice as inherently enjoyable runs through the Marxist tradition.

58. #58

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.278

    . A G OD W E C AN BE LIEV E IN

    Theoretical move: This passage argues, through a series of endnotes, that the heliocentric/capitalist dislocation of God generates the structural conditions for neurosis, that Hegel's move of grasping substance as subject is the philosophical response to this dislocation, and that capitalism substitutes an unconscious, irrational belief in a new Other for genuine freedom—collapsing ontological freedom into empirical consumer choice.

    Kiarina Kordela points out that the belief that capitalism demands is far more oppressive than earlier forms of belief because it is wholly unconscious and irrational

59. #59

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.286

    . A MOR E TOLE R ABLE INFINIT Y > . THE E NDS OF C APITALI SM

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage advances the theoretical argument that capitalism's structure is isomorphic with utilitarian ethics and teleological (final cause) thinking, while psychoanalysis, Spinoza, and Agamben's impotentiality offer resources for resisting capitalism's productivity imperative—locating the subject's desire, not the body, as the true site of power.

    the dynamic of the dropping price has the effect of bonding the subject to the process of consumption through the dissatisfaction that it creates.

60. #60

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.300

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

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

    For psychoanalysis, 'Too much is not enough.' Th at is to say, every excessive accumulation results in an unavoidable confrontation with lack.

61. #61

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

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The number two is odd

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic dimension irreducibly introduces a third term into the analyst-analysand dyad, making "two" structurally odd (*impair*), and uses this mathematical-structuralist move to critique ego psychology's reduction of drive to instinct, to align psychoanalysis with conjectural sciences, and to expose how the IPA's group dynamics reproduce the imaginary mechanisms of identification Freud himself theorized.

    This unfortunate mistranslation served to occlude the drive's surplus.

62. #62

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.23

    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.

    They thus always reproduce something of the pleasure which they are designed to prevent; they serve the repressed instinct no less than the agencies which are repressing it.

63. #63

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.232

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

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section providing scholarly citations and brief parenthetical remarks; it contains minimal sustained theoretical argument, though several notes gesture toward substantive theoretical connections (Rumi as Lacanian, religion as symptomatic, das Ding and divinity, sexuation formulas, jouissance and the Other as locus of truth).

    Lacan, 'From an Other to the other,' session of Apr. 30, 1969.

64. #64

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.247

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

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

    jouissance: and coveting, 126–27; and nakedness, 38–39; the Other's, 54; and religious fervor, 199

65. #65

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.22

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > You're No Good

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

    the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers . . . the means — the unrestricted development of the social forces of production — comes into persistent conflict with the restricted end, the valorization of the existing capital.

66. #66

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.66

    I > 2 > I Can Get Satisfaction

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that psychoanalysis is fundamentally an economic theory of the psyche in which the drive always-already produces satisfaction, meaning the analytic intervention is not a cure from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but a quantitative shortening of the circuitous path the subject takes to its inevitable enjoyment — a political critique of capitalism's logic of accumulation follows directly from this.

    The political project of psychoanalysis envisions a turn away from searching for the ultimate satisfaction located elsewhere — from accumulation — and toward enjoyment.

67. #67

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.72

    I > 2 > Th e Secret of the Symptom

    Theoretical move: The symptom is not a barrier to enjoyment but its very source and foundation: psychoanalytic intervention works not by eliminating the symptom but by transforming the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it already obtains through symptomatic disruption, and desire itself is a fundamental misrecognition of the death drive.

    The excesses attributed to the figure of the Jew are the excesses of the system itself, but the belief nonetheless arises that capitalism without excess is possible.

68. #68

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.77

    I > 2 > Capitalism contra the Death Drive

    Theoretical move: Capitalism structurally depends on the misrecognition of drive as desire—sustaining subjects in perpetual dissatisfaction and aligning accumulation with enjoyment—while the death drive, by finding satisfaction in the act of not-getting-the-object, constitutes the inherently anticapitalist beyond of the capitalist subject.

    The sexual nature of the gold in this scene stems from its ability to package and contain an enjoyment that would otherwise remain ungraspable.

69. #69

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.83

    I > 2 > Finding Our Lost Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: Capitalist ideology distorts the death drive by forging a false link between enjoyment and accumulation, concealing that our actual enjoyment derives not from obtaining the object but from the experience of its loss; emancipatory politics consists in revealing this 'map of enjoyment' — that we enjoy the absent object, not the present one.

    Capitalism needs dissatisfied subjects, but it also needs subjects who believe that the ultimate satisfaction is possible. This is accomplished by locating the ultimate satisfaction in the act of accumulation.

70. #70

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.85

    I > 2 > Finding Our Lost Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: Capitalist ideology and capitalist practice are structurally at odds: ideology directs subjects toward accumulation/having the object, while the actual mechanism of capitalist enjoyment operates through the object's absence/loss — and exposing this gap (relocating enjoyment to loss) is identified as a lever for undermining ideological seduction.

    Through the act of relocating our enjoyment — of exposing the link between enjoyment and loss or absence — we undermine the ability of capitalist ideology to seduce contemporary subjects.

71. #71

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.86

    I > 2 > Th e Ego as Detour

    Theoretical move: The ego functions as a structural detour for the death drive — its side-cathexes diffuse excitation and dull trauma but simultaneously alienate the subject from its own satisfaction, making the strong ego the ideal psychic modality for capitalist subjectivity rather than a remedy for dissatisfaction.

    This is why a strong ego is no defense against racism but in fact makes the subject receptive to racist appeals that focus on the excessive enjoyment of the other.

72. #72

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.88

    I > 2 > Miserliness and Excess

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's structural deferral of enjoyment imposes detours on the death drive, producing miserliness in jouissance rather than excess, and that the Freudian economy of the joke reveals an alternative logic—economizing to release excess enjoyment—that capitalism must suppress to function.

    the capitalist doesn't pay for — what the capitalist appropriates without any compensation — is the surplus value that workers create through their labor. This appropriated surplus value, a pure excess created by the way that labor functions in the capitalist system, is the source of the capitalist's profit

73. #73

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.95

    I > 3 > Freedom and Injustice

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a distinct critique of capitalism grounded not in justice (as in Marxism) but in freedom: class society deprives subjects of freedom and enjoyment at the level of the unconscious, and psychoanalysis emerges precisely to address the persistence of unfreedom after the Enlightenment's failure to achieve its own ideal.

    upper-class subjects pay these costs disproportionately and thus suffer in their own way from the inequities of the capitalist mode of production

74. #74

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.98

    I > 3 > Analyzing the Rich

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

    one can also enjoy one's sacrifi ce of enjoyment, and this is the primary mode of enjoyment that the upper class experiences.

75. #75

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.104

    I > 3 > Th e Cost of Recognition

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

    The goal of the social order as such and the goal of capitalism in particular is the harnessing of the uselessness of the subject's enjoyment and rendering it useful.

76. #76

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.108

    I > 3 > Mastery versus Capitalism

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism, by universalizing the demand for recognition through the structural appropriation of surplus value, eliminates the 'outside' position that allowed the slave to enjoy, yet simultaneously reveals that enjoyment is always already based on a prior loss — making capitalism the condition of possibility for a 'fully realized infinite' enjoyment rather than the slave's merely 'potential infinite.'

    surplus value is nothing other than the point at which the worker's sacrificed enjoyment manifests itself... surplus value is the manifestation of surplus enjoyment, which is the result of its original sacrifice.

77. #77

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.149

    I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic success consists in the subject publicly avowing its fantasy and acting from the "nonsense" of its own enjoyment rather than sacrificing that enjoyment to social authority — thereby exposing the groundlessness of all symbolic authority and opening a path for collective transformation. Hamlet's trajectory from perverse fool to authentic fool is used as the paradigmatic illustration of this move.

    the pervert never grasps the truth of how she/he enjoys. Th e pervert's public show of enjoyment is not an insistence on enjoyment for its own sake... No pervert, of course, recognizes the truth of this mode of enjoying, that she/he derives enjoyment from the very eff ort to curb it.

78. #78

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.161

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > Shared Sacrifi ce of Nothing

    Theoretical move: The shared sacrifice that founds social bonds repeats the originary loss that constitutes the subject; this repetition converts impossibility into prohibition, installs a constitutive lie at the heart of socialization, and explains the persistence of sacrifice (in religion, war, ritual) as enjoyment of loss itself rather than for any external end.

    Th ere is generally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form! Th e history of life on earth is mainly the eff ect of a wild exuberance

79. #79

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.177

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > From Enjoyment to Pleasure

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social bond is constituted through the enjoyment of traumatic loss rather than through pleasure, and that every social project (war, monument-building, political identification) uses pleasure as an alibi for this foundational enjoyment—while the structure of the signifier itself generates paranoia about the Other's enjoyment, rendering utopian equality impossible.

    what really bothers us about the 'other' is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the 'excess' that pertains to this way: the smell of 'their' food, 'their' noisy songs and dances

80. #80

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.184

    I > Against Knowledge > Rule by Experts

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the historical shift from master authority to expert authority under capitalism transforms knowledge from a liberating force into a mechanism of subjection, and that this shift demands a political program oriented around enjoyment rather than knowledge, since the knowledge that once subverted mastery is now the very weapon the expert wields against subjects.

    The expert enjoys informing subjects about the dangers they face or the ways they should alter their behavior, and it is this enjoyment that subjects rebel against.

81. #81

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.189

    I > Against Knowledge > Th e End of Class Consciousness

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory politics has misidentified knowledge as the engine of political change, when in fact political struggle has always been organized around competing modes of jouissance; today, as knowledge (rather than law) assumes the role of prohibition, the libidinal charge of challenging authority has migrated from challenging the master to challenging the expert, rendering classic consciousness-raising politically ineffective.

    With each puff, we repeat the act of sacrifice and return to the primordial experience of loss. The death that we bring on is not simply the price that we pay for smoking; it is the means through which we enjoy the act of smoking.

82. #82

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.191

    I > Against Knowledge > An Oxymoronic Populism

    Theoretical move: The rise of expert authority (university discourse) structurally tips the balance of political enjoyment toward conservative populism, because the contemporary master-figure monopolises both modes of enjoyment — transgression and obedience — leaving emancipatory politics with only knowledge, which yields enjoyment only for experts and their identifiers.

    Followers can experience themselves as fully obedient (in contrast to the rest of society) while enjoying the satisfaction that accompanies transgression. This paradoxical position offers a way of maximizing the subject's enjoyment.

83. #83

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.193

    I > Against Knowledge > Th e Emergence of University Discourse

    Theoretical move: The transition from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University does not end mastery but relocates the Master Signifier from the position of agent to the position of truth, making mastery more concealed and thus more effective — expert authority ultimately serves the hidden master, functioning as a retooling of domination under capitalist conditions.

    It has knowledge in the position of the other, surplus enjoyment (or what Lacan labels a) in the position of the product, and the divided subject in the position of truth.

84. #84

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.200

    I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that emancipatory politics fails when it aligns itself with knowledge/expert authority against enjoyment, because popular identification with political figures operates precisely through shared enjoyment rather than rational conviction — and documentary film, as a form structurally committed to facts over enjoyment, exemplifies this failure.

    We see Bush enjoying himself, and we hear Moore condemning that enjoyment... His guilt stems from his obscene enjoyment.

85. #85

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

    I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory politics fails by investing in knowledge-transmission (the documentary form) while ceding the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism; genuine political transformation requires reorganizing enjoyment, not merely supplementing knowledge.

    conservatism discovers a form that foregrounds enjoyment

86. #86

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.204

    I > Against Knowledge > Too Much Democracy

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

    Enjoyment stems from an excess, from going beyond what social authority permits.

87. #87

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.219

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

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

    they are actually in the business of producing (or facilitating the production of) surplus value. Surplus value, which the labor process creates, provides the basis for and determines profit

88. #88

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.238

    I > 9 > Life versus Death

    Theoretical move: The death drive, understood as a third option beyond the life/death binary, reveals the falsity of the opposition between global capitalism (pure life, bad infinite) and fundamentalism (love of death), and shows that modernity's repression of finitude/death necessarily produces the fundamentalist eruptions it cannot accommodate — what it forecloses in the Symbolic returns in the Real.

    Even though enjoyment itself is an experience of the infinite, an experience of transcending the limits that regulate everyday activity, it nonetheless depends on the limits of finitude.

89. #89

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.244

    I > 9 > Progress or Value

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the traditional left-right opposition of life vs. death is internally unstable: the left's identification with life (from Marx through Deleuze/Guattari to Hardt/Negri) reproduces a capitalist fantasy of unrestrained productivity, while conservatism and fascism deploy death in the service of making life valuable — both positions failing to reckon with the subject's constitutive alienation from pure enjoyment.

    the problem of the Jew for the Nazi was precisely her or his irreducibility to bare life — the excess of life, the surplus enjoyment, that she or he embodies.

90. #90

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.263

    I > 10 > A Universe of Utility

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that critiques of religious belief (e.g. Dawkins) are structurally self-defeating because they appeal to utility, whereas the libidinal force of belief is grounded in wasteful sacrifice—the very uselessness of belief constitutes its enjoyment—and this enjoyment is inversely proportional to utility, meaning that rational debunking only augments the enjoyment it attempts to eliminate.

    capitalism and its ethos of general utility that provides the ground, albeit negatively, for religious belief... subjects increasingly carve out the space for useless acts, and religion provides a ready arena for them.

91. #91

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.297

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Conclusion

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a positive politics of the death drive is possible not by eliminating it or escaping toward a utopian good, but by recognizing internal limits as the very source of infinite enjoyment—transforming the relationship to the lost object and the figures of the enemy so that external threats are seen as internal self-limitations rather than obstacles to be overcome.

    the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself

92. #92

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.311

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 2. The Economics of the Drive

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section advances several load-bearing theoretical moves: it aligns the drive's structure with a satisfaction that bypasses aim (via Copjec/Lacan), contrasts psychoanalytic identification-with-the-symptom against Marxist elimination-of-the-symptom, links the drive's constancy to capitalism's logic of endless accumulation, and grounds the ego's rivalry-structure in the Imaginary to argue against ego-psychology.

    The trajectory moving from dissatisfaction to satisfaction is what links so many forms of therapy to the capitalist economic system… therapy that aims at curing dissatisfaction inevitably reproduces it in order to sustain its own value as a potential cure.

93. #93

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

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

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

    Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge ma: mit Press, 2006), 313

94. #94

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.321

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

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

    the subject accepts the relation of nonrelation, giving up its fruitless but often destructive efforts to locate the excess outside itself or to eradicate it

95. #95

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.333

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 7. Against Knowledge

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section performs several theoretical micro-moves: it distinguishes the master signifier's exceptional status from the general equivalent in capitalism, argues that knowledge-intrusion converts pleasure into jouissance, and clarifies how hysterical discourse structurally returns to the discourse of the master, while also linking sexuation to the asymmetry of the superego between male and female subjects.

    Alenka Zupančič, 'When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,' in Clemens and Grigg, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side

96. #96

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.339

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 8. The Politics of Fantasy

    Theoretical move: This notes section advances the argument that fantasy is theoretically inescapable—neither Western philosophy nor Marxist politics can fully overcome it—and that the properly psychoanalytic (Lacanian) attitude toward fantasy is not its elimination but its dialectical traversal, which simultaneously dispels and reconfigures it.

    Marxism's reliance on the promise of a future complete enjoyment in order to encourage subjects to adopt the proper class consciousness

97. #97

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.342

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 9. Beyond Bare Life

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section theoretically anchors the main argument by linking the capitalist valorization of "bare life," the death drive's role in value-creation, the fetishistic function of afterlife imagery, and the structural necessity of the unconscious (as science's elided gap) to Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, and Agamben — positioning psychoanalysis as the discipline that occupies the subject-shaped gap that science must repress.

    Hitler's effort to stress the animality of the Jews covers up the Jewish mode of enjoying that is his real target.

98. #98

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_136"></span>***objet (petit) a***

    Theoretical move: This passage traces the full conceptual evolution of objet petit a across Lacan's work, showing how it migrates from a purely imaginary little other (schema L, 1955) through the object of desire/fantasy (1957) to the real cause of desire, surplus-jouissance, and finally semblance of being at the centre of the Borromean knot—demonstrating that the concept accumulates rather than replaces its earlier determinations.

    this surplus is objet petit a, a surplus meaning, and a surplus enjoyment (Fr. plus-de-jouir). This concept is inspired by Marx's concept of surplus value; a is the excess of jouissance which has no 'use value'.

99. #99

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_54"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0069"></span>**discourse**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically presents Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses as four possible social bonds founded in language, each defined by rotating four algebraic symbols (S1, S2, $, a) through four structural positions, with the discourse of the master as the generative base from which the others derive—and with the discourse of the analyst positioned as the structural inverse of mastery, making psychoanalysis inherently subversive.

    a = surplus enjoyment

100. #100

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_115"></span>**master**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's appropriation of Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic—via Kojève—through two distinct theoretical moments: first as a phenomenological illustration of intersubjective desire and aggression (1950s), and then as a structural formalization in the Discourse of the Master, where the dialectic's inherent failure of totalization is recast as the irreducible surplus that escapes the master signifier's attempt at complete representation.

     the master is the master signifier (S1) who puts the slave (S2) to work to produce a surplus (a) which he can appropriate for himself

101. #101

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

     <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys psychoanalytic categories (obsessional neurosis, masochism, the impossible object, fantasy screens, jouissance) to argue that Smiley's character is misread by Alfredson's film, which imposes a neoliberal logic of consumerism and youth onto a figure whose allure depends on the baroque mechanisms of self-deception proper to obsessional neurosis and the organisation of enjoyment around an unattainable object.

     The nickname for MI6, 'The Circus,' in fact openly acknowledges the aberrant enjoyment available to those who have crossed into this fictional Cold World.

102. #102

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.231

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

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that *Inception* symptomatically stages the supersession of the Freudian unconscious by a "subconscious" colonised by late-capitalist cognitive labour: where the classical unconscious was an alien otherness, the film's dreamscapes recirculate familiar commodified images, converting psychoanalytic depth into therapeutic self-help ideology and thereby dramatising how capitalist "inception" (interpellation) works by making subjects believe its implanted ideas are their own.

     Dreams have ceased to be the spaces where private psychopathologies are worked through and have become the scenes where competing corporate interests play out their banal struggles.

103. #103

     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.

     What if we were to take Richter's provocation seriously – what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that is to say, if objects themselves could sing?

104. #104

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

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

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

     once an idea is out of the rabbit's hat it's copied ad infinitum until the energy is gone… energy flashbacks, frail figments of Rave reconstructed in a serotonin-depleted brain.

105. #105

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.280

     **xx** > **WHAT COMES IN THROUGH THE EAR**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a "deceptive might" — never present where expected — such that anxiety is the truth of sexuality, and the subject-Other relation (S→A) is primordial over communication, with the subject first receiving his own message in broken, inverted form via the Other, a structure confirmed by the infant's pre-mirror-stage monologue.

     The minus minusphi, - (- φ), the re-positivizing of the phi they reckon to be operating in the psychoanalytic field, is what they aspire to gain access to.

106. #106

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan resists assimilating the unconscious to any existing ontological framework (Plotinus, Being/non-Being) because to do so would over-substantify it; instead he insists the unconscious harbours a non-completable corpus of knowledge (savoir), and that the subject is "magnetised" behind a screen in a state of split/dissociation—the Gordian knot of psychoanalytic theory.

     In human destiny, the remainder is always fruitful. The slag is the extinguished remainder.

107. #107

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (the ego ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject is seen) and the deeper, alienated level at which the objet petit a is encountered in transference — love as deception is contrasted with the paradoxical 'something more than you' that the analysand addresses to the analyst, culminating in the logic of the gift-turned-into-excrement as the swerve that marks analytic conclusion.

     I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this of my person—as they say—Oh, mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of skit

108. #108

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian field is constitutively defined by loss, and that the analyst's presence is irreducible precisely as witness to this loss — a structural condition that exposes Ego Psychology's propagation of the American way of life as a regressive obscurantism, making the conflict internal to analysis necessary rather than contingent.

     At this level, we can get nothing more out of it—for it is a dead loss, with no gain to show, except perhaps its resumption in the function of pulsation.

109. #109

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan resists assimilating the unconscious to any existing ontological framework (being/non-being), insisting instead that the unconscious harbours a corpus of knowledge that is irreducibly open and unsuturable, while the split/dissociation of the subject behind the 'screen' constitutes the central Gordian knot of psychoanalytic theory.

     In human destiny, the remainder is always fruitful. The slag is the extinguished remainder.

110. #110

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.166

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier's emergence into the human world has an affinity with sexual reality, specifically through the biological logic of meiosis (reduction/expulsion of remainders), and extends this to the thesis that primitive science — rooted in combinatory oppositions — is fundamentally a sexual technique, with the signifier's play structuring reality from astronomy to social ethics.

     a combinatory that operates at certain of its stages by the expulsion of remainders

111. #111

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the genesis of the subject is grounded in the logic of zero and one (lack and its filling), but that analytic experience always reveals an irreducible remainder—the objet petit a—which escapes both the demand-axis and the transference-axis, requiring topological figures (Klein bottle, Möbius strip) rather than Cartesian coordinates to capture the subject's divided structure and its relation to truth/castration.

     there is always a remainder, that no filling of the one... totally reduces the division of the subject between the zero and the one; that the effect of the operation is never a pure and simple zero

112. #112

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.300

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the modern subject by displacing truth onto the big Other (God), thereby inaugurating a science of accumulative knowledge severed from truth; psychoanalysis, precisely because it works at the split (Entzweiung) between "I think" and "I am," is the practice that can finally articulate the radical relationship between truth and knowledge — a relationship structured topologically, as in the Möbius strip.

