Symbolic Identity

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (54)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.97

   Good and Evil > The logic of suicide

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

   people are constituted as The People only in relation to this symbolic order ... it is the monarch (in his symbolic function) who gives people their symbolic existence ... the French people 'commit suicide' because they have annihilated what, in the Other, gave them their symbolic identity.

2. #02

   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.

   As a member of a culture, I gain a stable symbolic identity associated with a structure that extends beyond my own subjectivity.

3. #03

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

   OBTAININ G WH AT YOU D ON' T WAN T

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

   We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity.

4. #04

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.204

   THE TR IP BE YOND NARC I SSI SM

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

   it offers the lover a new symbolic identity. One can become a husband or a wife or a spouse: in each case, the subject gains recognition from the romantic attachment.

5. #05

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.65

   I > 1 > Targeted Violence

   Theoretical move: The abandonment of the seduction theory is reframed as Freud's foundational theoretical move toward the death drive: by relocating violence from an external aggressor to the subject's own self-inflicted sacrificial loss, Freud (and Lacan after him) grounds subjectivity in a constitutive self-violence that repetition compels the subject to re-enact — making aggressive violence toward the other a detour, not a solution, and redirecting the ethical question toward assaulting one's own symbolic identity.

   the more the subject engages in a violent assault on its own forms of symbolic identity, its own ego, its own deepest convictions, the more the subject fi nds an enjoyable alternative to the satisfactions of aggression.

6. #06

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.107

   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.'

   While the master invests in the idea of symbolic status and derives an identity from it, the slave can more easily adopt an attitude of indifference toward symbolic identity because this identity in the case of the slave is valueless.

7. #07

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.118

   I > Sustaining Anxiety > Beyond the Demand

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary capitalism has replaced the traditional dialectic of demand and desire (prohibition-based paternal authority) with an imperative to enjoy, producing a subject overwhelmed by the obscene proximity of the enjoying other rather than structured by lack — and that the ethical psychoanalytic response is the embrace of the resulting anxiety.

   The social field of prohibition is a terrain stripped of all enjoyment where everyone is reduced to the form of symbolic identity.

8. #08

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.130

   I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

   Theoretical move: Against Heidegger's anxiety-as-confrontation-with-nothing, McGowan (via Lacan) argues that anxiety is ethical precisely because it arises from the overwhelming presence of the other's jouissance rather than from absence; the genuinely ethical response is to tolerate and endure this anxiety rather than flee it through cynicism or fundamentalism.

   This type of tolerance allows the subject to feel good about itself and to sustain its symbolic identity.

9. #09

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.133

   I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that anxiety in the face of the Other's enjoyment is not merely an ethical posture but the very mechanism through which subjects access their own enjoyment, since enjoyment is structurally unavailable directly and must be fantasized through the enjoying Other—making the disturbing fantasy-encounter with the real Other ethically superior to both liberal tolerance (which neutralizes otherness) and fascist persecution (which disavows enjoyment while depending on it).

   Unlike the experience of the nonexistent symbolic identity, which closes down the space in which the real other might appear, the fantasized encounter with the enjoying other leaves this space open.

10. #10

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.137

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

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

    Symbolic identity offers the subject a stable answer to the question of identity that emerges with subjection to the signifier. With an identity, the subject can feel itself at home within the inherently alienating structure of the social order.

11. #11

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.141

    I > Changing the World > Th e Questionable Task of Analysis

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are forms of private rebellion that leave the social order intact, and that psychoanalytic "normalization" should be understood not as adaptation to the status quo but as the production of a subject capable of genuinely transformative public action.

    It is defiance rather than acceptance of symbolic identity and