     Just as an essential stage of our structure which is called social, but which is in reality metaphysical and which is called capitalism, is the accumulation of capital, the relationship of the Cartesian subject to that being which is affirmed in it, is founded on the accumulation of knowledge.

113. #113

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.299

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito installs a constitutive split (Entzweiung) between the subject of sense and the subject of being, and that this division—wherein the subject is what is *lacking* to accumulated scientific knowledge—is precisely what psychoanalysis radicalises: the unconscious is an "I think" that knows without knowing it, and truth returns not through confrontation with knowledge but through the stumbling intervals of discourse, the symptom being its privileged site.

     Just as an essential stage of our structure which is called social, but which is in reality metaphysical and which is called capitalism, is the accumulation of capital, the relationship of the Cartesian subject to that being which is affirmed in it, is founded on the accumulation of knowledge.

114. #114

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

     E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the objet petit a as the cause of desire by articulating its double register: it marks both the lack in the Other and the loss inscribed in the process of meaning, while its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to mis-identify with knowledge in order to cover over that constitutive loss.

     the function of the remainder issuing from the desire of the other, the function of the remainder which is manifested as a residue left by the bar, which affects the big Other

115. #115

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the vase-as-hole (the mustard pot) as a structural model for the symbolic order and the object of science, arguing that the material cause is the hole itself rather than any positive substance, and that science becomes possible precisely when the object is approached as lacking—a move that also grounds the distinction between the signifier's phonematic and logical poles in a new graph.

     Denis the menace ... He is given twenty eight little blocks ... One number is always going to emerge as a constant: twenty eight blocks. Well now, he says, energetics is like that. Only there are no blocks.

116. #116

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a functions as the cause of desire precisely through its status as objective lack: it operates in a double register — revealing the lack of the Other and the loss internal to signification — and its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to misidentify with knowledge in order to cover over the irreducible remainder left by castration.

     the function of the remainder issuing from the desire of the other, the function of the remainder which is manifested as a residue left by the bar, which affects the big Other

117. #117

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the symbolic order in the primacy of the hole (lack/void) over presence, arguing that the object of science, the vase as symbolic creation, and energetics all converge on the same structural point: what matters is not what fills the void but the void itself — a thesis that links the subject of science (Descartes/Frege) to the functioning of the signifier and forecloses any meta-language.

     Feynman concludes: 'Here is the example. One number is always going to emerge as a constant: twenty eight blocks. Well now, he says, energetics is like that. Only there are no blocks.'

118. #118

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-grounds the locus of the Other in the body (as the site where the signifier is originally inscribed), then pivots to argue that jouissance—distinguished from pleasure as its beyond—cannot be derived from Hegelian self-consciousness or dialectics but must be theorised through the structural impossibility of the sexual act, with the signifier's reference found not in thought but in its real effects.

     for the slave there is already a certain jouissance of the thing, in so far as he not only brings it to the master, but he has to transform it in order to make it acceptable to him.

119. #119

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

     Theoretical move: By critically engaging Bergler's theory of "oral neurosis" and its invocation of masochism, Lacan argues that masochism cannot be reduced to the enjoyment of pain; rather, it is structurally defined by the subject assuming the position of the object (objet petit a as remainder/waste) within a contractual scenario that implicates the big Other as the locus of a regulating word—thereby illuminating the Other's role in jouissance and the logic of fantasy.

     a gain of jouissance, whatever note we may or not add to it, concerning the maintenance, the respect and the integrity of the pleasure principle

120. #120

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates in the structural lack inaugurated by the castration complex, which reverses subjective enjoyment into objectal libido — irreducible to narcissistic libido — and that the objet petit a is the product ('waste-product') of the operation of language on the One/Other dyad, serving as the cornerstone for rethinking logic, the subject, and the analytic act.

     jouissance-value takes its origin in the lack marked by the castration complex

121. #121

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance-value—not truth—is the primary currency of the unconscious economy and of any discourse, including analytic discourse; this reframes the relation between truth, the unconscious, and the analyst's desire, while grounding the objet petit a topologically as the "setting" of the subject produced by the cut of repetition in the projective plane.

     Perhaps the question about the force of the truth is to be sought for in this field… the truth-market, if, like the last time, you can glimpse that the main-spring of the market is jouissance-value.

122. #122

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > A B C D.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical paradox of the catalogue-of-catalogues (Russell's paradox) to demonstrate that the closure of any signifying chain necessarily generates an 'additional One' (Un en plus) — an uncountable surplus signifier that is nowhere in the chain yet designates the chain as a whole. This structure, illustrated through topology (the torus), the biblical Mene-Tekel-Parsin, and Mallarmé's absolute Book, grounds Lacan's theory of repetition: what repetition seeks is precisely what the mark effaces, because the first mark cannot be reduplicated without losing what it originally marked.

     there results... this additional unit, uncountable as such... giving rise to this additional unit... which is essential for a whole series of structures

123. #123

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.142

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ, "small o") and the mathematics of the mean and extreme ratio to theorise the sexual relation: the subject enters genital union as a "product" (objet petit a), and the irreducible remainder generated by the division of the subject by the Other (the small o that cannot be eliminated) both limits jouissance and founds the "phantom of the gift" that constitutes feminine love.

     the organ which is the seat of detumescence … the subject can have the illusion … that there is no remainder, or, at the very least, that there is only a perfectly vanishing remainder

124. #124

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.196

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.

     there is this remainder of o2

125. #125

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the subject's constitution through the signifier effects an alienation that structurally separates body from jouissance — making castration the condition of possibility for any genuine sexual act, while systematically dismantling the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as a sufficient account of jouissance's distribution.

     what it discovers, is the introduction of what I called jouissance-value, namely, the cancellation of the jouissance most immediately involved as such in sexual union

126. #126

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively excluded from the locus of truth (the Other), such that the sexual act can only be established through a structural lie or dissimulation; the Oedipus myth is re-read not as a story of ignorance but as the mythic formula for a 'canned' (killed-off/aseptic) jouissance whose sacrificial negation is the precondition for all subsequent economies of jouissance in psychoanalytic experience.

     what transforms it into something of another order... the function of the value of jouissance, namely, what transforms it into something of another order.

127. #127

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as the structural analogue of exchange-value in the Marxist commodity form, arguing that castration is the subtraction of penile jouissance that produces woman as the 'object of jouissance'—thereby rewriting the Lévi-Straussian exchange of women and the psychoanalytic theory of castration through a unified logic of value.

     This subtraction of jouissance somewhere, is the pivot.

128. #128

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > A B C D.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses set-theoretic paradoxes (Russell, catalogue of catalogues) and topological structures (torus, edge) to argue that the closure of a signifying chain necessarily generates an "additional One" (Un en plus) — a surplus signifier that is uncountable within the chain yet constitutes the very condition of repetition, lack, and writing; this is then grounded in the Mene Tekel Parsin narrative as an archaic theory of the subject.

     there results... this additional unit, uncountable as such, which is essential for a whole series of structures... giving rise to this additional unit... which is essential for a whole series of structures

129. #129

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the sexual act by truth—the locus of the Other is the site where jouissance questions itself in the name of truth, but truth cannot be heard in the field of the sexual act without causing it to collapse. Lacan re-reads the Oedipus myth (and Freud's primal-father myth) to establish that originary, absolute jouissance only functions as already "canned" (killed-off, asepticised), and that this transformation of jouissance is the prerequisite for all psychoanalytic economy of exchange and reversal.

     what is played out in the operations, thanks to which there are exchanged, there are economised and there are reversed the functions of jouissance such as we have to confront them in psychoanalytic experience.

130. #130

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as structurally homologous to exchange-value in Marx's commodity analysis, arguing that castration operates as the subtraction of penile jouissance that transforms woman into the 'object of jouissance' (the homme-elle), thereby grounding the sexual act in a logic of value equivalence that founds the social/symbolic order.

     At the source of what is reduplicated, of what duplicates, in its structure, value at the level of the unconscious, there is something that takes the place of exchange-value, in so far as, from its false identification to use-value, there results the foundation of the object of merchandise.

131. #131

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.142

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the mathematical structure of the golden ratio (objet petit a as mean and extreme ratio) to theorize sexual difference and genital satisfaction: the irreducible remainder (small o / objet petit a) produced in the subject's confrontation with the maternal unity of "one flesh" is what structures jouissance, phallus, and love as the gift of what one does not have — with detumescence as the illusory elimination of remainder, and feminine love as causa sui arising from giving what one lacks.

     the subject can have the illusion – a deceptive one undoubtedly, but even though it is deceptive it is nonetheless satisfying - that there is no remainder, or, at the very least, that there is only a perfectly vanishing remainder

132. #132

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.178

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance-value is the foundational economy of the unconscious, and that the unconscious speaks of sex without necessarily saying the truth about it — establishing a structural gap between speaking and saying that conditions the analyst's position and explains the psychoanalyst's constitutive resistance to his own discourse.

     the main-spring of the market is *jouissance-*value

133. #133

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions jouissance as the central concept linking the failure of the sexual act to subjective constitution, arguing that the signifier's introduction into the real—not thought—gives jouissance its radical analytical value; this requires both a departure from the Hegelian dialectic (where jouissance belongs to the master) and an opening toward the irreducible non-relation at the heart of sexuality.

     for the slave there is already a certain jouissance of the thing, in so far as he not only brings it to the master, but he has to transform it in order to make it acceptable to him.

134. #134

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.234

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle that "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the introduction of the subject as an effect of signification necessarily alienates the subject from jouissance — separating body from jouissance — with castration named as the structural mechanism by which jouissance is cancelled in the sexual relation, making any genuine sexual act contingent on this loss.

     the introduction of what I called jouissance-value, namely, the cancellation of the jouissance most immediately involved as such in sexual union; what it calls castration.

135. #135

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act produces the divided subject ($) as its truth-effect, with the analyst serving as support for the objet petit a that causes this division; Lacan then pivots to argue that the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is itself grounded in — and displaced from — the objet petit a, making undecidability (Gödel-style incompleteness) a structural consequence of the subject's relation to the not-all, rather than a technical curiosity.

     this impasse in so far as it is, you should note, a fruitful impasse. For if we had the slightest hope that everything could be subjected to a universal algorithm... this would be rather a closing down.

136. #136

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalyst operates *as* the objet petit a rather than *being* it, and the psychoanalytic act constitutes a paradoxical act of faith precisely insofar as it puts in question the very support (the subject supposed to know) that makes the analytic work possible—this structural paradox is then leveraged to re-read the Marxist critique of alienation, suggesting that capitalist production of the worker-as-subject mirrors the analyst's production of the psychoanalysand.

     the product of the worker, under a certain aspect, is precisely the singular form, the figure that capitalism takes on in our day.

137. #137

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the act from the doing in order to locate the analyst's position as a specific structural function: psychoanalytic practice, as a doing of pure speech, approaches the act through the 'signifier in act', and the analyst must occupy this corner of the barred subject supposed to know precisely by absenting himself from the doing—a structural self-effacement that risks collapsing into a 'hypochondriacal jouissance' if theorised away as mere equidistance from all schools.

     I do not dare to say solitary enjoyment, morose delectation, in the name of this to allow oneself to say that all theories are of equal value... All of this fundamentally is a hypocondriacal enjoyment.

138. #138

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.102

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristotelian syllogistic logic—specifically the middle term—to argue that the Objet petit a functions as the logical middle term connecting the psychoanalysand (as vanishing subject) to the psychoanalyst (as product/predicate), while also theorizing that the analyst's position is constituted by an 'in itself' identification with the o-object, distinguished from narcissistic human relations by the exclusion of the 'I like you' (tu me plais).

     What is at stake is what I called the o-object which is for us here the true middle term that is proposed, assuredly, as a plus one

139. #139

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that the inconsistency of the Other is what converts all stating into demand, situating the subject's division on the Graph of Desire; he then mobilises Gödel's incompleteness theorems as the logical analogue of castration, and closes by arguing that meaning is a lure veiling language's essential meaninglessness, with surplus-jouissance as the remainder that articulates the subject's relation to castration and enjoyment.

     enjoyment can only be articulated for every individual - himself included in language and the utensils - can only be articulated in this register of remainder inherent to one and the other that I defined as the surplus enjoying.

140. #140

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes his seminar as a form of productive work whose meaning escapes most observers, using the university crisis of May '68 and the rise of capitalism/science as the context to argue that genuine subversion lies not in political agitation but in the function of knowledge at its most subversive mode — a function that power (whether capitalist or revolutionary) cannot master.

     Capitalism is precisely of use for something and we ought not to forget it. It is the things that it makes that are of no use. But that is a completely different affair.

141. #141

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.371

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the structural necessity of the "additional one" (un-en-plus) and the empty set within the field of the Other, demonstrating through set theory that the inclusion of a first signifier into the Other necessarily generates a second term (the empty set/S(Ø)) and that subjectivity only appears at the level of S2, reorienting the field from intersubjectivity to intra-subjective structure.

     That is properly - this for those that have put in the time to understand it what, in my Ecrits as well as in my propositions, I always designated as the additional one (un-en-plus).

142. #142

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lack—as the precondition of anxiety's "not without an object"—only arises within a symbolic order capable of counting, and uses this logic to theorize the objet petit a as the effect of symbolic counting on the imaginary field, while simultaneously framing the modern disjunction between knowledge and power as the broader historical context in which this structural analysis gains its urgency.

     these effects of symbolic counting, in the order of the imaginary... counting has, at the level of the imaginary, the effect of making appear in it what I call the o-object.

143. #143

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.341

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) stages the fundamental aporia between knowledge and enjoyment, and that the neurotic's testimony—not therapeutic benefit—is what gives psychoanalysis its historical and theoretical stakes, particularly within capitalism's structuring of enjoyment.

     What is called the exploitation of the worker does not consist, very precisely, in the fact that enjoyment is excluded from work.

144. #144

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the May 1968 events as a collective manifestation of the "strike of truth" — the symptomatic eruption of surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust) from within a social order that commodifies knowledge — and uses this to argue that no discourse can fully articulate truth, making the discourse of psychoanalysis structurally distinct from the emerging market of knowledge in the University.

     The way in which each one suffers in his relationship to enjoyment in so far as he does not insert himself into it only through the function of surplus enjoying, this is the symptom

145. #145

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

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

     Surplus enjoying is explicitly modulated as foreign to the question.

146. #146

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.109

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Jouissance is irreducible to the pleasure principle and is topologically structured as the subject's own topology; he then deploys this against Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic (where the master renounces enjoyment from the start) and Pascal's Wager (where Surplus-jouissance, not enjoyment itself, is what is actually at stake in the bet).

     at every stage of recuperation it links them to surplus enjoying which is, as I think I have sufficiently stated from the beginning of this year, something different. Namely, what responds not to enjoyment but to the loss of enjoyment

147. #147

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVI by arguing that psychoanalytic theory is constitutively 'a discourse without words' — that is, grounded not in phenomenological sense but in the cause-structure of the unconscious — and uses this to distinguish psychoanalytic discourse from both philosophy and structuralism as a worldview, while announcing that the seminar will develop the function of the objet petit a through a homology with Marx's analysis of the labour market.

     I shall appeal to Marx whose remarks I have had a lot of trouble not introducing earlier... in connection with the o-object the place in which we have to situate his essential function.

148. #148

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that surplus-jouissance (surplus enjoying) is structurally homologous to Marx's surplus value: both arise from the renunciation of enjoyment within a discourse, and both only become visible once knowledge is unified and marketised under capitalist logic — establishing that the conflictual 'truth' of the capitalist system is a problem of knowledge, jouissance, and discourse, not merely of political economy.

     It is more than probable, and for a good reason which is that we have, for that, introduced the surplus enjoying.

149. #149

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     Am I making myself understood?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a theoretical artifice but an effect of analytic discourse itself—homologous to Marx's discovery of surplus value—and uses this claim to introduce the Graph of Desire's earliest construction (1957-58) as the formal ground for understanding how a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, with meaning constituted retroactively.

     what function this relation of surplus enjoying to surplus value turns around — it is the function of the o-object

150. #150

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the structural homology between Marx's surplus value and his own concept of surplus-jouissance (plus de jouir), arguing that the o-object (objet petit a) is produced as a remainder/loss at the very point where the subject is constituted by the inter-signifier relation — a loss strictly correlative to the renunciation of enjoyment under the effect of discourse.

     what I would call the function of the surplus enjoying (plus de jouir). This function appears because discourse occurs, because what it demonstrates in the renunciation of enjoyment is an effect of discourse itself.

151. #151

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 22 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mathematical proportion I/o = 1+o (the golden ratio / Fibonacci series) and Pascal's wager to argue that the Objet petit a (o) is the structural measure of loss in relation to the Other, and that surplus-jouissance (masochistic enjoyment) is the analogical position by which the subject takes on the role of the waste-product (o) in order to constitute the Other as a complete field — thus linking the formalization of desire's cause to the topology of the Other.

     at the level of the surplus enjoying, the subject takes on in a qualified fashion this position of loss, of waste product that is represented by o.

152. #152

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.101

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

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

     The reinvestment, as they say, of profits, which is fundamental, this again is what is called enterprise, the capitalist enterprise, to designate it in its proper terms, does not put the means of production at the service of pleasure.

153. #153

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Gödel's incompleteness theorems as a structural analogy for the psychoanalytic subject: just as formalization reveals a constitutive limit (incompleteness) at the heart of the most consistent discourse, the subject is nothing but the function of the cut that separates formal from natural language—and this structural lack grounds both the desire of the mathematician and, via the Graph of Desire, the alienation of meaning and the exclusion of jouissance.

     you must grasp the sense of my starting this year with the definition of the surplus enjoying and its relationship with everything that one can call...the means of production

154. #154

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analogy of Marx's introduction of surplus value—and the capitalist's laughter at the moment of its revelation—to argue that surplus-jouissance names a structural "gag" or elision at the heart of the unconscious, while simultaneously warning against treating this as a "theory of the unconscious" and insisting that the subject only exists as the effect of an assertion (dire), with the Real defined as the impossible limit of that assertion.

     Around surplus enjoying there is something like a fundamental gag that depends properly speaking on this joint into which we have to drive our wedge when what is at stake is this relationship that operates in the experience of the unconscious in its most general function.

155. #155

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 22 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager as a formal model for the structure of the subject's relation to loss, arguing that Pascal's mathematical discovery (that the stake is lost at the outset) grounds the logic of repetition, the unary trait, and the gap between body and jouissance introduced by the signifier — not a narcissistic-imaginary wound but a symbolic-real effect.

     the essence of the game, in what it involves in terms of logic because it is regulated, depends on the fact that what is bet is lost at the start... to settle what is at stake, which is that the essence of the game... depends on the fact that what is bet is lost at the start.

156. #156

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     Am I making myself understood?

     Theoretical move: Lacan revisits the two-tier structure of the Graph of Desire—signifying chain vs. circle of discourse—to show how the Witz (joke/wit) demonstrates the subject's triple register and its entanglement in the big Other, culminating in the claim that the subject is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier, and that primal repression (Urverdrängung) is the originary fading of the subject into opaque knowledge.

     What is the function of each of those who pass between the links of the iron network that this constitutes… All those who are not caught in these two extremes of the chain, what are they in this perspective if not employees?

157. #157

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.138

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads Pascal's wager through the lens of the objet petit a as the real stake, arguing that the asymmetry of the wager only becomes legible once the 'falling effect' of the signifying conjunction — which produces the divided subject and surplus-jouissance — is distinguished from the fiction of a neutral zero; the wager thus becomes a figure for the subject's irreducible implication in the desire of the Other.

     In neglecting what it hides, namely, its tailing effect at the level of enjoyment you fail to recognise the true nature of the o-object.

158. #158

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.365

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

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

     Does not this imputation that the work of the exploited person is supposed in the enjoyment of the exploiter find something like its analogue at the entrance of knowledge?

159. #159

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces *surplus-jouissance* (Mehrlust) as the psychoanalytic homologue to Marx's surplus value (Mehrwert), and grounds this move in the claim that structure is real — not metaphorical — because it is determined by convergence toward an impossibility; discourse is what constitutes, rather than merely represents, the real, and this principle is the condition of seriousness for any practice of psychoanalysis.

     to this surplus value, I hooked on, I superimposed, I plastered on the other side the notion of surplus enjoying. It is said like that in the original tongue. It was said the last time for the first time, namely, in French. To restore it to the tongue from which the inspiration for it came to me, I would call it... Merhlust.

160. #160

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan reworks Pascal's wager through the mathematical logic of repetition and the genesis of objet petit a (o), arguing that the wagering subject's very existence is constituted by the act of inscription/writing rather than by philosophical conceptualization, and that the zero in Pascal's matrix marks not a neutral outcome but the constitutive loss of the bet and the possibility of refusing to play — a structure homologous to the entry of life into the symbolic game of repetition.

     o is precisely not defined... it ties the 1 to o, that it is I/o, that this proportion of one number to another ends up in the more and more rigorous constant of this I/o

161. #161

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a distinction between truth-as-cause (which speaks but does not "tell the truth") and knowledge, anchoring this in a re-reading of Pascal's wager as a structural problem about the existence of the Other and the Real, while drawing an analogy between Marxist surplus-value and surplus-jouissance to illuminate the political stakes of psychoanalytic theory.

     my Italian translator... had no merit in telling me that, in short, this was surplus value. Because I already spoke so much about Marx... except this name Mehrlust, surplus enjoying as an analogy for Mehrwert.

162. #162

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969 > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 12 February 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the objet petit a (o) is not merely a remainder or lost object within the field of the Other, but the very cause of thinking itself — its shadow and ground — such that the supposed unity of the One (the field of discourse, the Other) is always already constituted by an arbitrary act of positing, and desire's lack is redefined through the mathematical structure of the Fibonacci series and the o-function rather than through the traditional ontological appeal to the infinite.

     I am an extra o

163. #163

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) to ground the constitution of fantasy as the point where subject and object (objet a) achieve a non-reducible consistency, arguing that truth has no guarantee in the Other but only its correlate in the fabricated o-object, while perversion names the site where surplus-jouissance is unveiled in naked form.

     what is fabricated in this relationship to surplus enjoying, in this something that is able through the opening of the operation of the organism to take on the figure of these vanishing entities

164. #164

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 27 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds surplus-jouissance as a structural (not merely analogical) homologue to Marxist surplus value, with jouissance itself designated as the substance of psychoanalytic discourse — the move establishes jouissance as a formal, topological concept rather than a formless background.

     Enjoyment has here the significance of allowing us to introduce this properly structural function, that of the surplus enjoying.

165. #165

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.386

     Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the subject's constitution through the fantasy ($◇a) and the Four Discourses schema, arguing that knowledge born from the slave serves the master, that the objet petit a as surplus-jouissance is the structural stake in the Master/Slave dialectic, and that the Discourse of the University is the hommelle (alma mater) whose subjection effects on students mirror the hysteric's truth-telling function—making the political question of revolution inseparable from the psychoanalytic question of knowledge and the subject.

     this is the year that I posited the o as surplus enjoying, in other words the stake that constitutes the wager in order to gain the other enjoyment.

166. #166

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" of the sexual relation precisely because sexual jouissance is outside the system of the subject — there is no subject of sexual enjoyment — and this impossibility is demonstrated by the untraceable, non-coupled nature of the male/female distinction at the level of the signifier.

     Sense, which is not simply an effect but a rejected effect, an effect that is carried away, and moreover an effect that accumulates, culture in a word, participates in this something that flows from an economy founded on the structure of the o-object.

167. #167

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.132

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio (φ/o) to demonstrate that the subject's division is irremediable: the relation between the subject of enjoyment and the subject constituted by the unary trait (1) can never collapse into self-identity (Hegelian Selbstbewusstsein), because the o (objet petit a as surplus-jouissance) is always already an effect of the inaugural mark and persists as an irreducible remainder across infinite repetition.

     Like this loss, the o, the limiting relationship of a term of a Fibonnaci series to the one that follows it, like this loss the o is only an effect of the position of the unary trait.

168. #168

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the "Copernican revolution" not as a change of centre but as the discovery that knowledge can be structured without a knowing subject, paralleling Newton's "unthinkable" formula for gravity and Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a knowledge that escapes consciousness—both pointing to the impossible as the Real; simultaneously he argues that the concept of "revolution" only acquires structural dignity from Marx's discovery of surplus value as foreclosed in the capitalist discourse, and that being itself is born only from the flaw (lack) introduced by the speaking being.

     Marx had not given it its structural titles, by justifying it from the discourse of the capitalist, with the discovery that this involves, of surplus value as foreclosed in this discourse

169. #169

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the four discourses as a structural apparatus, anchoring the Discourse of the Master in the S1→S2 relation and grounding this structure in the Freudian articulation of the signifier, jouissance, and surplus-jouissance, while aligning the slave's knowledge (S2) with the philosophical operation of extracting know-how from the slave as the inaugural move of philosophy itself.

     it is not for nothing that last year I called this same object... surplus enjoying (plus-de-jouir). This means that the loss of the object is also the gap, the hole, opened up to something which one does not know whether it is the representation of the lack in enjoying.

170. #170

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transition from the ancient Master's discourse to modern capitalism/bureaucracy involves a displacement of knowledge (S2) into the dominant position, producing a new tyranny that occludes truth; and that psychoanalytic experience operates by introducing the Hysteric's discourse as a structural condition ("hystericisation") that exposes the non-self-knowing character of unconscious knowledge and the impossibility of sexual rapport.

     Capitalist exploitation in effect frustrates his knowledge by making it useless. But what is given him through a type of subversion is something different - the knowledge of a master.

171. #171

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Discourse of the Analyst is structurally derived from—and is the inversion of—the Discourse of the Master: where the Master's discourse masks the divided subject at the place of truth, the analyst's discourse installs the objet petit a in the commanding place, thereby liberating the Splitting of the Subject and the half-said truth it conceals. This structural comparison also diagnoses the Discourse of the University as science's imperative ("Keep on knowing"), driven by the Master Signifier concealed at the place of truth.

     Marx dixit, he will have taken all this time to foment his surplus enjoying. Why does he owe this surplus enjoying to the master?

172. #172

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     **ANALYTICON**

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

     it is a matter of seeing what at the level of the o-object that you constitute, namely, from the quarter where it has its incidence in a discourse, what you are offered

173. #173

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     (6) X: *As regards anxiety, I thought it was the opposite of enjoyment.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines anxiety not as objectless but as having surplus-jouissance (objet petit a) as its specific object, then leverages the Four Discourses schema to diagnose the university crisis: in the Discourse of the University, the student occupies the place of objet a and is charged with producing a divided subject ($), making the current student revolts structurally legible rather than contingent.

     It is surplus enjoying, this is what we will have to look at, but it is not nameable, even though it can be approximately named, expressed, in this way. That is why it has been expressed in terms of surplus value.

174. #174

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and its limiting proportion (the golden number) as a mathematical formalization of the structure of affect, cause, and the repetition of the unary trait, arguing that science—grounded in symbolic/combinatorial proof rather than perception—produces an "unsubstance" that dissolves the male/female forming principles, and that each subject is ultimately determined as objet petit a, the cause of desire.

     By using the term Mehrlust. What is reproduced from this infinité articulation? Because o is the same here and there, it is self evident that the repetition of the formula cannot be the infinite repetition of the I think within I think

175. #175

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the 'no smoke without fire' sign-logic to argue that the signifier (smoke/sign) does not point to a supreme subject-guarantor behind appearances, but rather to the materialist productivity of surplus-jouissance; he then defends his independent deployment of metaphor and metonymy against claims of mere Jakobsonian borrowing, insisting he was saying something categorically different.

     When one has recognised the sort of surplus enjoying that makes one say 'that's really someone', one will be perhaps on the path of a dialectical matter

176. #176

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phallic enjoyment is structurally excluded from the social-libidinal economy, and that this exclusion—not biological sexuality—is what Freudian discourse is fundamentally about; the repetition compulsion discovered in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is reread as the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance, while surplus-jouissance is positioned as the substitute system that operates in place of prohibited phallic enjoyment.

     she would be happy to leave this object to someone else...who, for her part, would find the surplus enjoying, because this indeed is what is at stake in the dream.

177. #177

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of material implication and the 'A child is being beaten' phantasy to argue that truth cannot be isolated as an attribute of propositional knowledge, that the subject is constitutively divided by jouissance, and that University discourse inevitably reinstates the transcendental I as master-signifier, whereas analytic discourse must attend to the truth that only emerges from the effects of language including the unconscious.

     we are beings born from surplus enjoying, the result of the use of language

178. #178

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     *[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to argue that Freud's substitution of the Oedipus complex for the truths offered by hysterical experience was a defensive idealization that masked the fundamental truth — audible in the hysteric's discourse — that the father/master is castrated from the start; this leads to a critique of the Oedipus myth as an unworkable, quasi-religious fiction that displaces the proper analytic relation between knowledge and truth.

     the quite distinct character of what can be done between the process of accumulation and the presence of surplus enjoying - of the very presence of this surplus enjoying to the exclusion of a good old orgasm

179. #179

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) is the structural analogue of Marxian surplus value within the Discourse of the Master, and that the Discourse of the Analyst uniquely situates knowledge in the place of truth — a position occupied by myth and governed by the law of half-saying — thereby reframing the Oedipus complex as myth rather than clinical universal.

     It is through this something lost that at least some bit of enjoyment ought to be restored to him - precisely surplus enjoying.

180. #180

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     see emerging this o-object that we have pinpointed as surplus enjoying... The Master was satisfied with this little tithe, with a surplus enjoying

181. #181

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that repetition—rooted in the pursuit of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle—necessarily produces a loss (entropy), and it is precisely at the site of this lost enjoyment that the lost object (objet petit a) and knowledge as a formal apparatus of enjoyment originate; the unary trait is redeployed from Freud as the minimal mark that simultaneously founds the signifier and introduces surplus-jouissance.

     working knowledge produces, let us say an entropy... when the signifier is introduced as an apparatus of enjoyment, we have no reason then to be surprised to see appearing something that is related to entropy.

182. #182

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is constitutively grounded in loss/entropy, and that this structural gap—formalized as surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust)—is what drives knowledge as a means of enjoyment, necessitating the Four Discourses as its articulation; simultaneously, truth is identified not with full-saying but with half-saying, its essence being the concealed fact of castration/impotence, which redefines the analyst's position and the analytic act.

     This is why I initially introduced the term Mehrlust, surplus enjoying. It is precisely because it is glimpsed in the dimension of loss that something requires there to be compensated

183. #183

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **ANALYTICON** > **X:** You mean a relative deafness.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Vincennes "Analyticon" confrontation to demonstrate in vivo how the Four Discourses operate: the University discourse produces students as surplus-value/Objet petit a, the Hysteric's discourse enabled the Marxian discovery of historical symptoms, and the gap/incompleteness structurally irreducible to each discourse refutes any totality ("nothing is all").

     Last year when I made the effort to announce something called From an Other to the other, I said that it was the place revealed, designated by Marx as surplus value. You are the products of the University. The surplus value is you.

184. #184

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     *[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to demonstrate the structural logic of the Discourse of the Hysteric: the hysteric maintains an alienated relation to the master-signifier (the idealised father) precisely by refusing to surrender knowledge and by orienting desire around the Other's enjoyment rather than her own, thereby unmasking the master's function while remaining in solidarity with it.

     the loss of enjoyment from which we extract the function of surplus enjoying

185. #185

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > X: *Where then do you place the proletarian?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions the proletarian structurally in the place of the big Other—the place where knowledge no longer carries weight—arguing that proletarian exploitation is not merely economic but constitutes a stripping of the function of knowledge, and raises the question of whether manual know-how can still function as a subversive force in a world dominated by objectified science.

     these little things, gadgets and things, which for the moment occupy the same space as us

186. #186

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.263

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic as a foil to show that the Master Signifier is constitutively tied to the impossibility of mastery, and that the Real—defined as the impossible—cannot be reached through truth alone; this structural impossibility is what the discourse of the master conceals and what analytic discourse uniquely allows us to articulate.

     production has not in any case any relationship with the truth. You can do whatever you want, you can say whatever you want, you can try to connect this production with needs, which are needs that are forged, there is nothing to be done.

187. #187

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

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     to posit oneself as the residue of the effect of language, as the one who ensures that, from enjoying, the language effect only extracts what the last time I stated about the entropy of a surplus enjoying

188. #188

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVII by introducing the Four Discourses as a formal apparatus derived from a quarter-turn operation on the algebraic chain (S1, S2, $, a), and articulates the foundational claim that 'knowledge is the enjoyment of the Other', linking repetition, the lost object, and the death drive to the structural limits of the subject within discourse.

     This other, the little other, with its famous the, was what we designated at this level, that of algebra, which is a signifying structure, as the o-object.

189. #189

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces and distinguishes the Four Discourses (Master, Hysteric, Analyst, University) by identifying the structural "dominant" place each discourse organizes around — locating the objet petit a as what occupies the dominant place in the Discourse of the Analyst — while simultaneously critiquing how University discourse systematically reverses his formula ("language is the condition of the unconscious") and thus distorts analytic discourse.

     in the discourse of the Master, the o is precisely identifiable to what emerged from a hard-working thought, that of Marx; namely, what was involved, symbolically and really, in the function of surplus value.

190. #190

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility structuring each of the Four Discourses is grounded in the problem of surplus-jouissance: ancient thought (Aristotle, Stoics) could not account for it, Hegel re-staged it, Marx made it calculable as surplus-value thereby stabilising the Master Signifier, while the University discourse symptomatically produces the student as objet petit a — miscarriage of the cause of desire. The key to any revolutionary step lies not in the subject but in questioning what enjoyment is, a question made possible only by the entry of the signifier and its mark of death.

     This surplus enjoying that I articulated this year and that I put at the beginning as a support, is a construction and even a reconstruction, but it seems to me to be important. It is a truer support.

191. #191

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the Real Father as a structural-logical operator defined by impossibility: as the agent (not the performer) of castration, the Real Father is constitutively an effect of language, not a psychological or empirical figure, and the impossibility he embodies is precisely what generates the master signifier through the repetitive failure of demand, producing surplus-jouissance as loss.

     Language only obtains it by insisting to the point of producing the loss by which surplus enjoying is embodied.

192. #192

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     **ANALYTICON**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that within the University discourse, students are not subjects but Objet petit a — irreducible residual objects, tolerated as credits/surplus-value — and that the Discourse of the Master persists not through force but through the structural power of the Master Signifier, which has progressively absorbed the apparatus of knowledge (science), thereby sustaining capitalist surplus-value extraction.

     You are predestined, whatever you may wish, in this little mechanism, to play the same role of everything that is involved as o-object in capitalist society, namely, to function as surplus value... it is one thing to be an incarnated surplus value and something else to be a countable surplus value.

193. #193

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic discourse reveals a single foundational affect—the subject's capture as object in discourse—and that this, rather than dialectical ontology, is the proper frame for rereading the Cartesian cogito, the Master Signifier, castration, and the impossibility of the sexual relation, all grounded in the unary trait as language's inaugural effect.

     If I try to name it as surplus enjoying, this is only a system of nomenclature. What object is constructed by the effect of a certain discourse? We know nothing about this object except that it is the cause of desire.

194. #194

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's pleasure-principle economy as a "hyper-hedonism" in which jouissance is structurally produced by discourse rather than being a natural fact, and introduces surplus-jouissance as the impossible-real effect that the emerging discourse of the unconscious names but cannot simply realise.

     finally there can appear to us the relief of this effect of discourse that up to then appeared to us as impossible, namely, surplus enjoying

195. #195

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that there is no sexual relationship because sexuality at the level of discourse is constituted as semblance, with surplus-jouissance (not biology) as its operative term; the phallus functions as the signifier of sexual enjoyment precisely insofar as it is identical with the Name of the Father, and the Oedipus myth is the discourse's necessary fiction for designating the real of an impossible enjoyment.

     it is very precisely what is forbidden to sexual discourse... what Freud encountered... namely, that he advances things to the point that they concern us on the plane of truth

196. #196

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.5

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVIII by arguing that discourse is a structure irreducible to any speaking subject, that the subject is necessarily alienated and split within it, and that the question of "a discourse that might not be a semblance" can only be posed from within the artefact of discourse itself — there being no metalanguage, no Other of the Other, and no true of the true from which to judge it.

     what this presence signifies, I would pinpoint as a pressurised surplus enjoying (plus-de-jouir presse).

197. #197

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language occupies the gap left open by the phallus in the place of the sexual relationship, substituting a law of desire/prohibition for any mathematical relation between the sexes; this move is theoretically grounded in Peirce's logical schema to establish that there is no universal of Woman (not-all), while the phallus-as-instrument is posited as the "cause" (not origin) of language, and the truth—like the unconscious—sustains contradictory positions that only become paradoxical when written.

     the desire of the man, as I have just said, is linked to its cause, which is surplus enjoying

198. #198

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Chinese concepts of *hsing* (nature) and *ming* (heavenly decree) from Meng-Tzu as theoretical coordinates to triangulate the elusive status of surplus-jouissance, arguing that neither 'nature' nor decree adequately locates what psychoanalysis (via Freud's discovery of the symptom) must grasp, and that linguistics—understood as a deliberately fabricated metaphor—can model for us how to sustain a metaphor without neutralizing its action.

     there is no kind of chance that we will find it in this thing that requires great cunning to get, to get a close hold of, which is called the surplus enjoying. If it is so slippery, that does not make it easy to get one's hands on it.

199. #199

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan designates the unnamed "top-left" place in the Four Discourses as the place of the *semblance*, establishing that the semblance is not the contrary of truth but its strictly correlative dimension (*demansion*), and that scientific discourse reaches the real only through the algebraic articulation of semblance—where the real appears as the impossible hole in that semblance.

     when surplus enjoying occupies it, I speak about the discourse of the Analyst... the o, in so far as it is directly a consequence of the discourse of the master

200. #200

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is irreducibly metaphorical—the referent is always "real" precisely because it is ungraspable—and uses this to ground both surplus-jouissance (whose support is metonymy) and psychoanalysis's relationship to linguistics: psychoanalysis does not borrow from linguistics but rather moves within the same constitutive metaphoricity, with surplus-jouissance functioning as the sliding metonymic object that keeps discourse in motion.

     the only interesting thing, is what happens in the performance, it is the production of surplus enjoying, of yours and of the one that you impute to me when you reflect.

201. #201

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: Language has only one Bedeutung — the phallus — because it is constituted from the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship; writing provides the "bone" that jouissance lacks, and the semblance that structures discourse is irreducibly phallic, meaning sexual enjoyment forever remains barred from the field of truth.

     for metonymy, from which they take the x little bit of reality that remains to them, under the form of surplus

202. #202

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.178

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every discourse is structured as a semblance, and that the four discourses—particularly analytic discourse—circle around the fundamental impossibility of the sexual relationship, a void that is managed (but never resolved) through the composition of jouissance and castration; surplus-jouissance, as the Freudian analogue of Marxian surplus value, names the point where the semblance of discourse is anchored to this constitutive gap.

     this exposure reverts back to a questioning about this something which may be more original... what I articulated under the term of surplus enjoying, refers you to what is questioned in the Freudian discourse as putting in question the relationship of something which is articulated properly speaking and anew as a truth, in opposition to a semblance

203. #203

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of a Mencian formula on language and nature to argue that what emerges from the effects of discourse is nothing other than the function of cause insofar as it is surplus-jouissance (li/profit), while also positioning writing as the indirect but constitutive reference for language, against logical-positivist demands for graspable meaning.

     as regards the effects of discourse, as regards what is under the heavens, what emerges from it is nothing other than the function of the cause, in so far as it is surplus enjoying

204. #204

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     accommodate yourselves.

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.

     what is here in my tetrad, the semblance, the truth and enjoyment and the surplus enjoying - I don't have to rewrite it on the board, do I?

205. #205

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that discourse is always discourse of semblance, and that the Four Discourses—grounded in the tetrad of semblance, truth, enjoyment, and surplus-jouissance—are held together not by their content but by the formal necessity of the number four and its vectors; the analytic discourse is distinguished by placing the objet petit a in the position of semblance, thereby intervening in the gap between body and discourse.

     enjoyment, about the truth, about the semblance and surplus enjoying as constituting here the foundation, the ground

206. #206

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     accommodate yourselves.

     Theoretical move: Through Recanati's intervention on Peirce, the passage argues that the universal quantifier cannot stand alone but requires a prior inscription of inexistence (negation as function), and that the repetition of inscribed inexistence—not bare inexistence—grounds logical and mathematical structures; this move aligns Peirce's logic of the continuous with Lacan's concerns about the Not-all and the grounding of the universal.

     in a distortion of a disk on its edge, at least one point escapes the distortion which authorises it, by this fact even to escape it

207. #207

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops the formulas of sexuation—specifically the not-all (pas toute) and the logic of the at-least-one exception—to articulate woman's mode of presence as "between centre and absence," a jouissance that exceeds the phallic function without negating it, while diagnosing Hegelian dialectics and Marxist discourse as structurally blind to the surplus-jouissance drawn from the real of the Master's discourse.

     what leaves a shadow of meaning in Hegel's discourse, is an absence, and very precisely this absence of surplus value as it is drawn from the enjoyment in the real of the discourse of the Master.

208. #208

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the unary trait (support of imaginary identification via the mirror stage) from the *Yad'lun* (there-is-One), while arguing that the Not-all grounds both the crowd and the question of Woman; he then re-situates the Subject Supposed to Know as a pleonasm pointing to the analyst's legitimate occupation of the position of semblance with respect to jouissance.

     the spectator, I mean that of the ancient stage, should find in it his community surplus enjoying, for himself. This indeed is what gives the cinema its value for us.

209. #209

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan substitutes Peirce's schema with his own articulation of analytic discourse, identifying the *objet petit a* as the sole representamen in analysis — the analyst embodies this object as semblance/waste-product so that the analysand can be born to interpreting speech; the passage closes by reframing the analytic relation as fraternal brotherhood rooted in shared subjection to discourse, while warning that bodily fraternity without symbolic mediation gives rise to racism.

     the suspension of the relationship of the body to enjoyment...desire which for its part depends on surplus enjoying, is not going to be for all that put in brackets.

210. #210

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (the non-orientable surface) to argue that castration is structurally ubiquitous—present at every point of the relational surface between man and woman—and then anchors this topological claim to the Four Discourses, showing that the mathemes ($, S1, S2, a) constitute the logical "walls" behind which enjoyment, surplus-enjoyment, truth, and semblance must be situated.

     truth and semblance, enjoyment, surplus enjoyment

211. #211

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the analytic discourse operates by reproducing neurosis through a model that isolates the master signifier, and that psychoanalysis differs from ideology only insofar as it maps out, rather than veils, the jouissance organised by the signifier's positional effects in a discourse.

     linked to the norms of surplus enjoying, namely, of what is measurable.

212. #212

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a localized object but the very tetrahedral structure of the four discourses, and that each discourse constitutively prevents its own agent from comprehending it — the analyst included — because it is castration (as a gap) that guarantees the Real from which all discourse stems.

     a gallant little wretch from the university who finds that my statements on truth, the semblance, enjoyment and the surplus enjoying, to be formalistic

213. #213

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > Pascal's Triangle

     Theoretical move: By working through Pascal's triangle and set theory (the empty set as element, pure difference as sameness), Lacan argues that the One operative in analytic theory is not the One of similitude/Platonic universality but the One of pure difference that grounds repetition — the S1 produced at the level of surplus-jouissance in the analytic discourse.

     what is produced and what I designate at the level described as that of surplus enjoying, is that Si, namely, a signifying production

214. #214

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan situates the psychoanalyst's complex, horror-laden relationship to knowledge as the central theoretical problem, arguing that the discourse of the analyst places its practitioner in a structurally difficult position where knowledge about truth—mapped onto the four-discourse schema—is simultaneously perceived and repudiated, with foreclosure (Verwerfung) operating not only in psychosis but as a rationally legitimated social force.

     this that of surplus enjoying that I am writing in shorthand here: '+ de-jouir'.

215. #215

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the tetrahedron to ground the Four Discourses as a structural necessity derived from the properties of four points in space, then pivots to the question of the function of speech as the unique form of action that posits itself as truth—establishing the epistemological basis for the knowledge of the psychoanalyst.

     these four poles that I am stating with the terms of truth, of semblance, of enjoyment and of surplus enjoying.

216. #216

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     VI > VII

     Theoretical move: The passage uses information theory (Shannon/Bell Telephone) and thermodynamics to reframe the pleasure principle as a principle of cessation rather than gratification, and then distinguishes human repetition — driven by failure, fixation, and the wrong form — from animal adaptation, arguing that psychoanalytic experience reveals a radical discordance irreducible to learning, adaptation, or any harmonious developmental anthropology.

     If Maxwell's demon can stop the atoms which move too slowly, and keep only those which have a tendency to be a little on the frantic side, he will cause the general level of the energy to rise again

217. #217

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)* > **Knowledge and truth**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that knowledge is grounded in the Other as a locus of the signifier, and that its true nature lies in the identity between the jouissance of its acquisition and its exercise — not in exchange value but in use — while the analyst, by placing objet petit a in the place of semblance, is uniquely positioned to investigate truth as knowledge; this culminates in a meditation on the not-all, the Other's not-knowing, and the link between jealouissance, the gaze, and das Ding as the kernel of the neighbor.

     Here we encounter in a sure manner, surer than in Marx's own work, the true nature of use value, since in Marx's work use value serves only as an ideal point in relation to exchange value, to which everything is reduced.

218. #218

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

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural articulation between writing, jouissance, and the Real: what is written encodes the conditions of jouissance, the Other must be barred (S(Ø)) because it is founded on the One-missing, and mathematization alone can reach a Real that is not fantasy — identified ultimately as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious.

     Isn't it by joining that a-sexual up with what she has by way of surplus jouissance - being, as she is, the Other, since she can only be said to be Other - that woman offers it to man in the guise of object a?

219. #219

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **II** > To Jakobson

     Theoretical move: Lacan carves out "linguistricks" (linguisterie) as a domain distinct from Jakobson's linguistics proper, arguing that the consequences of "the unconscious is structured like a language" exceed linguistics and belong to a separate field grounded in the psychoanalytic discourse; he then deploys the Four Discourses to show that love—as opposed to jouissance of the Other—is the sign of a shift between discourses, with the emergence of analytic discourse marking every such transition.

     a, surplus jouissance … truth … production

220. #220

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **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.

     I cannot withdraw and simply say encore and the fact that it goes on is stupidity because I myself obviously collaborate in it.

221. #221

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's discourse is uniquely positioned to examine the truth of knowledge by placing the objet petit a in the place of semblance; he then develops a theory of knowledge as grounded in the Other (as locus of the signifier), where knowledge must be 'paid for' through use/enjoyment rather than exchange, and where the Letter reproduces without reproducing the same being—culminating in the claim that the Other's structural not-knowing constitutes the not-all, linking feminine sexuality, unconscious, and castration.

     surer than in Marx himself, what is involved in use value. Since moreover in Marx, it is only there to act as an ideal point as compared to exchange value in which everything is summed up.

222. #222

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.102

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 7: Tuesday 11 March 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Names-of-the-Father as identical to the RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), argues that the phallus furnishes the consistency of the Real while enjoyment ek-sists with respect to it, and situates naming/the Borromean knot as the structural answer to the philosophical impasse between realism and nominalism about language and the Real.

     That is judged by the surplus-enjoying (plus-de-jouir) as production.

223. #223

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topology — particularly the distinction between ek-sistence (the track/cycle) and the hole — as the operative figure for primordial repression (Urverdrängt), arguing that the difficulty of mentally grasping the knot is itself the trace of an irreducible, foundational repression, and that the inexistence of the sexual relationship is not a failure but the very structure knotted into being.

     Just as surplus enjoying comes from the père-version, from the a-per-(e)-itive version of enjoying.

224. #224

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Real as fundamentally unbound and orientating-without-meaning, distinguishes a more radical foreclosure than that of the Name-of-the-Father, and ties the Death Drive to the Real itself, while the matheme (and the Borromean knot as topological device) are offered as instruments for reaching "bits of Real" that resist symbolic embroidery.

     the status starting from the pretence (faire semblant) of the little o-object

225. #225

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     So then what is this lack?

     Theoretical move: The passage maps a four-moment dialectical circuit of the drive (using music as its privileged illustration) in which the subject's repeated failure to encounter the objet petit a gradually confirms its radical impossibility, ultimately enabling a leap "through the fantasy" toward an ecstatic, desexualised Other jouissance that Lacan identifies with sublimation – and which constitutes the terminal point of the analytic process beyond ordinary surplus-jouissance.

     the nature of the enjoyment to which one can accede at the end of the journey is not at all on the side of a 'surplus enjoying'

226. #226

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Two lines of numbers**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topology of the Real grounded in writing, arguing that (1) the Real is only accessible through writing as artifice, (2) the torus—unlike the sphere—introduces a structural asymmetry and equivocation between inside/outside and hole/rod that models the living body and sexuality, and (3) the Borromean knot's necessary alternation formalizes the non-relation, with zero as hole and one as consistency providing an arithmetic analogue for chain-topology.

     everything that Freud says about the witticism is quite notorious as being linked to this economy which is writing, economy as compared to speech.

227. #227

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.22

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's biologistic and adaptationist framework by showing that the object's function is not complementary satisfaction but a defensive structure against fundamental anxiety—exemplified by the phobic object and the fetish—and proposes that the essential difference between phobia and fetish (both responses to castration anxiety) must be grasped through a rigorous structural analysis of the object, not through developmental mythology.

     the notion of the fetish object and, if you like, the screen object… the notion of fetish in Marxist theory by an altogether coterminous, though not synonymous, term, namely the fetish

228. #228

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     *UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**

     Theoretical move: By duplicating the Graph of Desire to incorporate the Other as a parallel subject-system, Lacan formalizes the conditions under which a Witz succeeds: the Other must share the same signifying chain (be "of like mind"), and the comic/naive works by evoking a primal lack of inhibition that mirrors the metonymic captivation structuring the joke's mechanism.

     the beyond that it evokes - to the Other we are telling it to and who is himself already fascinated by this absence of inhibition.

229. #229

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the domain of the good is not reducible to utilitarian use-value but is fundamentally structured by power—the capacity to deprive others—which erects the first barrier against desire; jouissance introduces a surplus that splits the good from mere utility, and the depriving agent is revealed to be an imaginary function (the little other), not a real one.

     In all this wealth finally - whatever its correlative in poverty there is from the beginning something other than use value. There is its jouissance use.

230. #230

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates as the elision of a signifier in the signifying chain—i.e., as constitutive forgetting—and uses this to ground an account of the good that refuses to reduce reality to a mere corrective of the pleasure principle, insisting instead that reality is produced through pleasure and that goods (exemplified by cloth/textile as a signifier) are structured from the beginning as signifiers, not natural objects of need.

     this cloth has time value. That's what distinguishes it from any form of natural production... it is use value, time value; it is a reservoir of needs; it is there whether one needs it or not

231. #231

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade as a limit-figure who, in his theory (if not his fantasy), points toward the genuine space of the neighbor as irreducibly other — beyond imaginary capture by the fellow-man — and thereby illuminates the structure of jouissance, transgression, and the ethical problem of loving one's neighbor as oneself.

     The security of jouissance for the rich in our time is greatly increased by what I will call the universal legislation of work.

232. #232

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral and anal stages must be understood through the structural distinction between need, demand, and desire—where desire emerges as a gap or negation irreducible to need's satisfaction—and uses the anal stage to demolish the myth of "oblativity," revealing that anal desire is constituted by the subject's identification with the excremental object (objet a) and its symbolic evacuation, which grounds the obsessional's fundamental fantasy.

     Sexual libido is indeed a surplus, but a surplus that renders vain any satisfaction of need wherever libido is situated.

233. #233

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *PAUSANIAS*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pausanias's speech in the *Symposium* as a "psychology of the rich" — an ethics of love structured entirely around the valuation, investment, and capitalization of the beloved as a good — and uses this reading to argue that any ethics which reduces love to outward signs of value inevitably produces illusion, thereby distancing Plato himself from Pausanias's position.

     The first duty of the rich in primitive societies is to spend money on luxuries. It is quite strange that, as societies evolve, this duty seems to shift to a secondary or at least clandestine level.

234. #234

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     It is not my point of view. I didn r mention religion.

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two registers of the real: the symptomatic real (how the real impinges on living/speaking beings) and the scientific real (accessible through mathematical formulas but producing only 'gadgets'), while grounding the irreducibility of sexual non-relation as the engine of symptomatic proliferation — with wordplay (foi/foire/forum) serving not as decoration but as the very key to psychoanalytic method.

     It eats us up, but it eats us up by means of things that it stirs up in us. It is no accident that television devours us.

235. #235

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.99

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive—understood as a drive toward loss, self-destruction, and repetition of originary absence—is the foundational structure of both subjectivity and sociality, with sacrifice, love, and political bonds all grounded in shared nothingness rather than positive satisfaction; the emancipated subject is thus one who avows hopelessness rather than seeking untainted enjoyment.

     When we sacrifce more, we value the thing more. If I have to work more for something, then I think it's more valuable. I think that all that is tied to this logic of sacrifce and the death drive.

236. #236

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

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

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

     The fundamental minus, the ontological lack-of being is nowhere to be encountered directly. We are alerted to it by the surplus, by excessive positivity (say the symptoms made of surplus enjoyment).

237. #237

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.138

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that psychoanalysis uniquely enables access to the structural causes of suffering by attending to the signifier rather than pre-established therapeutic schemas; suppression of the unconscious through positive-thinking regimes or pharmaceuticals does not eliminate its content but forecloses it, producing a return of the Real — a logic she homologizes to the climate crisis as a structural surplus-waste problem.

     the idea prevailed of a productive use of pretty much everything; and the waste pilling up as the other side of this productive use was simply dismissed, or cut off

238. #238

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.156

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

     there is a sound surplus which does not make sense, it is there just like that, for the fun of it, for the beauty of it, for the pleasure of it

239. #239

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.80

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice structurally resists 'disacousmatization': its source is constitutively concealed, meaning ventriloquism is not an exception but the very condition of voice as object—the voice emerges precisely in the void from which it supposedly stems, operating as both surplus-of-body and no-more-body (plus-de-corps), and thus as the operator of the impossible division between interior and exterior.

     the voice is plus-de-corps: both the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-more-body, the end of the corporeal, the spirituality of the corporeal

240. #240

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.210

     Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

     there is what Eric Santner... has called 'undeadness' and 'surplus-animation,' the animation which sustains the vicious circle of transgression and guilt

241. #241

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.17

     A Voice and Nothing More

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces the voice as a third object irreducible to either its function as a vehicle of meaning or as an aesthetic fetish, arguing that psychoanalysis alone can sustain fidelity to this "object voice" — a surplus effect that escapes both interpellation and aesthetic sublimation.

     it is as if the effect could emancipate itself from its mechanical origin, and start functioning as a surplus—indeed, as the ghost in the machine; as if there were an effect without a proper cause, an effect surpassing its explicable cause

242. #242

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.39

     A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-linguistic voice (laughter, singing) is neither simply outside linguistic structure nor fully captured by it, and that the singing voice's apparent surplus-meaning is a structural fantasy/illusion that functions as a fetish disavowing castration—the very condition that gives the voice its fascination. The object voice (objet petit a) is precisely what aesthetic or religious idealization of the voice conceals.

     The voice appears as the surplus-meaning.

243. #243

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.111

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies an irreducible ambiguous position between the ethical and the perverse: the ethical voice is pure enunciation without statement (demanding the subject supply the statement/act), while the superego is a "fat voice" that fills this void with positive content, guilt, and transgressive enjoyment — yet neither exhausts the voice, which always marks a void in both the subject and the Other. The chapter then opens onto the political dimension by following Aristotle's division between mere voice (phone) and speech (logos) as the foundation of the political.

     this apparent indulgence will only strengthen the law and endow it with 'surplus-authority.' The Other rules all the more through the transgressions of its rule which seemingly undermine it

244. #244

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.71

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice—a voice whose source cannot be seen or located—is shown to structurally produce effects of divinity, authority, and uncanny presence (Unheimlichkeit) by separating the voice from its body, and this mechanism operates through a fantasy-encirclement of the enigmatic object behind the screen, linking the acousmatic to the Voice as Lacanian object.

     it was the voice itself which acquired authority and surplus-meaning by virtue of the fact that its source was concealed

245. #245

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.90

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: The voice, as object of the drive, operates through a constitutive asymmetry of incorporation and expulsion that makes it extimate—belonging to neither interior nor exterior—and this same structural topology grounds the intimate connection between voice and conscience that has animated the ethical tradition.

     There is a too-much of the voice in the exterior … and there is a too-much of the voice stemming from the inside

246. #246

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.216

     Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

     he is indulging in this very Christian form of 'surplus-enjoyment,' this thwarted—and hence irresistible form of enjoyment in transgression and culpabilization.

247. #247

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.14

     Read My Desire

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's reduction of society to immanent relations of power and knowledge constitutes a historicism that undermines his own best insights about a 'surplus existence' that escapes predication—an insight whose Lacanian inflection (the non-existence of 'The' woman, the 'il y a') Copjec identifies and defends against Foucault's own anti-linguistic turn.

     the notion of an existence without predicate, or, to put it differently, of a surplus existence that cannot be caught up in the positivity of the social.

248. #248

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.124

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion (specifically fetishism) inverts the structure of fantasy: where the neurotic subject constitutes itself in relation to the object a as an externalized image of loss, the pervert positions himself as the object a in its real form, becoming the instrument of the Other's enjoyment rather than a desiring subject—and Clerambault's fetishistic photographs thereby expose, rather than obscure, the utilitarian fantasy's dependence on the supposition of an obscene Other jouissance.

     the pleasure of the Other is 'very subtly' affirmed and denied when, in the utilitarian fantasy, it is retroactively posited as cause of the subject's desire. This simultaneous affirmation and denial is what splits the subject of the fantasy.

249. #249

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.210

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, first, that film noir's visual techniques and the femme fatale figure both function as failed symbolic defenses against the drive/jouissance; and second, pivoting to Butler's Gender Trouble, that the sex-as-substance vs. sex-as-signification binary is inadequate because it smuggles in an imaginary (complementary) conception of sexual difference, which Lacanian sexuation can displace.

     the femme fatale's greed, her constant demand for more and more satisfaction. The more the hero devotes himself to procuring it for her, the more she delights in hoarding it.

250. #250

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.241

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure > The Male Side: Dynamical Failure

     Theoretical move: The male/dynamical side of the sexuation formulas resolves the antinomial impasse not by finding a metalanguage but by subtracting being from the universe it forms: existence is posited as the limit-concept that closes the set, yet being as such escapes the concept, rendering the universe complete but ontologically incomplete. This structural move is shown to parallel both Kant's dynamical antinomies and Freud's account of negation and reality-testing, where a negative judgment anchors perception to a lost real object.

     A surplus, because illegitimate, affirmation of existence burdened each statement. On the dynamical side, this surplus is subtracted from the phenomenal field and-we can look at it this way-it is this subtraction that installs the limit.

251. #251

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.198

     Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

     Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.

     An excess of pleasure, a private enjoyment, seems to adhere in the act of speaking as such, as Neff contents himself, beyond the content of the message, with the act itself.

252. #252

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.206

     Locked RoomILonely Room

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's characteristic "lonely room" architecture — depopulated, emptied of desire and interpretability — is the spatial correlative of the drive's displacement of the big Other: where classical detection produces an infinite interpretable space (the locked room), noir produces a space of pure being, where the intrusion of objet petit a (the grain of the voice, private jouissance) into the phenomenal public field depletes rather than enriches social reality, and the hero's choice of jouissance over the signifying network yields a satisfying "nothing."

     it is precisely this nothing that satisfies. And therein lies the problem, the potential fatality of this choice.

253. #253

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.171

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern democratic subject is constituted not by power's self-guaranteeing omniscience (Foucault) but by a structural lack of knowledge in the Other: because power cannot certify the subject, a surplus of meaning escapes social recognition, and it is precisely this conflict—including the irruption of jouissance—that both constitutes democratic subjectivity and prevents its totalisation.

     there is necessarily a surplus of meaning in the subject, an excess for which the Other cannot account

254. #254

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.140

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

     the object which 'completes' the subject, filling in its lack, is also always a disfiguring surplus

255. #255

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.117

     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 surplus pleasure, the useless jouissance that the voluminous cloth was supposed to veil

256. #256

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud elaborates narcissism as the economic ground of self-feeling, arguing that the ego's libidinal economy—structured by the tension between primary narcissism, ego-ideal, and object-cathexes—determines both psychic health and the dynamics of love, repression, and social feeling (guilty conscience as displaced homosexual libido).

     Non-gratification resulting from non-fulfilment of this ideal releases homosexual libido, which converts into guilty conscience (social fear).

257. #257

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Ethics and love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love exceeds and fulfils ethics by functioning as a radical surplus beyond rule-following, and that scripture should be read as an open, ever-renewed encounter rather than a closed ethical rulebook - a theological critique of foundationalist ethics in favour of a "law of love" as the only genuine foundation.

     love says, 'I will do more than is required.' If, for instance, it was the right thing to do to buy a flower on Valentine's Day for your beloved, then love says, 'I will buy more than one.' Love is never satisfied by what is required but must always do more.

258. #258

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.44

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *The Call of Character*

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes two faces of surplus drive-energy (undeadness): one that locks the subject into hegemonic symbolic investitures (the "vampire") and one that ruptures sociality and summons the subject to its singular jouissance (the "daimon/miracle"), arguing that psychoanalytic practice is precisely the site where the latter can be cultivated by attending to the eccentric, unsaid, and idiosyncratic pulse of the signifier.

     between liberating and symptomatic forms of surplus energy... they represent two different forms of interpellation, two different forms of being compelled by something 'bigger' than the self

259. #259

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.152

     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.

     From Viagra to Deepak Chopra, we are told that there are ways to improve the quality of our lives, yet the improvement in question often remains elusive, so that we end up expending our energies in a futile attempt to catch up with satisfactions that forever flee us.

260. #260

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.53

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as fate-defining precisely because it gives the repetition compulsion its content, sutures the subject's lack, fills the gaps of the big Other, and thereby embeds jouissance within normative ideological structures—dissolving fantasy is therefore recast as a rare existential act of rewriting psychic destiny and reclaiming singularity.

     the surplus vitality of our drives tends to seek relief by cathecting to sociofantasmatic zones of legitimacy that stabilize its otherwise unmanageable force

261. #261

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.135

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Singularity as a Social Phenomenon*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity is not an asocial eruption of the real but a social phenomenon produced by creatively linking the sinthome (the inexorable real in the subject) with the signifier, such that the rebellious energies of the real become the very engine of symbolic innovation—and this reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion.

     the excess ('too muchness') of the drives can become the basis for the excess ('overabundance') of meaning.

262. #262

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.237

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *3. The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical architecture of the chapter by elaborating the sinthome as the singular limit of analysis beyond interpretation, articulating the act as an annihilating break with fantasy and the future, and positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction to act in conformity with desire rather than serve the 'service of goods'.

     offering a constant access to their surplus of jouissance

263. #263

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.235

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *2. The Rewriting of Destiny*

     Theoretical move: This passage, constituted by scholarly endnotes, theorizes the constitutive incoherence of the big Other (barred, lacking any Other of the Other), the pre-symbolic law of the mother as foundational subjection, the distinction between classical and modern tragedy as forms of destined versus destituted subjectivity, and the analytic end-point as confrontation with helplessness and the absence of a Sovereign Good — all articulating how drive, fantasy, and the real internally limit symbolic consistency.

     If life includes a dimension of 'too much,' then being in the midst of life will of necessity involve a mode of tarrying with this unassumable excess rather than repetitively and compulsively defending against it

264. #264

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.189

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Narcissism as an Ethical Failure*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic desire constitutes an ethical failure precisely because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, which Lacanian ethics requires one to confront as the Real dimension of the other — including its traumatic jouissance — rather than reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness.

     if I am haunted by a surplus animation that agitates me while simultaneously lending a thrilling singularity to my being

265. #265

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.47

     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.

     it asks us to allow ourselves to be swayed by aspirations that may lead to thoroughly awkward displays of surplus ardor, passion, and (post-theological) devotion.

266. #266

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.257

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Conclusion: The Other as Face*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical apparatus of the chapter's argument about the neighbor/Other, drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Badiou to negotiate the tension between singularity, universality, and the traumatic jouissance of the Other as the ethical crux of love and politics.

     At its most radical level, violence is precisely an endeavour to strike a blow at this unbearable surplus-enjoyment contained in the Other

267. #267

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.70

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Possibility for New Possibilities*

     Theoretical move: Lacanian analysis is theorized as a process that dismantles fantasy-generated fixity—the unconscious reproduction of the Other's desire as one's own—and converts symptomatic repetition into a more fluid, singular capacity for desire, where the goal is not happiness but the tolerance of anxiety and the opening of new existential possibilities.

     fantasies that seek to artificially contain the surplus of the drives make us defensive . . . their disbanding represents a revitalizing upsurge of fresh energy that summons us to our character

268. #268

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

     meeting the irreducible alterity of the other entails bringing my nonrelational (asocial) surplus into a bizarre kind of 'relation' with the other's equally nonrelational surplus

269. #269

     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.

     sublimation can saturate an ordinary object with the radiance of the Thing. This is why the fictions we fashion, the substitute satisfactions we endow with special significance, hold such value for us.

270. #270

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.103

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *Fidelity to the Event*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event requires the subject to sustain a retroactive truth-process through the "unknown," tolerating disorientation and working through it toward "ethical consistency"; this fidelity is theorized as an uncoupling of the drive from its normatively determined destiny, opening genuinely new existential possibilities.

     the congealed surplus agitation or overanimation that haunts the subject as a result of its normative seduction by the enigmatic signifiers of the Other

271. #271

     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.

     The 'surplus satisfaction' we get from a lover or a dear friend (as opposed to a mere acquaintance) arises precisely from this split between what 'is' and what is 'more than.'

272. #272

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.14

     *Introduction*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian subjectivity involves a tripartite negotiation of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers, and proposes "singularity" as a concept specifically aligned with the real — a non-symbolizable surplus of being that exceeds all social categories and persists beyond the subject's symbolic and imaginary supports, distinguished from both subjectivity (symbolic) and personality (imaginary).

     This 'peculiar surplus of insistence over existence' agitates the subject with a relentless urgency, pressure, or necessity that overflows its symbolic mandate.

273. #273

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.175

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Upside of Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety and singularity are structurally linked through the surplus energies of the Real, and that sublimation functions as Lacan's more rigorous answer to Heidegger's existential authenticity: it binds anxiety by welcoming jouissance without being engulfed by it, making anxiety a precondition of creativity rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

     The surplus vitality or 'too muchness' of energy that characterizes human life is at once a source of enormous originality and enormous discomfort.

274. #274

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.33

     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 drives persist as a surplus of enjoyment that continues to bubble up into the symbolic, allowing remnants of the real to seep into the domain of signification

275. #275

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.230

     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 very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder/surplus of jouissance

276. #276

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.147

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Sublimation and the Pleasure Principle*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as the instrument by which the death drive's push toward the Thing is deflected into desire regulated by the pleasure principle: by inserting the signifier between subject and Thing and redirecting drive toward objet a, sublimation makes satisfaction possible while preserving the subject from the annihilating proximity of jouissance, thereby constituting the structural "destiny" of the subject's psychic life.

     It can never entirely contain the excess jouissance of the drives, which is why so many of us end up with the kind of 'too muchness' of energy that periodically overwhelms the pleasure principle and causes anxiety.

277. #277

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.42

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that transcendent experiences function as a counter-interpellation that breaks the hypnotic hold of sociosymbolic investments, thereby releasing congealed drive energies and opening access to subjective singularity — situating this claim at the intersection of Lacanian Real, Santner's theology-inflected post-Lacanian theory, and Althusserian interpellation.

     the release of these energies makes it possible to intervene in that stiffness, 'to convert a rigidity at the very core of one's being . . . into a resource of transformation'

278. #278

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.161

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy is constituted not by power belonging to an anonymous "anyone" (Foucault's self-guaranteeing law) but by a structural lack in the Other—no guarantees, no ultimate markers of certainty—and that this very lack produces the subject's singularity and surplus of meaning, while the enjoyment that emerges from erased certainty is precisely what sustains democratic conflict against totalitarian closure.

     there is necessarily a surplus of meaning in the subject, an excess for which the Other cannot account, that is to say, there is something in the subject that escapes social recognition

279. #279

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.200

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Lethal Jouissance and the Femme Fatale**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's visual techniques (deep-focus, chiaroscuro) and the figure of the femme fatale both function as symbolic defenses against the drive—ersatz substitutes for a genuinely operative symbolic order—and that the femme fatale specifically embodies a contract by which the noir hero surrenders jouissance to an external double, a delegation that proves lethal rather than stabilising because she hoards rather than screens enjoyment.

     explicit reference is made to the femme fatale's greed, her constant demand for more and more satisfaction

280. #280

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.156

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power is structurally blind to totalitarianism because it fails to recognize that the "mild and provident" tutelary power is, in Freudian-Lacanian terms, the ideal father who constitutes himself precisely by interdicting jouissance (expelling objet petit a), and that this interdiction — not discursive multiplicity — is what generates the fantasy of transgression and the eventual return of the despotic primal father in the form of totalitarianism.

     The ideal father—the number-one son in the society of brothers—only affirms, only becomes the principle of the regulation of alliances, by forbidding excess enjoyment, only becomes the principle of knowledge and intelligibility by casting out the object a

281. #281

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.196

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Locked Room/Lonely Room**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir enacts a structural shift from the "locked room" of classical detection (governed by a benevolent-impotent Other that conceals and yields meaning) to the "lonely room" (governed by the drive), where the intrusion of the non-phenomenal private realm—the object a, the grain of the voice—into public space registers not as plenitude but as a depletion of phenomenal reality, so that noir's characteristic emptiness is the positive mark of jouissance overrunning the signifying network.

     Jerry's Market is the result, then, of Neff's choice of private being, jouissance, rather than the signifying network that structures social reality. What he gets is being, but deprived of the inaccessibility that gave it its value; in short, he gets nothing.

282. #282

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.

     Is this not, mutatis mutandis, a clinical version of the colonialist fantasy of a cloth that acted as a barrier to union, of a surplus sexuality?

283. #283

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.187

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

     Theoretical move: Copjec contests standard film noir criticism's equation of the voice-over's "grain" with epistemological failure or masculine malaise, arguing instead that the voice-over marks a radical heterogeneity between speech and image driven by the primacy of jouissance (drive) over desire—a structural excess that refuses reduction to either commentary or social particularity, and which Barthes's "grain of the voice" captures more precisely than Bonitzer's "body of the voice."

     An excess of pleasure, a private enjoyment, seems to adhere in the act of speaking as such, as Neff contents himself, beyond the content of the message, with the act itself.

284. #284

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets**

     Theoretical move: Copjec's introduction argues that Foucault's post-1968 historicism—his reduction of society to immanent relations of power—undermines his own most productive insight (the desubstantialized 'plebness' as an existence without predicate), and that Lacanian theory preserves what Foucault's genealogical turn abandons: a surplus existence that exceeds the positivity of the social.

     the notion of an existence without predicate, or, to put it differently, of a surplus existence that cannot be caught up in the positivity of the social.

285. #285

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.179

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p175" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 175. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian perspective can bridge the anthropological divide between violent (immolatory) and non-violent (votive) forms of sacrifice, and that psychoanalysis—particularly via the death drive—offers a unifying framework for understanding ritual killing as a constitutive moment of human subjectivity; a survey of anthropological theories (Smith, Tylor, Hubert/Mauss, Bataille) prepares the ground for this Lacanian intervention.

     Energy that would otherwise be poured out in a limitless and indefinite exuberance of vitality is harnessed and stabilized in the restricted economy of human artifacts.

286. #286

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.293

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 5. Freudian “Materialism” and the Transcendence of Desire

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian doctrine of the phallus as master signifier, together with the contradictory nature of objet a (split between the imaginary and symbolic registers), explains how the unconscious simultaneously orients desire beyond all imaging and remains tied to the imaginary body — thus Freud's "materialism" is not biological determinism but an account of how natural need is dislocated into drive and desire through the orbit of objet a, making desire structurally "useless" and open to an indefinite range of objects.

     Each stage of libidinal development generates a margin of denatured surplus. This margin of surplus is the dimension of jouissance

287. #287

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.147

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p141" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 141. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Imaginary Alienation

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's concept of the Real functions as a rigorous reformulation of Freud's energetic metaphor (libido/drive), positing the Real as a primitively excluded remainder of imaginary partitioning that can only be encountered obliquely—through anxiety and the disintegration of imaginary coherence—and that the lamelle concretizes this excluded real as the undifferentiated life-drive that haunts the subject after ego-formation.

     a surplus of excitation forever excluded from the system of representations... What is excluded, remaindered, and alienated by the imaginary is in the first place something of the subject's own being, a portion of the vital energies

288. #288

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.126

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > An irreligious religion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic religious fidelity requires a perpetual "faithful betrayal" — God as Real exceeds every conceptual, symbolic, or propositional capture, so that true worship is always a response to an irreducible excess that ruptures any naming or systematisation, including Christianity itself.

     the God who brings us into a new life is never the God we grasp but always in excess of that God

289. #289

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter008.html_page_45"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love operates as a structural excess beyond the law — not as an ethical system that calculates duty but as a force that always already surpasses what the law can command — and pairs this with a parable in which aesthetic appearance (beauty) functions as a concealment that neutralises the symbolic content of a prophetic message.

     If the ethical question is, 'What must be done?' love adds, 'I will do more.'

290. #290

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.87

     Fuzzy Math > **P**⊋**{{***n*+**1},{Ø}}**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a mathematical re-reading of Kierkegaard's "all and nothing" definition of the public, arguing that the public's structure is best captured as the proper superset P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}: an expansive subset of somebodies-turned-nobodies plus an empty subset whose "nothing" is not additive but subtractive, anticipating Badiou's set-theoretic ontology and showing that the public's apparent excess over its own totality is a formation-into-one-of-zero rather than a genuine whole.

     the public includes something else, something in excess of this totality— a surplus of sorts that causes it to continue counting but also, somehow, amounts to 'nothing.'

291. #291

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.17

     Abbreviations in Text Citations > **A Usable Past**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's concept of "chatter" inaugurates an intellectual tradition—continued by Heidegger and Lacan—that identifies everyday talk as a self-perpetuating "means without end," structurally analogous to machine automatism, thereby providing a usable conceptual genealogy for diagnosing digital-age communication pathologies.

     Speakers frequently suspend the pursuit of attainable rhetorical advantage in order to prolong their own utterances— and for no other reason than to prolong their own utterances.

292. #292

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.148

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that comedy and love share a structural affinity organized around a central object that incarnates impossibility rather than enabling desire through inaccessibility; she then distinguishes joke-structure (instantaneous, final satisfaction) from comic-structure (satisfaction that opens and sustains discontinuous continuity), theorizing a specific temporality of the comic as distinct from the punctual logic of the joke.

     Jokes produce all kinds of surprising object-senses, and when they do so, they leave them to hang in the air and slowly die away... A comic sequence, on the other hand, does not leave the surprising, erratic object-sense to die away in the air; rather, it picks it up as a new starting point

293. #293

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.48

     part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy enacts the speculative Hegelian passage from abstract to concrete universality: not by representing the universal through the individual, but by forcing the universal to relate to itself, thereby generating the subject as the gap within substance—a movement she aligns with Lacanian representation and illustrates through Lubitsch and Chaplin.

     the relating that always succeeds either too much or not enough—this is the surplus with which most comic situations and dialogues are built

294. #294

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.104

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic suspense differs from thriller suspense by beginning *after* the catastrophe (an "overrealization"), and that this structural feature is the mechanism by which comedy suspends the big Other, introducing a surplus-object that irreversibly alters the symbolic coordinates when the Other is reinstated — a thesis illustrated through Molière's *Amphitryon* and Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*, where the restored Other is not the same Master but one stripped of its authority.

     it is absent as the symbolic frame of Sense, yet very much present as a surplus-object of nonsense, so to speak

295. #295

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.116

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object functions as the material subsistence of the symbolic Other's suspension, identifying it with objet petit a as a paradoxical "effect-cause" rather than a mere effect, and distinguishes genuine comedy (which produces the Thing as objectified surplus) from derision (which veils the Thing's comedy by prematurely exhibiting its obscene underside). She then extends this to Marivaux, where the comic mechanism operates through pure structural difference rather than surplus-object.

     it consists in correlating the suspension of the Other not with a surplus-object but with a pure difference, difference as inherent to identity.

296. #296

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy and jokes share the mechanism of the point de capiton (quilting point) but differ structurally and temporally: jokes build toward a single retroactive S1, while comedy generates a series of surplus-objects (objet petit a) that function simultaneously as effects and causes of the comic movement, producing a 'staccato fluidity' of continuous discontinuity. Furthermore, jokes operate on two levels—laughing at content and laughing at the contingent, precarious functioning of the signifying order itself—and Freud's forepleasure theory must be supplemented by a reverse mechanism in which tendentious content acts as a smokescreen enabling confrontation with universal nonsense.

     the surplus-satisfaction as object that results from the signifying operation of S1, the corporeal dimension of the signifier existing, in the case of jokes, in the form of laughter

297. #297

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.17

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic subjectivity resides not in any ego or subject but in the irresistible movement of comedy itself, and that this movement — unlike the laughter promoted by contemporary ideology — introduces a cut or non-immediacy into the very feelings and naturalized socioeconomic differences that ideology seeks to smooth over, giving comedy a genuinely subversive (rather than merely ironic-distancing) function.

     the objective surplus, the materialized work itself, is eliminated at the very outset

298. #298

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.131

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Against Bergson's model of comedy as the mechanical encrusting upon pure life, Zupančič argues that life is non-identical with itself—constitutively split—and that the comic works not by extracting mechanism from life but by relating life to itself so that 'pure life' appears as an object; the comic's two-step movement (splitting the imaginary One, then revealing the intrinsic bond between the resulting duality) is driven by the Real as the connective silence that prevents the two terms from becoming fully independent.

     we laugh at the 'miraculous' occurrence of the surplus-sense that was produced from that very failure or nonsense.

299. #299

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.203

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

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

     a coincidence so elegantly expressed in the French term plus-de-jouir, which can have both meanings

300. #300

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.184

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian repetition is neither the Deleuzian affirmation of pure difference nor simple re-presentation, but rather the repetition of the signifying dyad of alienation whose constitutive gap (tyche) produces the Objet petit a as the subject's fleeting self-encounter in the Real — a move that distinguishes Lacan from Deleuze on the question of failure and difference in repetition.

     the failure of repetition itself fails at some point, or, something disturbs the pure failure of repetition: something fleeting, elusive, something perceptible at one moment and gone the next. And this something is what the subject wants to see, again and again.

301. #301

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.143

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that tragedy and comedy are not two attitudes toward the same discrepancy but two structurally distinct standpoints *within* it: tragedy stands at the point of demand (articulating discrepancy as desire), while comedy stands at the point of satisfaction (articulating discrepancy as jouissance/surplus-satisfaction), and this standpoint-difference entails a reversal of temporality in which satisfaction precedes and overtakes demand rather than lagging behind it.

     Not only do we (or the comic characters) not get what we asked for, on top of it (and not instead of it) we get something we haven't even asked for at all.

302. #302

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.103

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic trust (and transference) operates not through knowledge but through a credit extended precisely at the point of the Other's lack, and that the comic suspension of the big Other (as in comedies of mistaken identity) produces a surplus object — "error incorporated" — as a little other that takes the Other's place, revealing that comedy proper pivots not on the Other's failure itself but on the surplus effects that failure generates.

     the comic suspense of the Other functions in such a way that the suspension of the symbolic Other coincides with the surprising appearance of a (small) other: in the form of a double or in the form of a surplus comic object that could be defined (in comedies of error) as 'error incorporated.'

303. #303

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.217

     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.

     there is something in the very constitution of human nature that, so to speak, sexualizes sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus-investment

304. #304

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.200

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the structural core of comedy is not mere bisection but the emergence of a surplus element ("comic object," factor x) from any split of an imaginary One—a logic she grounds in a re-reading of Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium*, where Zeus's second cut (relocating the genitals) introduces surplus-jouissance as the element that perpetually prevents the two halves from fusing back into One, and which Lacan identifies as the essential comic reference to the phallus.

     In the perspective of halves desperately searching for their other halves... not only do we not get what we are searching and longing for, on top of that we get something we haven't even asked for... enjoyment as (originally) surplus-enjoyment

305. #305

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.103

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism is not a non-philosophical system but rather the most abstract social system in history, and that philosophy's task is to dialectically articulate the present by accepting the full consequences of capital's dissolution of solidity—a task requiring Hegel's logic of negativity to read Marx's critique of political economy.

     the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means.

306. #306

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

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

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

     The worker animal is an unnatural animal, and political economy thus transforms man's 'advantage over animals . . . into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.'

307. #307

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.143

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

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

     does capitalism itself not massively rely on unpaid and thereby structurally 'voluntary' labor?

308. #308

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.27

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectical Materialism is Immaterialism**

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that genuine dialectical materialism is paradoxically "immaterialist": it holds that every actual interaction must be sustained by a virtual background (vacuum fluctuations, the big Other, normative structures), and that purely relational virtual entities—though they have no substance of their own—are nonetheless real agents that resist reduction to "really existing" material practices, thereby redefining materialism against both naïve substance-ontology and pure flux/relationism.

     This relational status does not mean that such entities are totally (self-)transparent: they have their own impenetrable In-itself, and we can legitimately debate their hidden destructive potentials.

309. #309

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.158

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Absolute—whether figured as posthuman singularity, communist productivity, or perfect beauty—is constitutively dependent on the obstacle (finitude, mortality, sexuality, contradiction) that seems to prevent its full actualization; the objet petit a logic shows that removing the obstacle simultaneously destroys what the obstacle was obstacle to, so the Absolute persists only as a virtual vanishing point within failure, not beyond it.

     Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment.

310. #310

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.164

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian formula "there is no big Other" must be taken in its strongest ontological sense—not merely that the symbolic order exists only as a virtual fiction, but that it cannot even cohere as a fiction due to immanent antagonisms—and that this non-existence of the big Other is the very condition for the subject, while simultaneously exposing guilt and jouissance as structurally co-constitutive in conditions of permissiveness.

     guilt provides the surplus-pleasure which transforms a simple pleasure into intense jouissance

311. #311

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.294

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

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

     generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own, the plus-de-jouir

312. #312

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.363

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "inhuman view" of assemblage theory—treating humans as mere actants among others—paradoxically presupposes a pure Cartesian subject (cogito), which is itself sustained by objet a as the objectal form of surplus; this articulation introduces historicity into the ahistorical emptiness of the barred subject, with capitalism uniquely revealing objet a as surplus-enjoyment/surplus-value.

     Lacan's homology between surplus-enjoyment and surplus-value gains all its weight here.

313. #313

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.126

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts the Hegelian move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, arguing that the subject's constitutive failure to symbolize itself, the Other's opacity to itself, and sexuality's irreducible excess all converge on the same structure: reality is non-all, and the obstacle to knowledge IS the thing-in-itself. The enigma OF the other must become the enigma IN the other, grounding universality not in shared content but in shared failure.

     the traumatic impact of the 'primordial scene,' the enigma of the signifiers of the Other's desire, generates an excess which cannot ever be fully 'sublated' in symbolic ordering.

314. #314

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.141

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

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not a binary opposition between two self-identical terms but a "crumbled" asymmetry in which one signifier (the masculine/phallic Master-Signifier S1) lacks its binary counterpart, so that the feminine position is pure difference/excess (M+) rather than a second species; this generates a double transcendental genesis in which S1 and the chain of S2 each retroactively posit the other as what fills its own constitutive lack.

     The same goes for surplus-enjoyment which does not come after some kind of 'normal' enjoyment: enjoyment is as such a surplus, in excess over the 'normal' run of things.

315. #315

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.355

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [How to Do Words with Things](#contents.xhtml_ahd23)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that assemblage theory's "flat ontology" must be supplemented by a Lacanian/Hegelian dimension of abstract negativity: elements do not combine to form a larger Whole but are already traversed by a universal antagonism/inconsistency, and this negativity requires a subjective support in objet a as "less than nothing"—thereby rejecting both the subjectless object of Bryant/Badiou and the self-congratulatory liberal gesture of declaring oneself "nothing" without fully renouncing surplus-enjoyment.

     while its enunciated content seems radical, its position of enunciation remains that of a privileged universality… this very renunciation to a (particular) something is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment of their moral superiority

316. #316

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.296

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

     Three is not the set of three Ones, but, at its most elementary, 2 + a, the Two plus an excess which disturbs their harmony—Masculine and Feminine plus objet a (the a-sexual object, as Lacan calls it), the two principal classes plus rabble (the excess of no-class).

317. #317

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.204

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Marx, <span id="scholium_22_marx_brecht_and_sexual_contracts.xhtml_IDX-211"></span>Brecht, and Sexual Contracts

     Theoretical move: By reading Brecht's Marxist parody of Kant on sexual contracts alongside Marx's structural analysis of labor exploitation, Žižek argues that the MeToo movement's privileging of structural weakness over objective weakness reproduces a ruthless power logic that reduces sex entirely to power, foreclosing love and reinscribing the very domination it claims to contest — while the only genuine path to emancipation paradoxically runs through radical commodification (the Möbius-strip reversal).

     the worker is a commodity which produces surplus-value, i.e., more value than its own value. In this sense, the contract is unjust, the worker is in a weaker structural position

318. #318

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Marx, <span id="scholium_22_marx_brecht_and_sexual_contracts.xhtml_IDX-211"></span>Brecht, and Sexual Contracts

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip topology of political logic reveals that the incel/hierarchy position flips into a demand for egalitarian redistribution at its extreme, just as the logic of egalitarian human rights flips into its opposite at the point of sexuality; simultaneously, Marx's analysis of the 'free' labor contract is extended to the sexual contract to show that formal consent/freedom conceals structural coercion, and that surplus-jouissance is the sexual homologue of surplus-value, making contractual sex inherently asymmetric and ideologically limited.

     Here enters the homology between surplus-value (produced by the worker) and surplus-enjoyment (produced by the activity of giving pleasure), the enjoyment generated by the very activity of serving the other (sexual partner).

319. #319

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.130

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

     one could claim that it is this surplus-knowledge which renders her factual promiscuity so threatening.

320. #320

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.431

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: By mapping the Lacanian triad of language/*lalangue*/matheme onto the RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) structure and arguing through the topological figures of the Möbius strip and cross-cap, Žižek resists any materialist-genetic primacy of *lalangue* over language, insisting instead that the cut introducing differential symbolic order is originary and irreducible to bodily or pre-symbolic ground.

     does the same not hold for the capitalist self-valorization, the circular movement of money generating more money, which is also its own goal since it serves nothing, no external human needs? This is why the same superego injunction 'Enjoy!' sustains the capitalist drive to self-valorization

321. #321

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.417

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Wagner's *Parsifal* — framed against historicist contextualization — Žižek argues that the opera's central ethical and libidinal drama turns on the obscene superego-jouissance of the father (Titurel as père-version), hysterical feminine subjectivity (Kundry), and the paradox of a wound that is simultaneously the mark of corruption and the source of immortal life-energy; Parsifal's salvation-gesture is grounded not in simple purity but in hysterical identification with the very suffering he refuses.

     she undermines the position of each of them by means of the surplus-knowledge contained in her hysterical obscene laughter which reveals the fact that the master is impotent

322. #322

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.152

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human sexuality is not a "civilized" displacement of natural animal sexuality but rather the point where the dislocation/impossibility immanent in all sexed reproduction becomes registered as such—via the Unconscious and surplus-jouissance—so that culture retroactively denaturalizes nature itself, while the transition from animal to human mirrors the Hegelian move from In-itself to For-itself applied to not-knowing.

     Here Lacan provides a precise answer: in the guise of plus-de-jouir, of the excess-of-enjoyment which is not just an excess over every determinate form of object-of-enjoyment but an object which positivizes this excess of negativity.

323. #323

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian perspective on ideology inverts the Marxist critique: where Marxism attacks false universalization, Lacanian analysis targets over-rapid historicization that blinds us to the Real kernel that returns as the same. The homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment (objet petit a) shows that enjoyment is constitutively an excess—a structural lack that drives the capitalist machine—and that Marx's own failure to think this paradox explains both his vulgar evolutionist formulations and the historical irony of 'real socialism'.

     It is this paradox which defines surplus-enjoyment: it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some 'normal', fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an 'excess'.

324. #324

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology is not false consciousness about reality but reality itself insofar as it is sustained by non-knowledge; this is mapped onto Marx's "invention of the symptom" — the logic by which a particular element (e.g. labour-power, the proletariat) simultaneously belongs to and subverts a universal (freedom, equivalent exchange), with commodity fetishism explained as the structural displacement of fetishism from interpersonal domination to relations between things at the passage from feudalism to capitalism.

     the labour force is a peculiar commodity, the use of which - labour itself - produces a certain surplus-value, and it is this surplus over the value of the labour force itself which is appropriated by the capitalist.

325. #325

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that both descriptivism and antidescriptivism miss the radical contingency of naming: descriptivism misses the big Other (the tautological, self-referential dimension of the master signifier), while antidescriptivism misses the small other (objet petit a as the objectification of a void opened by the signifier), with the identity of an object across all counterfactual situations being a retroactive effect of naming itself rather than a feature found in positive reality.

     we search in vain among its positive properties for the feature which constitutes its value (and not only its use-value)

326. #326

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.

     'Beyond interpellation' is the square of desire, fantasy, lack in the Other and drive pulsating around some unbearable surplus-enjoyment.

327. #327

     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.

     this process produces at the same time a residue, a leftover, which is the surplus-enjoyment

328. #328

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

     what remains hidden in Kant is the way this renunciation itself produces a certain surplus-enjoyment (the Lacanian plus-de-jouir)

329. #329

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology functions through a surplus-enjoyment generated by renunciation itself (structurally homologous to Marxian surplus-value), and that this enjoyment must remain concealed to operate—since ideological form is its own end; further, it theorizes how ideological fields achieve unity through the 'quilting' function of the point de capiton (nodal point), which arrests the sliding of floating signifiers and retroactively fixes their identity.

     This surplus produced through renunciation is the Lacanian objet petit a, the embodiment of surplus-enjoyment; here we can also grasp why Lacan coined the notion of surplus-enjoyment on the model of the Marxian notion of surplus-value

330. #330

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation fails to account for the traumatic, senseless residue that is the very condition of ideological submission; drawing on Pascal, Kafka, Lacan's reading of the burning-child dream, and the Zhuang Zi paradox, he establishes that ideology functions not as illusion masking reality but as a fantasy-construction that *constitutes* reality, sustained by an irreducible surplus of jouissance ('jouis-sense') that escapes symbolic internalization.

     there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it.

331. #331

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Point de capiton functions as a 'rigid designator' — a pure, meaningless signifier that retroactively constitutes the identity of ideological objects — and that 'ideological anamorphosis' names the error by which this structural lack is misperceived as supreme plenitude of Meaning; the Objet petit a emerges as the real-impossible surplus correlative of this operation.

     what we gain from this simple inversion is precisely the surplus-X, the object-cause of desire, that 'unattainable something' which is 'in Coke more than Coke'

332. #332

     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, and so on

333. #333

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.163

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that while Deleuze and Lacan share a tripartite topology grounded in an originary negativity (crack/hole/Real) around which the drives congregate, Deleuze ultimately "liquefies" this topological rift into a pure dynamic movement of Difference, thereby obliterating the Lacanian Real as a third term irreducible to both the signifying chain and surplus-enjoyment.

     this brings us to the properly psychoanalytic (Lacanian) concept of the 'unbound surplus': namely, enjoyment . . . the nexus of representation and enjoyment has to be conceived against the background of an original negativity . . . as a third element in relation to the unbound excess (enjoyment) and the signifiers.

334. #334

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.167

     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 order to get to reality 'such as it is,' a (subjective) surplus is needed (or produced), a surplus or excess which is precisely not reducible to 'reality such as it is.'

335. #335

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.157

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: By reading Lacan and Deleuze together, the passage argues that the death drive is not a principle of destruction but the site of originary affirmation, and that repetition is not a response to a pre-existing traumatic original but the very mechanism that produces its own excess — with a constitutive split at its heart that parallels the Lacanian distinction between the void around which drives circulate and their partial figures.

     The traumatic surplus is produced only in and by repetition; if anything, repetition (and the excess or surplus object it necessarily introduces) is the cause of repression, not the other way around.

336. #336

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.152

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič, drawing on Brassier, Lacan, and Deleuze, argues that the death drive must be understood not as a return to the inanimate (a secondary extension of the pleasure principle) but as a transcendental principle grounded in an aboriginal trauma that precedes and conditions all experience, thereby reframing repetition compulsion as driven by an irreducible, unbindable excess rather than by any homeostatic tendency.

     the death drive qua compulsion to repeat is the originary, primordial motive force driving organic life, this is because the motor of repetition—the repeating instance—is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation.

337. #337

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.171

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze diverge precisely where they are closest—on repetition—because for Lacan emancipation is not achieved by the centrifugal force of difference/repetition itself (Deleuze), but requires the production of a new signifier (S1) from within the analytic discourse, a signifier that names the foundational "hole" and thereby shifts the subject's relation to the signifying order.

     it is precisely this surplus that binds, connects different Ones (signifiers) in concrete circumstances.

338. #338

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.219

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

     Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

     The wound of subjectivity stems from the fact that the Other cannot be resolved as the Self, producing what is simultaneously a subjective lack and an objective surplus.

339. #339

     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.

     surplus-enjoyment. See Lacan, Jacques

340. #340

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.269

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     surplus-enjoyment, 156, 164

341. #341

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.191

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic account of sexuality as an ontological negativity—instantiated in the drive, fantasy, and the body as distinct from the organism—provides a properly materialist ethics that new materialism cannot supply, because it grounds freedom, difference, and ethical creativity in the constitutive gap at the core of human being rather than in a "flat ontology" that nullifies human peculiarity.

     a conversion of organic energy into a surplus that cannot be put to work in service to the system from which it originates and that unworks the system from within

342. #342

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.199

     Correlationism or Causation?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Harman's object-oriented ontology (OOO) covertly recapitulates the Lacanian Imaginary operation—transforming an epistemological impossibility into an ontological property of the object—and that, properly understood, Harman's project is less about defeating "correlationism" than about solving the problem of non-relational causation, a problem that Lacan's objet petit a is better equipped to address.

     objects must be an excess or surplus outside their current range of relations, vulnerable to some of those relations but insensible to others

343. #343

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.30

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Capitalist Produdion a nd Human Re produdion

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's constitutive lie—its temporal narration of an originary, atemporal loss—paradoxically reveals the truth of castration by staging it as visible; crucially, the passage argues that the loss intrinsic to sexed reproduction (castration) and the loss demanded by capitalist production are structurally identical, and that fantasy's staging of the impossible object can render this connection visible and thereby open a radical political potential.

     What makes capitalism distinct, according to the dream-logic of Eraserhead, is what it does with the sacrifice. It uses the sacrificed enjoyment to feed its ever-expanding production process.

344. #344

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.66

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **A Utopia Without Disavowal** > The Excesses of W¡/d ot Heorl

     Theoretical move: McGowan reads *Wild at Heart* as a filmic staging of unrestrained jouissance: by denying any space of narrative normalcy against which excess could be measured, Lynch shows that a world without lack produces not liberation but suffocation, figured through the perverse authority of a maternal superego and an anal father of enjoyment who command the subject to enjoy.

     To experience too much enjoyment is always to feel as if one is not experiencing enough.

345. #345

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.23

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Loss of the Life Subsfonce

     Theoretical move: Fantasy in *Eraserhead* is theorized not merely as ideological veil (obscuring production) but as the very mechanism that exposes the subject's foundational sacrifice of enjoyment — a sacrifice of nothing — which constitutes subjectivity itself and fuels capitalist productivity; this dual function (obscuring/revealing) revalues both fantasy and avant-garde critique.

     the subject in no way has any enjoyment prior to its sacrifice. The social order demands that the subject give up what it doesn't have, and it is this sacrifice of nothing-the pure act of sacrifice itself-that constitutes the subject as such.

346. #346

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.49

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

     Theoretical move: The figure of Baron Harkonnen functions as the necessary obverse of classical Hollywood fantasy: by removing symbolic prohibition, the fantasy that grants access to total enjoyment must also produce an unrestrained obscene enjoyer, making visible the excess that normative fantasy disavows. Lynch's refusal to restrain this depiction forces the spectator to confront the obscenity integral to their own enjoyment.

     Everything about the Harkonnen world suggests an absence of any limitation on enjoyment.

347. #347

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.53

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

     Theoretical move: Lynch's Dune enacts a fantasmatic resolution so complete that it collapses the barrier between fantasy and social reality, revealing that the fantasy of escape can only complete itself by looping back to what it escapes from—and that revolutionary transformation ultimately produces a speculative identity between the new society and the old one, demanding that repetition be embraced freely rather than blindly.

     By going too far and offering us too much enjoyment, the fantasmatic resolution in Dune eliminates the ideal another place, an alternative possibility, more than any of Lynch's other films.

348. #348

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.117

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

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

     The enjoyment that the impossible object contains seems to exist right before her eyes—in the figure of Camilla Rhodes—and yet it remains wholly out of reach.

349. #349

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.124

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > NOTES > J. Sacrificing One's Head for an Eraser

     Theoretical move: This notes section consolidates several theoretical moves: it links surplus-jouissance to Marx's surplus value, establishes the masochistic structure of fantasy as requiring a revisiting of loss, and articulates the forced choice of entry into the social order as constitutive of the subject through sacrifice of enjoyment.

     Lacan notes that it is Marx's conception of surplus value that allows him to discover the existence of surplus enjoyment, the enjoyment that emerges in the subject after an initial sacrifice of enjoyment.

350. #350

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.77

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer** > The Hostility of Deer Meadow

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the first part of *Fire Walk with Me* constructs a "world of desire" structured around the absent object-cause (Teresa Banks), where subjects experience alienation in the signifier without the relief of fantasy, and where enjoyment takes the paradoxical form of senseless signification for its own sake—only resolvable when the film shifts to the fantasmatic world of Twin Peaks.

     Cole isn't trying to deceive anyone; he simply—and admittedly—enjoys the code for its own sake. There is, strictly speaking, no reason for it except enjoyment.

351. #351

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.27

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Malaise of the Desiring Subject

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Eraserhead* formally enacts the structure of desiring subjectivity—through absent reverse shots, extreme darkness, temporal elongation, and mechanical characterization—demonstrating that desire is constitutively tied to lack and alienation, and that enjoyment (jouissance) has been displaced from human subjects onto machines and the natural world through capitalist production's demand for sacrificed enjoyment.

     According to Marx, the capitalist pays the worker fairly for the value of her/his labor, but what the capitalist appropriates without compensation is the surplus value that the very productivity of labor generates.

352. #352

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.32

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that *Eraserhead* distinguishes itself from traditional Hollywood cinema by fully committing to fantasy's consequences: the embrace of fantasy unleashes jouissance but simultaneously destroys the social reality whose consistency depends on the shared sacrifice of enjoyment, thereby exposing the subject's complicity in capitalist production and the political cost of any genuine act of refusal.

     This sacrifice produces dissatisfaction for the subject, but it also produces the surplus enjoyment that moves the gears of capitalist production.

353. #353

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.72

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Price of the Ho ppy Ending

     Theoretical move: The happy ending of *Wild at Heart* is theorized not as commercial compromise but as a demonstration that genuine enjoyment requires abandoning the ideal of non-castration and fully committing to the logic of fantasy—including its traumatic, real dimension—which transforms not only the subject but the external world itself.

     The only freedom from the threats that populate contemporary society lies in the full embrace of fantasmatic enjoyment rather than the attempt to curb it.

354. #354

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.24

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian lamella—the life substance lost when the subject enters language and sexed reproduction—is the theoretical key to understanding *Eraserhead*'s opening sequence: Henry's loss of this substance inaugurates him as a desiring, lacking subject, and the film shows how fantasy, desire, and capitalist production all derive from this originary, pre-ontological sacrifice.

     the loss of the lamella and the onset of mechanical production unleash a world of desire

355. #355

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.139

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

     surplus enjoyment, 23111; and the theory of enjoyment, 11.7, 140, 23371

356. #356

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.95

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the superego's complete internalization—achieved through the dissolution of fantasy and sacrifice of jouissance—paradoxically undermines social control by stripping away the supplemental enjoyment that fantasy provides to docile subjects; furthermore, the speculative identity of social reality and fantasy is revealed precisely through the failure immanent in fantasmatic success, as both circulate around the same fundamental impossibility.

     As a superegouic force, he demands all of Fred's enjoyment for himself, not even allowing him the small ration of enjoyment the fantasy provides him in compensation for his sacrifice of desire.

357. #357

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.82

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in *Fire Walk with Me*, the Man From Another Place figures the Lacanian libido as detached body part—the primordial lost object that institutes the death drive—while BOB figures the phallus as an attempt to short-circuit the drive by possessing the object without loss; the film shows that phallic authority is secretly subordinate to the death drive, and that fantasy makes visible the hidden dependency of the social order on this structure.

     his activities merely feed the drive, allowing it to continue to enjoy.

358. #358

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.104

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

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

     Our view of the other as embodying excessive enjoyment is always our view: it tells us much more about our own subjectivity than it does about how much others are really enjoying.

359. #359

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.80

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-77-0"></span>*Object* a: *The Other's Desire*

     Theoretical move: Through the operation of separation, the Other's inscrutable desire constitutes object a as the remainder of a hypothetical mother-child unity, and it is only by cleaving to this remainder in fantasy that the split subject sustains an illusion of wholeness and procures a sense of being beyond mere symbolic existence.

     Some modicum or portion of that real connection is refound in fantasy (a jouissance after the letter, J2), in the subject's relation to the leftover or byproduct of symbolization: object a.

360. #360

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.152

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-150-0"></span>**The University Discourse**

     Theoretical move: The university discourse is theorised as a historical rationalization of the master's discourse, where systematic knowledge displaces the master signifier in the commanding position while producing the alienated, divided subject as its remainder — and this structural function of mere rationalization is contrasted with genuine scientific work, which Lacan re-aligns with the hysteric's discourse.

     Knowledge here interrogates surplus value (the product of capitalist economies, which takes the form of a loss or subtraction of value from the worker) and rationalizes or justifies it.

361. #361

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.210

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Object (a): Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage does substantial theoretical work in clarifying the concept of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) as structural surplus analogous to Marxian surplus-value — not an end or excess of jouissance but an additional, supplemental jouissance — while also distinguishing imaginary, symbolic, and real registers of the object, and situating objet petit a as the real cause of desire rather than a symbolically constituted object of demand.

     plus-de-jouir is constructed on the model of plus-value, the traditional French translation of Marx's Mehrwert (surplus value)... a surplus, extra, or supplemental jouissance, not an end to jouissance or too much jouissance.

362. #362

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.103

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: Fink establishes Objet petit a as Lacan's most significant and polyvalent contribution to psychoanalysis, cataloguing its many avatars and situating it across the registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real as a prerequisite for systematic exposition in the chapter ahead.

     the cause of desire, surplus jouissance, the materiality of language, the analyst's desire

363. #363

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.119

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **Castration**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of castration is re-theorised as a structural loss of jouissance — not an anatomical threat — that is transferred to and circulates in the Other (as language, knowledge, market, law), and this structure of lack/loss is shown to be homologous across the economic, linguistic, kinship, and political registers.

     Surplus value, equated in the last chapter with surplus jouissance (Lacan's plus-de-jouir), circulates in an 'alien' world of 'abstract market forces.'

364. #364

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.150

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-147-0"></span>**The** Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The Four Discourses are introduced as structural matrices governing different social bonds, with the Master's Discourse functioning as the primary or originary discourse from which the other three are generated by quarter-turn rotations; each discourse's positions (agent, truth, other, product/loss) assign different roles to the same four mathemes (S1, S2, $, a), making discourse a structural — not psychological — category.

     That surplus, deriving from the activity of the worker, is appropriated by the capitalist, and we might suppose that it directly or indirectly procures the latter enjoyment of some kind: surplus jouissance.

365. #365

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.205

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Subject and the Other's Desire

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus elaborates key theoretical moves from the main text: the neurotic's fantasy structure as ($◇D) rather than ($◇a) - conflating the Other's demand with the Other's desire - and the topology of the subject/Other relation, while clarifying that separation involves replacing demand with objet a in the neurotic's fantasy.

     Sexual über is generally translated as 'surplus of sexuality'

366. #366

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

     plus-de-jouir, 191 n.28; ... surplus value, 96-97

367. #367

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.157

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **There's No Such Thing** as a **Metalanguage**

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis does not occupy an Archimedean point outside discourse but rather elucidates discourse's structure from within; every discourse entails a constitutive loss of jouissance and a dissimulated truth, making metalanguage impossible.

     Every discourse requires a loss of jouissance (see chapter 8) and has its own mainspring or truth (often carefully dissimulated). Each discourse defines that loss differently.

368. #368

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

     Surplus Value, Surplus Jouissance

369. #369

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.116

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > **Surplus Value, Surplus Jouissance**

     Theoretical move: By equating object (a) with Marx's surplus value, Lacan shows that the work process simultaneously produces the alienated subject ($) and a loss (a), where surplus-jouissance circulates outside the subject in the Other — structurally positioning the neurotic subject as working for the Other's enjoyment rather than its own.

     Like surplus value, this surplus jouissance may be viewed as circulating 'outside' of the subject in the Other. It is a part of the libido that circulates hors corps.

370. #370

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.202

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Creative Function of the Word

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus consolidates several key Lacanian theoretical commitments: the Real as without gap or fissure, reality as fantasy-laden and symbolically constituted, extimacy as the logic of internal exclusion structuring the subject's relation to its object, and the signifier's irreducible surplus beyond itself.

     There is always an excess or surplus in the autonomous working of the signifier, related, Lacan suggests, to its stuff, its 'material' nature.

371. #371

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" that makes finitude a Master-Signifier closing off the infinite, Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" grounded in the Lacanian insight that human finitude is always-already a *failed finitude* — a finitude with a constitutive hole — whose materiality is objet petit a, and whose topology is best captured by the Möbius strip as the figure of immanent transcendence.

     the drive, with its always excessive, 'surplus' nature

372. #372

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.17

     Introduction

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

     The objective surplus, the materialized work itself, is eliminated at the very outset.

373. #373

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.159

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *point de capiton* in a joke retrospectively reveals a split between two signifying series rather than unfolding temporally, and that when a joke is embedded in a comic sequence, its Master-Signifier is transformed into a comic object (S1→a) that combines enjoyment and sense — a *jouis-sense* — which then becomes the elastic material sustaining the comic sequence's "continuity that constructs with discontinuity."

     the signifying objects produced in it, including the comic pleasure that sticks to them, are used as the material and the means of its further construction

374. #374

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.103

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comic naivety (trust in the Other's metonymic object despite its inconsistency) is not mere ignorance but a structural wager on the lack-in-the-Other, and that comedies of mistaken identity function by suspending the symbolic Other, generating a surplus comic object ('error incorporated') that displaces the emphasis from the Other's failure to the productive accidents that failure enables.

     the suspension of the symbolic Other coincides with the surprising appearance of a (small) other: in the form of a double or in the form of a surplus comic object that could be defined (in comedies of error) as 'error incorporated.'

375. #375

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.217

     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.

     there is something in the very constitution of human nature that, so to speak, sexualizes sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus-investment

376. #376

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.48

     part i

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that the distinction between subversive and conservative comedy cannot be located in content or self-parody, but rather in the structural move comedy performs: the passage from abstract to concrete universality, in which substance becomes subject through an inner split — a move structurally homologous to Hegel's Phenomenology and illuminated by the Lacanian logic of representation.

     the relating that always succeeds either too much or not enough—this is the surplus with which most comic situations and dialogues are built

377. #377

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.200

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium* contains a second, overlooked "cut" — the superimposition of genitals — that introduces a surplus-enjoyment irreducible to the complementarity logic of halves seeking fusion; this "comic object" (x) is structurally equivalent to the phallus as the ultimate comic reference, confirming that comedy is grounded in a logic of heteronomous addition that perpetually prevents the return to imaginary Oneness.

     In the most general level, this 'factor x' is a factor of a supplementary satisfaction... It is enjoyment as (originally) surplus-enjoyment (enjoyment as something that does not simply spring from, or originate in, the body).

378. #378

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.104

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic suspense is structurally distinct from thriller suspense because it begins *after* the catastrophe (an "overrealization"), and that this post-catastrophic surplus-object suspended in the comic action actually transforms the symbolic Other rather than simply restoring it—demonstrated through close readings of Molière's *Amphitryon* and Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*.

     The suspense of the Other coincides with the emergence of a surplus-object (as if the latter were in fact an irreducible objective kernel of the former), a not-quite-predictable action, the effects of which form the inner tension (suspense) of comedy.

379. #379

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.203

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacanian castration is not merely an operator of lack but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment as an "encrusted" appendix with relative autonomy — and that comedy, unlike tragedy, stages this constitutive dislocation of enjoyment at the level of structure itself rather than through individual existential destiny.

     a coincidence between 'no more enjoyment' and 'more enjoyment,' a coincidence so elegantly expressed in the French term plus-de-jouir, which can have both meanings

380. #380

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object (as surplus-object) is not merely a humorous treatment of the symbolic Other but the material condition for any retroactive effect of the phenomenal order on its own transcendental coordinates; she further distinguishes genuine comedy from derision by showing that derision protects the sacred mystery of the symbolic structure whereas comedy produces das Ding as an objectified surplus, and introduces Marivaux as the figure who replaces surplus-objects with pure difference as the mechanism of comic suspension.

     it is not enough to say... that comedy treats this object in a comic or humorous way... For the first distinguishing feature of comedy is that it produces it as object in the first place, or uses material which already has this 'comic' quality.

381. #381

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.142

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that tragedy and comedy are not different attitudes toward the same configuration of discrepancy but rather two standpoints *within* it: tragedy stands at the point of demand (articulating discrepancy as desire's constitutive non-satisfaction), while comedy stands at the point of satisfaction (articulating discrepancy as jouissance/surplus-satisfaction), and this difference in standpoint entails a reversal of temporal sequence in which satisfaction precedes and overtakes demand rather than trailing after it.

     Comedy switches the supposedly natural sequence... The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really meet demand, but rather that the demand can never really meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction.

382. #382

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.156

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that comedy and jokes differ structurally in their temporal logic: jokes culminate in a single retroactive 'quilting point' (S1) that reorganizes prior meaning, while comedy generates an inaugural surplus-object that becomes the motor of an indefinitely extensible sequence; both structures converge on *objet petit a* as the point where signifying operation and corporeal enjoyment (laughter) mutually implicate each other, supplementing Freud's theory of jokes with a bidirectional mechanism in which content-related tendentiousness and the display of the signifier's paradoxical non-sense serve as reciprocal smokescreens.

     the surplus-satisfaction as object that results from the signifying operation of S1, the corporeal dimension of the signifier existing, in the case of jokes, in the form of laughter

383. #383

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.314

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: The Matrix trilogy is read as a political allegory in which jouissance functions as the ultimate stake of both oppression and liberation: the Matrix's true need is not energy but human jouissance, making any genuine revolution a transformation in the regime of jouissance-appropriation rather than a mere exit from illusion into reality.

     a true revolution would have been a change in the way humans and the Matrix itself relate to jouissance and its appropriation.

384. #384

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.426

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 6The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the argument that ideological formations (anti-Semitism, the Decalogue, totalitarian power) require a fantasmatic obscene supplement, and that the structure of castration paradoxically entails losing castration itself as surplus-enjoyment; several notes further develop the structural logic of the Master-Signifier and the irreducibility of symbolic identity to private psychic content.

     its true threat resides in the fact that, no matter how much I lose, I will never really get rid of it—namely, of the disturbing excess/remainder of surplus-enjoyment.

385. #385

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.4

     Contents

     Theoretical move: This is a table of contents for Žižek's *The Parallax View*, organizing the book's theoretical architecture around three "parallax" registers (stellar, solar, lunar) that traverse ontology, subjectivity, and politics. It is non-substantive filler content.

     FROM SURPLUS-VALUE TO SURPLUS-POWER

386. #386

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.321

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

     this excess is strictly correlative to the excess of power itself over its 'official' representative function

387. #387

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.317

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses a Christological reading of *The Matrix* trilogy to distinguish between a proto-Jewish and a properly Christian logic of sacrifice, arguing that the trilogy's ideological deadlock stems from Capital functioning as a double allegory (for Capital and for the Symbolic Order), and that the failure of any final resolution is itself a sober political message against pseudo-Deleuzian celebrations of multitudinal revolt.

     the Matrix is still there, continuing to exploit humans, with no guarantee that another Smith will not emerge

388. #388

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.31

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "concrete universality" is not a neutral container of particulars but the irreducible tension and non-coincidence between levels—demonstrated through the logic of the frame (appearance appearing as such), the supernumerary exception that *is* the universal, and the "temporal parallax" by which the same principle cannot actualize simultaneously across domains, requiring retroactive reading (après-coup) to become legible.

     A certain surplus-effect is thus generated which cannot simply be cancelled through 'demystification': it is not enough to display the mechanism behind the frame, the stage effect within the frame acquires an autonomy of its own.

389. #389

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.305

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.

     when Lacan shows how the capitalist discourse epitomizes perversion insofar as it pretends to count/accumulate jouissance, he demonstrates how a pervert acts as if one can accumulate zero(s) or lack(s), as if a zero plus a zero plus . . . is more than a mere zero.

390. #390

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.297

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Biopolitical Parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that late capitalism's shift from desire to demand (and from Oedipal to post-Oedipal subjectivity) converges with biopolitical control as two faces of the University Discourse; the correct psychoanalytic response is not conservative re-Oedipalization but a full assumption of the Other's nonexistence, enabling a demand no longer addressed to the Other — a mode that coincides with the drive.

     the capitalist matrix of a system whose dynamic is propelled by the incessant production and (re)appropriation of an excess ('surplus-value'): that is, a system which reproduces itself through constant self-revolutionizing

391. #391

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.252

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

     the explosion of human symbolic capacities does not merely expand the metaphorical scope of sexuality... but that, much more importantly, this explosion sexualizes sexuality itself

392. #392

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.64

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

     Theoretical move: By reading Marx's account of capital's self-movement through Hegel's substance-to-subject passage and Lacan's desire/drive distinction, Žižek argues that capitalism operates at three levels—subjective experience, objective exploitation, and an "objective deception" (the unconscious fantasy of self-generating capital)—and that the shift from desire to drive requires distinguishing objet petit a as lost object (desire) from objet petit a as loss itself (drive), while redefining the death drive as an excess of life rather than a thrust toward annihilation.

     humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things.

393. #393

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.311

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary politics is fundamentally a biopolitical regulation of jouissance rather than emancipatory politics proper, tracing this through liberal ideology's fantasmatic disgust, the symmetry between fundamentalism and liberal hedonism, and the paradox of the superego imperative to enjoy—where permitted jouissance becomes obligatory jouissance—culminating in a reading of The Matrix as staging the co-dependence of the big Other (Symbolic) and the Real.

     the problem is that, although the immediate and explicit injunction calls for the rule of a pleasure principle that would maintain homeostasis, the actual functioning of the injunction explodes these constraints into a striving toward excessive enjoyment.

394. #394

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.228

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

     Theoretical move: By reading Damasio's neuroscience of consciousness through the lens of Fichte's Anstoss and Lacan's "answer of the Real," Žižek argues that the subject is not a substance but a self-generating narrative process, and that consciousness involves a constitutive parallax gap between inside and outside that cannot be closed from either side alone.

     What we are dealing with here is a paradoxical single entity that is 'doubly inscribed,' that is simultaneously surplus and lack.

395. #395

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.393

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

     Theoretical move: This notes section deploys several theoretical pivots: the "spectral Real" is articulated in three versions linked by the subject's gaze as vanishing mediator; Kantian ethics is re-situated as the ethics inherent to both modern science and capitalist circulation-logic; and the Hegelian notion of form (das Formelle) is distinguished from its Kantian counterpart to ground the critique of political economy.

     it is with this shift to the universal form of circulation as an end in itself that we pass from premodern ethics, grounded in a reference to some substantial supreme Good, to the paradigmatically modern Kantian ethics in which it is ultimately only the form of duty that matters

396. #396

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.119

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Odradek as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: Odradek (Kafka's figure) is read as the lamella—jouissance embodied as immortal, purposeless, inhuman-human excess outside symbolic/paternal order—and this logic is extended to bureaucracy as the secular form of the divine Thing, and to the Alien series as a figuration of pure drive that capitalism exploits and sacralizes.

     the crazy excess of bureaucratic jouissance perpetuating itself in its auto-circulation

397. #397

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.278

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Heidegger's ontology is structurally blind to Marx's critique of political economy—an ignorance it shares with fascism—and that Heidegger's move from individual to communal authenticity is not arbitrary but a necessary escape from decisionistic formalism, yet one that cannot be rehabilitated into a "progressive" alternative without repeating the same structural problem.

     modern technology is not only empirically, but in its very concept, rooted in the market dynamics of generating surplus-value. The underlying principle which impels the unrelenting drive of modern productivity is not technological, but economic

398. #398

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.264

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis has surrendered its sociopolitical critical edge by seeking institutional recognition, while Hardt and Negri's biopolitical theory of the multitude commits a parallel theoretical error: by neglecting the dialectical role of capitalist *form*, they reproduce the ultimate capitalist fantasy of frictionless self-revolutionizing production, leaving the notional structure of revolutionary rupture in darkness.

     is not the capitalist form (the form of the appropriation of surplus-value) the necessary form, formal frame/condition, of the self-propelling productive movement?

399. #399

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.352

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the true stake of both psychoanalytic treatment and ideological critique is not changing the subject's conscious knowledge but transforming what the subject presupposes the big Other to know — a split that is internal to the subject itself — thereby demonstrating that fetishistic disavowal, commodity fetishism, and ideological belief all operate through displacement of belief onto an Other who is presumed not to know.

     we are all ready to indulge in utter skepticism, cynical distance, exploitation of others 'without any illusions,' violations of all ethical constraints, extreme sexual practices, and so on—protected by the silent awareness that the big Other is ignorant of it

400. #400

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.53

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Karatani's Kantian reading of Marx, argues that the parallax gap between production and circulation is irreducible and constitutive of Capital's movement—value is generated "in itself" in production but actualized only retroactively through circulation (futur antérieur)—and that this structural antinomy cannot be resolved by privileging either side, making Capital's self-movement a "spurious infinity" rather than Hegelian dialectical closure.

     "I replaced Freud's energetics with political economy," said Lacan in Seminar XVII

401. #401

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.380

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

     the very gesture of renouncing enjoyment ('Enough of decadent pleasures! Renounce and sacrifice!') generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own

402. #402

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.415

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian proletarian position instantiates a "redoubled alienation" in which the subject is emptied of substance and surplus-value emerges as its objectal correlate (objet petit a / surplus-object), making universal market economy structurally dependent on the commodification of labour-power itself; along the way it critically engages Milner on post-Yugoslav ideology, Hardt/Negri on carnival and multitude, and Agamben/Laclau-Mouffe on community and hegemony.

     surplus-value is literally correlative to the emptied subject, it is the objectal counterpart of S/

403. #403

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.86

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

     Lacan will call this organ a condenser of jouissance, a surplus-enjoyment, that is to say, that part of jouissance which resists being contained by the homeostasis, by the pleasure principle.

404. #404

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.327

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that egalitarian political "terror" (from the Jacobins to Maoism) is a symptom of the *foreclosure* of the economic sphere rather than its over-extension, and that Badiou's anti-Statist politics reaches a deadlock precisely because it refuses to grant the "economic" domain the dignity of Truth/evental potential—the only exit being to restore the economic as a site of Event.

     the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his laborpower)

405. #405

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.268

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the inherent obstacle/antagonism of capitalism is simultaneously its condition of impossibility AND possibility (via Derrida/Lacan), meaning abolishing capital's contradiction would dissolve rather than release productive potential; it then identifies slum-dwellers as today's privileged "evental site" and proletarian subject, defined not by exploitation but by exclusion from citizenship, making them the true symptomatic product of global capitalism rather than its accident.

     That is Lacan's fundamental reproach to Marx, which focuses on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment.

406. #406

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.299

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's four discourses map the historicity of European modernity—with the Master's discourse coding absolute monarchy, University/Hysteria coding biopolitics and capitalist subjectivity, and the Analyst's discourse coding emancipatory politics—while complicating Miller's claim that contemporary civilization itself operates as the Analyst's discourse, and then pivoting to show how global reflexivization paradoxically generates brute, "Id-Evil" immediacy resistant to interpretation.

     the 'agent' of the social link today is a, surplus-enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse

407. #407

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.173

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.

     capitalism is grounded in the Real of a certain quasitheological impersonal 'drive,' the drive to reproduce and grow, to expand and accumulate profit.

408. #408

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.335

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

     Theoretical move: Through a reading of Marx's analyses of Bonapartism, Žižek argues that political representation is structurally in excess of what it represents: the only common denominator of all classes is their excremental remainder, and sovereignty is constituted by an obscene superego underside that necessarily exceeds the Law's public face—a structure Žižek maps onto the Lacanian logic of the signifier and the Master-Signifier.

     insofar as Napoleon III perceived himself as standing above class interests...his immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of all classes, the rejected nonclass of/in each class

409. #409

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.237

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Hegel, Marx, Dennett

     Theoretical move: Against both phenomenology and cognitivism, Žižek argues—via Hegel, Dennett, and Marx—that alienation is primordial and formal: form (empty signifier, capitalist subsumption, ideological cliché) precedes and retroactively constitutes content, so that the "immediacy" of experience, meaning, or authentic social life is always already a retroactive construction.

     What if this resistant core of frustrating non-sense is what transforms mere meaning (simple denotative reference of a statement or a practice) into a deeper Sense?

410. #410

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.59

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

     workers are not exploited by not being paid their full value—their wages are in principle 'just,' they are paid the full value of the commodity they are selling ('labor-power'); the key is, rather, that the use-value of this commodity is unique, it produces a new value greater than its own value

411. #411

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.125

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

     castration and its disavowal are two sides of the same coin; castration has to be sustained by a noncastrated remainder, a fully realized castration cancels itself... lamella... is... literally, the product of the cut of castration, the surplus generated by it.

412. #412

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.52

     **The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy operates as a necessary supplement to ideology, compensating for ideology's constitutive incompleteness at the level of the signifier; but cinema's publicization of fantasy can also expose the obscene surplus-enjoyment that ideology depends on yet cannot avow, giving fantasy a double political valence—both conservative and subversive.

     The very submission of subjects to an ideology depends on the surplus enjoyment that it provides for them.

413. #413

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.61

     5

     Theoretical move: Kubrick's films expose the obscene enjoyment structurally embedded in symbolic authority itself—not as the fault of particular subjects—and this fantasmatic revelation serves the subject's freedom by dissolving ideological investment in that authority.

     he derives a surplus enjoyment from his symbolic position of power.

414. #414

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.243

     29 > **15. Political Desire in Italian Neorealism**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist ideology is constitutively self-undermining: it promises fantasmatic enjoyment to drive consumption while being structurally intolerant of actual jouissance, and it proclaims individual exceptionalism while reification produces universal equivalence — a fundamental ideological antagonism that Italian Neorealism exposes by refusing fantasmatic narrative resolution.

     Capitalism thrives on fantasmatic promises of the ultimate enjoyment, but it is constitutively incapable of tolerating any actual enjoyment. This is because subjects who are really enjoying themselves are not good consumers.

415. #415

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.124

     15

     Theoretical move: Italian neorealism politicizes desire by refusing fantasmatic resolution—whether fascist or capitalist—thereby constituting the spectator as a desiring subject whose political engagement is grounded in the impossibility of a stable object, and Lacanian concepts of fantasy, desire, and the lost/impossible object are deployed to explain both the films' form and their ideological critique.

     capitalism works, as a mode of production, to eliminate all difference between objects... it becomes impossible to own the object. Hence, capitalism itself renders its own individualistic fantasy impossible.

416. #416

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.235

     29 > **6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions**

     Theoretical move: This footnote-heavy passage advances the theoretical argument that racist ideology operates at the level of fantasy (jouissance attributed to the Other), that Lee's formal excess targets this fantasmatic racism whereas Haggis's realism misses it, and that Mann's male heroes instantiate a Kantian ethics of excess structurally tied to the phallic exception.

     everyone wants to be black in order to access this excessive enjoyment, which is why blackface becomes so popular in the film.

417. #417

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.79

     **The Bankruptcy of Fantasy in Fellini**

     Theoretical move: Fellini's films enact the logic of fantasy so completely that they expose its ultimate vacuity: by presenting excessive, unrestricted enjoyment, they produce boredom and failure-to-enjoy, thereby breaking fantasy's hold on the spectator and pointing toward a cinema structured around absence, desire, and the gaze.

     The films of Fellini's middle period confront the spectator with excess, with too much presence, and this leaves the spectator yearning for absence. Here, one suffocates from an overabundance of enjoyment that leaves one bored rather than enjoying.

418. #418

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.55

     **Early Explorations of Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that early cinema's fantasmatic dimension — exemplified by Eisenstein's montage and Chaplin's mise-en-scène — politically exposes the obscene jouissance embedded in social authority and capitalist production, demonstrating that filmic fantasy can interrupt ideology by unmasking the excess it must constitutively disavow.

     the excessive enjoyment that often plays a central role in sustaining the unfreedom of subjects can play a part in their freedom

419. #419

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.39

     **Fantasy and Showing Too Much**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not as secondary supplement to desire but as the very condition that establishes desire's coordinates, and filmic excess—reread through the gaze as objet petit a—is internal to narrative structure rather than an external subversion of it, which allows cinema's fantasmatic dimension to render visible the hidden enjoyment that constitutes social reality.

     his films reveal that we must avoid the temptation to believe we can eliminate this excess. Excessive enjoyment is not just the source of oppression: it is also the foundation of our ethical being.

420. #420

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.23

     **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Gaze as Object** > **Desiring Elsewhere**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the early Lacanian film theory tradition misreads Lacan by conflating desire with a Nietzschean/Foucaultian will to mastery; the properly Lacanian gaze is not the vehicle of mastery but an objet petit a—a point of traumatic, unassimilable enjoyment in the Other that causes desire precisely by remaining out of reach, thereby reorienting film theory from the imaginary look to the real gaze.

     No matter how much power one acquires, one always feels oneself missing something—and this something is the objet petit a.

421. #421

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.73

     **Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Michael Mann's films use fantasmatic cinematic excess to make visible the Kantian ethical subject — one whose freedom and subjectivity emerge precisely through an unconditional, excessive devotion to duty that refuses symbolic identity, aligning enjoyment with duty rather than with the satisfactions the symbolic order offers.

     the film also makes clear that this enjoyment does not imply happiness; in fact, throughout Mann's films, devotion to duty, while it brings enjoyment, inevitably deprives the hero of happiness.

422. #422

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.68

     6

     Theoretical move: Lee's cinema of fantasy operates politically by forcing the public avowal of excessive enjoyment hidden in racist and paranoid fantasies, thereby stripping that enjoyment of its ideological power — not through guilt but through the gaze's capacity to implicate the spectator in what they see.

     In forcing the spectator to avow the excessive enjoyment that derives from hidden fantasies, Lee demonstrates the politics of the cinema of fantasy.

423. #423

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.119

     **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

     Theoretical move: Denis's *J'ai pas sommeil* dismantles the fantasy of ultimate/transgressive enjoyment by rendering the serial killer's acts ordinarily joyless, thereby redirecting desire away from fantasized full satisfaction toward an acceptance of enjoyment's constitutive partiality — a move the passage frames as both an aesthetic and political intervention against ideological fantasy and paranoia about the Other's enjoyment.

     Even the act of killing does not allow Camille to access the enjoyment that he feels himself to be missing.

424. #424

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.142

     18

     Theoretical move: The cinema of integration ideologically stabilizes the subject by transforming the gaze from an ontological absence (impossible object-cause of desire) into an empirically fulfillable presence, thereby conjuring the image of a non-lacking Other that conceals the constitutive incompleteness grounding subjective freedom and generates the fantasy of a hidden agency responsible for the subject's failure to enjoy.

     the idea of the nonlacking Other in the film runs even deeper: the actual Other of the Other in the film is God himself... the film suggests that God is a secret power operating behind the scenes who really has the ability to access the Ark (the privileged impossible object).

425. #425

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.66

     6

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Spike Lee deploys cinematic excess not as aesthetic failure but as a formal strategy for making visible the fantasmatic enjoyment that structures social reality, thereby forcing spectators to confront the gaze rather than disavow it—and that this exposure of fantasy's role in racism constitutes a more fundamental political intervention than any articulated political program.

     we see the fantasies that inform all thinking on race, and we also see the great enjoyment that the white writers obtain from these fantasies

426. #426

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Nietzsche, that nihilism results not from negativity per se but from its insertion into the truth/appearance topology, which collapses the structural gap sustaining desire; she then maps this onto Lacanian concepts (desire, jouissance, the Real) and proposes a non-dialectical "double affirmation" as the only way out of nihilism.

     the mysterious surplus or difference between the satisfaction of a need and the 'other satisfaction,' to express this in Lacanian terminology

427. #427

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.147

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth is structurally "not-whole" not because of lack but because of an irreducible surplus—an auto-referential doubling where the level of enunciation always sticks to what is enunciated—and that this same structure (the Real as the gap between knowledge and jouissance, between the Symbolic and Imaginary) underlies the Nietzschean "double affirmation," the Lacanian not-all, and the ontological status of Woman/Truth as irreducible to objet petit a.

     The Real is the interval or gap that exists, within truth, between knowledge and enjoyment. The nihilistic temptation consists in placing the Real either on one side or the other, on the side of knowledge or on the side of (surplus-) enjoyment, thus abolishing the very doubleness that is the Real of truth.

428. #428

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.161

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" means transgressing Nothingness as the structuring centre of moral dialectics—not abolishing negativity but relocating it from an external, unattainable limit to an internal, minimal difference—and that this move (illustrated via Lacan's Achilles/tortoise reading and Malevich's Suprematism) inaugurates a logic where truth is inherent to appearance, and where necessity is experienced as grounded in contingency rather than in purposive will.

     infinity as the Nothing that we are infinitely approaching, the Nothing that propels our desire/will

429. #429

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.59

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Nietzsche to argue that guilt and surplus-enjoyment are co-originary articulations of immeasurability rather than causal sequence, and that "forgetting" (as distinct from repression or forgiveness) is the condition of possibility for the act, since it is not a prior closure but the effect of a surplus passion that opens us toward life.

     the notions of guilt and surplus-enjoyment emerge together. Yet—and again—not in the sense that guilt refers to enjoyment, that enjoyment causes guilt, but, rather, in the sense that guilt is itself an articulation of enjoyment

430. #430

     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.

     Maybe we should try through a Nietzschean gesture: with a 'yes'—a 'yes' not to the imperative of enjoyment, but to the little bit of enjoyment that keeps persisting on the subject's part

431. #431

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.185

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love, conceived as drive rather than desire, operates through a "time warp" logic in which the impossible Real happens rather than remaining structurally inaccessible; this enables love to "humanize jouissance" through a sublimation-as-desublimation that dislocates the sublime object from its source of enjoyment, thereby making jouissance itself an object of desire.

     To 'desire one's own jouissance' is probably the hardest to obtain and to make work, since enjoyment has trouble appearing as an object.

432. #432

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that nihilism is not a general category subdivided into active and passive forms, but names precisely the mortifying tension between "willing nothingness" (active nihilism as passion for the Real) and "not willing" (passive nihilism as sedative defense against surplus excitement); these two forms are co-dependent and mutually constitutive, with passive nihilism requiring active nihilism as its inherent Other.

     passive nihilism as a defense against the mortification caused by surplus excitement, a defense that operates by mortifying this excitement itself

433. #433

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.84

     **Transference**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it extends Lacan's reformulation of transference via the 'subject supposed to know' from the clinical dyad to the reader-text relation, arguing that reading is structurally transferential; second, it argues—against a scarcity model of trauma—that psychoanalysis locates the real source of trauma in excess (especially excess jouissance/sexuality), not in physical suffering or deprivation.

     it is the hidden excess in the situation of scarcity that is the real source of the trauma

434. #434

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.80

     **Surplus-***jouissance*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary chunk that defines and illustrates multiple Lacanian and related theoretical concepts — Surplus-jouissance, Surplus Repression, Structuralism, Symbolic Castration, Symbolic Identity, Symbolic Order, and Symptom — each entry doing distinct theoretical work: homologizing Marx's surplus-labour with Lacan's surplus-jouissance via the entropic Real; distinguishing the Symbolic from the Imaginary and Real orders; and articulating the symptom's double function as both repressive and gratificatory.

     Marx's surplus-labour is already, in itself, coterminous with Lacan's surplus-jouissance, for it not only refers to a worker's unpaid labour-time, but also to the excessive, incalculable quality of labour-as-such.

435. #435

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.41

     **Interpellation**

     Theoretical move: This passage works through a cluster of interrelated concepts—Interpellation, Lack, Lamella, Law of the Father, and Les Non-Dupes Errent—to argue that subjectivity is constituted by a structural loss (lack) that is simultaneously the condition for desire, jouissance, and signification, and that any attempt to eliminate this lack (as in utopian projects) is self-defeating because satisfaction is always mediated through loss.

     The subject's lack is correlative to an excessive satisfaction that defines it. Because the subject lacks, it cannot find satisfaction in the way that other living beings do. Instead, it enjoys too much.

436. #436

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.23

     **Demand** > **Drive** > **Enjoyment/***Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized as a structural excess irreducible to the pleasure principle—a paradoxical satisfaction-in-dissatisfaction that inextricably binds pleasure and pain, is constituted in relation to the symbolic limit (rather than merely through its transgression), and marks the subject's foundational disconnection from the symbolic order, functioning as the only measure of human freedom.

     the surplus pleasure or 'other satisfaction' that tends to be produced in the process of the satisfaction of vital needs

437. #437

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.45

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

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

     Our enjoyment circles around that point of the Master Signifier, even though it's never enjoyment of the Master Signifier...the only enjoyment lies in exclusion.

438. #438

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Hopelessness and Jouissance: Repetition and Lack

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's "courage of hopelessness" is not despair but a politically radical form of hope grounded in the psychoanalytic structure of repetition (drive) and jouissance: by locating crisis and lack in the present rather than deferring them to the future, the subject is forced to act, unleashing unactualized potential that can rupture the established symbolic coordinates of the possible.

     The trouble with jouissance … is not that it is unattainable, that it always eludes our grasp, but rather that one can never get rid of it, that its stain forever drags along.

439. #439

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

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

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

     humans […] are possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess.

440. #440

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.233

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

     One should mobilize here Lacan's key distinction between pleasure (Lust, plaisir) and enjoyment (Geniessen, jouissance): what is 'beyond the pleasure principle' is enjoyment itself, it is drive as such.

441. #441

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.293

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Potentiality, Otherwise, and Muñoz

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's politics of hopelessness and Muñoz's queer utopianism converge on a shared political direction—the "otherwise" or "potential"—by distinguishing drive-based jouissance (which enacts loss itself) from desire-based hope (which pursues the lost object), and showing that repetition as jouissance keeps radical potential open by thwarting symbolic closure rather than cementing fantasy.

     Muñoz's previous monograph, Disidentifications, sets the scene for this interpretation by pointing to how surplus pleasures can play a key role in political transformation.

442. #442

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.311

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against reducing the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Western cancel culture to psychotic foreclosure or clashing paranoiac singularities, instead mapping both phenomena onto Lacan's University Discourse and formulas of sexuation, while insisting that symbolic communication (the inverted message) and fetishistic disavowal—not psychosis—are the operative mechanisms.

     the object is objet a, surplus enjoyment embodied in the problematic entity

443. #443

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

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

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

     I not only 'insist that our satisfactions, subjectivity, and the social are rooted in constitutive loss,' I also insist that this loss is the other side of an excess.

444. #444

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.284

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     lack is strictly correlative with excess—there is always something that adds itself to reality, that is in excess with regard to it: human life never coincides with itself; to be 'really alive' means to be 'larger than life'

445. #445

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.211

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Zalloua](#contents.xhtml_ch8a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "dislocation" — the radical re-contextualization of an element into a new symbolic space that confers an entirely new meaning — is the key dialectical concept that corrects misreadings of Hegelian Sublation: in genuine dialectical passage, Universality itself is dislocated and a predicate becomes a new Subject, so that no single overarching Substance persists through history.

     with capitalism, money becomes capital, the subject (active agent) of the entire process... the true goal of the entire process is the expanded self-reproduction of capital itself—my needs and their satisfaction are just subordinated moments of capital's self-reproduction.

446. #446

     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.

     the objet a is the 'surplus' of the real 'over every symbolization'

447. #447

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.11

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Jester’s Epistemic Stance

     Theoretical move: Žižek's reformulation of the death drive as the eternal core of subjectivity—finding jouissance in failure and repetition rather than success—grounds his critique of ideology, which operates not through false consciousness but through fantasmatic enjoyment that sustains social authority; the political act of over-conformity to the public letter of the law, refusing its obscene underside, is presented as the path to breaking ideology's hold.

     the public law is compelled to search for support in an illegal enjoyment.

448. #448

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.222

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     Marcuse's notion of repressive desublimation, which should be contrasted with Lacanian surplus-enjoyment, did at least construct a Utopian idea which kept real the possibility of an alternative

449. #449

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.87

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Harman](#contents.xhtml_ch3a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends his position against Harman's OOO critique by arguing that the subject's transcendental limitation is not a form of idealist duomining but reflects a genuine ontological asymmetry: unlike objects, the subject has no existence outside its interactions, making the Unconscious and meaning itself irreducibly interactional and retroactive rather than substanial.

     I deal with this in the Finale of my Surplus-Enjoyment (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

450. #450

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.292

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Present Hopelessness/Present Satisfaction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent contradiction between Žižek's politics of hopelessness and McGowan's advocacy for present satisfaction is resolved by foregrounding constitutive loss as the condition of jouissance: pleasures are ideologically conservative only when they function as salves for loss, but become potentially radical when their necessary relation to loss—repeated in drive rather than concealed by desire—is inhabited.

     workers are thrown 'crumbs of enjoyment' and opportunities for 'small transgressions [to] keep [them] satisfied, as ways to secure the smooth running of productivity.

451. #451

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11)

     Theoretical move: Mari Ruti challenges Žižek's categorical elevation of drive over desire by arguing that his distinction is too strongly drawn: desire is not intrinsically normative, and the ethical act requires an object of desire to arrest jouissance and motivate action—something a self-enclosed drive, by its circular structure, cannot supply alone.

     every newly 'liberated' desire gets appropriated by the Other, thereby merely augmenting the Other's hold over us

452. #452

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.164

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > <span id="chapter5.xhtml_pg_161" aria-label="161" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**EVERY DAY A STRUGGLE**

     Theoretical move: Identity is not a pre-given substance but is constituted by the enemy it posits as a threat: the external menace is logically prior to and structurally necessary for the identity it appears to endanger, making identity politics inherently tied to reactionary logic and the friend/enemy distinction.

     The division into friend and enemy creates a value for which one can sacrifice oneself... The struggle that identity politics requires is not a defect for potential adherents but its chief selling point.

453. #453

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **COLORBLIND OR JUST BLIND**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia are genuinely universalist—not identity-political—and that their universality is revealed through what is constitutively absent; capitalism is identified as the structural barrier that obscures this universality by forcing subjects into bare particularity, making the critique of capitalism indispensable to any genuine universalist project.

     No universalist project can isolate itself from the critique of capitalism today and still pretend to be universalist.

454. #454

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.120

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

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

     Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated particularity.

455. #455

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.131

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **ON NOT SEEING INVISIBLE HANDS**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism structurally requires subjects to disavow knowledge of the capitalist whole, misidentifying the advantage of capital with their own advantage; this constitutes a necessary deception that converts individual dissatisfaction into an engine of endless accumulation, so that the capitalist subject sacrifices real satisfaction for the commodity form's demand.

     In the attempt to accumulate more and more satisfaction for oneself, one actually increases one's sense of dissatisfaction. Capitalism nourishes itself on our inability to ever have enough.

456. #456

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.195

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **A PARTICULAR GUISE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that genuine universality is not achieved through total inclusion of all particulars but is instead revealed through those who don't belong to a public institution; drawing on psychoanalysis, he shows that embracing lack—rather than overcoming it—is the condition for both subjective satisfaction and emancipatory universalist politics.

     Embracing my lack is simultaneously unleashing an excess that is integral to my satisfaction.

457. #457

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.141

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > <span id="chapter4.xhtml_pg_137" aria-label="137" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE EMPTY SUBJECT**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism's privileging of the general equivalent structurally empties out subject identity, reducing every particular to an interchangeable commodity form; this systemic annihilation of identity is not a contingent feature but the core logic of capitalism, which simultaneously liberates subjects from traditional mythic identity while rendering any chosen identity alien, contingent, and worthless.

     Capitalism ensconces everyone—both capitalists and workers—in a commodity form that prescribes their activity while granting them a subjective experience of freedom.

458. #458

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.77

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **SPEAKING ABSENCES**

     Theoretical move: The universal is not a positive totality but the constitutive failure of inclusion: it appears only as an absence, through those who do not belong, and any attempt to positivize it (whether as present achievement or deferred promise) betrays it by collapsing it into a particular. McGowan deploys Fanon and Marx to show that genuine universal struggle is indexed to this structural absence rather than to the goal of complete belonging.

     This surplus labor produces the surplus value that, according to Marx, is the basis for the capitalist's profit... the capitalist always receives something additional in the bargain not paid for.

459. #459

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.129

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **A NEW FORM OF OBEDIENCE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism inaugurates a historically novel form of obedience in which the structuring principle reproduces itself unconsciously through subjects' pursuit of private particular interest, making self-deception not merely useful but structurally necessary—and thereby rendering insistence on particularity the new mode of conformism rather than resistance.

     Capital uses traders to develop itself while leaving them with a lingering dissatisfaction that they never have enough. Their accumulation doesn't serve their own interests but those of capital.

460. #460

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.113

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the death drive involves two distinct splits—the genesis of surplus satisfaction from organic need, and a constitutive negativity (inbuilt lack of being) around which the drive circulates—and that satisfaction/enjoyment is not the goal but the *means* of the drive, whose true aim is the repetition of negativity; this reframes the death drive not as a return to the inanimate but as the opening of alternative paths to death beyond those immanent in the organism.

     The repetition involved in the functioning and satisfying of organic functions produces a surplus, unexpected satisfaction, which then becomes the drive of another repetition, repetition within repetition, repeating this surplus satisfaction.

461. #461

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.36

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

     these elements already bear the mark of the non-relation (and this mark is the surplus-enjoyment adhering to them).

462. #462

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.76

     Contradictions that Matter > Hm…

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the apparent opposition between equivocity (Cassin) and formalization/univocity (Badiou) in Lacan is false: equivocity is not the opposite of formalization but its very condition, since the "right word" in analytic interpretation functions like a formula by targeting the singular impasse/contradiction that the symptom "solves," rather than by conveying a determinate meaning.

     it does so by spoiling/dissolving the enjoyment (surplus excitation) that emerges at the place of this negativity or contradiction

463. #463

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.140

     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.

     The excess exists, flourishes at the structural place of the minus one, and here it proliferates as its irreducible material plus.

464. #464

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacan's Real is irreducible to Butler's performative ontology because the emergence of the signifying order is coextensive with a constitutive gap (a "minus one"), and it is precisely at this place of the missing signifier that surplus-enjoyment arises — making sexuality not a being beyond the symbolic but the contradictory effect of the symbolic's own structural impossibility, which is what is lost when "sex" is translated into "gender."

     It is in the place of this gap or negativity that appears the surplus-enjoyment which stains the signifying structure: the heterogeneous element pertaining to the signifying structure, yet irreducible to it.

465. #465

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.121

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze share a common theoretical move: rejecting the pleasure principle as primary and affirming the primacy of the death drive, which they reconceptualise not as a tendency toward destruction but as the transcendental/ontological condition of repetition itself—a faceless negativity or "crack" that is irreducible to either life or death, and which constitutes rather than follows from the surplus excess and repression it generates.

     the excess (of excitation) does not exist somewhere independently of (and prior to) repetition, but only and precisely in and through repetition itself

466. #466

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.31

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Quandary of the Relation

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "there is no sexual relation" should not be ontologized into a gloomy fact about reality, but understood as the very condition that generates ties and discourses; the non-relation, mediated by objet petit a as its objective counterpart, produces an "object-disoriented ontology" that links the sexual to emancipatory politics at a structural, not merely thematic, level.

     leave sexuality out, put it aside, and pursue other concepts, such as the (barred) Other, surplus-enjoyment, the Lacanian theory of the four discourses

467. #467

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.135

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

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

     it is precisely this surplus that binds, connects different Ones (signifiers) in concrete circumstances.

468. #468

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.99

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that jouissance/the drive is neither simply animal instinct nor the marker of human exception, but rather the point at which nature's own inherent impossibility gets articulated as such — making the human being not an exception to the animal but the 'question mark' to the very consistency of the Animal, and by extension the point at which the incomplete ontological constitution of reality becomes visible.

     This is why I'm describing what appears here as 'surplus jouissance' and not forcing anything or committing any transgression…What analysis shows, if it shows anything at all…is very precisely the fact that we don't ever transgress.

469. #469

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.97

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "human animal" is not a half-animal plus something else, but a half-finished animal whose structural incompleteness (lack within animality itself) is the very site from which jouissance — rather than Heidegger's being-toward-death — opens the specifically human dimension; jouissance is thus recast as the ontological condition of possibility for human finitude, not merely a deviation from natural need.

     any satisfaction of a need allows, in principle, for another satisfaction to occur, which tends to become independent and self-perpetuating in pursuing and reproducing itself

470. #470

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.19

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Where Do Adults Come From?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that what makes enjoyment "sexual" is not its continuity with adult sexuality or its entanglement with partial drives per se, but its constitutive entanglement with the unconscious as a structural negativity arriving from the Other—such that sexuality is not first present and then repressed, but appears *only* as repressed, making the unconscious and sexuality ontologically co-extensive.

     the enjoyment involved in the drives (the surplus pleasure or the 'other satisfaction' that tends to be produced in the process of the satisfaction of vital needs) and sexuality

471. #471

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.43

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > "The Invisible 'Handjob' of the Market"

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that modern forms of social power—paradigmatically capitalism—operate not by abolishing the constitutive non-relation of the symbolic order but by *appropriating* it (a "privatization of the negative"), building it into a narrative of a higher Relation (e.g., the invisible hand of the market), while Marx's concept of the proletariat names the precise structural point of this disavowed negativity within the capitalist mode of production.

     The money-owner finds on the market a commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, and whose actual consumption is a creation of value.

472. #472

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.58

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via a close reading of Freud and Lacan, that sexual difference does not arise from the existence of two sexes but from the non-existence of the "second sex"—a constitutive ontological deficit—and traces Lacan's shift from locating "pure loss" on the side of the body (early work) to locating it within the signifying order itself (late work), showing that surplus-enjoyment emerges at the place of a missing signifier ("with-without"), which is also the origin of sexual division.

     surplus-enjoyment itself is precisely what emerges at the place of the signifying deficit or hole.

473. #473

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

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

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

     what repeats itself could be formulated by the term 'One-plus': something (some discernible entity) plus the surplus that invests and drives it.

474. #474

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.70

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference is not merely one example of signifying differentiation but rather the ontological presupposition of the signifier's functioning: the constitutive gap and surplus-enjoyment that prevents the signifying field from being a closed, consistent structure are the very ground on which sexuation is configured, making the subject of the unconscious irreducibly sexed.

     it is not one reality, but reality as split... (and that, at the same time, there is something excessive in it—surplus-enjoyment)

475. #475

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.111

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Freud's trajectory in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"—from the monism of the death drive, through the Eros/Thanatos dualism, to a monism of sexual drives—in order to show that the Lacanian death drive is not a separate drive but the inherent negativity (the gap/void) around which every partial drive circulates, with objet petit a functioning as the "crust" that sticks to this void and makes repetition possible.

     Surplus satisfaction itself does not yet qualify as drive. It is not inconceivable that animals experience some surplus satisfaction when satisfying their needs, yet for it to function as partial object (or object of the drive) this satisfaction must, at the same time, start to function as objective embodiment (object-representative) of the negativity or gap involved in the signifying edifice of being.

476. #476

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.127

     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.

     Certain existing signifying connections (symptoms) or signifying complexes ('formations') are thus not only a disguise under which the original negativity repeats itself, they are also its—more or less fantasmatic, enjoyment-fueled—representations

477. #477

     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.

     the psychoanalytic notion of the 'unbound surplus,' that is, to enjoyment as always *surplus*-enjoyment/excitation

478. #478

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that "Really Existing Capitalism," like Really Existing Socialism, depends on the big Other as a structural guarantor of symbolic fiction—not its dissolution—and that post-Fordist bureaucratic audit culture intensifies rather than dissolves this dependency, producing a permanent, Kafkaesque anxiety in which subjects become their own surveyors while the big Other's authority is simultaneously disavowed and re-entrenched.

     These interpretations then achieve the strange autonomy peculiar to bureaucracy... bureaucratic procedures float freely, independent of any external authority; but that very autonomy means that they assume a heavy implacability

479. #479

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism

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

     If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermedia consumer culture.

480. #480

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     October 6, 1979: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything’

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Fordism — inaugurated on October 6, 1979 — has restructured not only labour and production but subjectivity itself, generating a psychic economy of permanent instability, 'precarity', and rising mental illness; the chemico-biologization of mental illness functions ideologically to de-politicize what is in fact a social causation, thereby reinforcing capitalist realism.

     Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream.

481. #481

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that neoliberal 'market Stalinism' is not a deviation from capitalism but its essential logic: the proliferation of bureaucratic audit culture and PR-production instantiates a structural compulsion to substitute representations of performance for actual achievement, and this system is held together by the Lacanian big Other as the collective fiction that must be maintained in its constitutive ignorance for social reality to function.

     workers receive multiple memos from different managers saying the exact same thing... 'creativity' and 'self-expression' have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies; which... now makes affective, as well as productive demands, on workers.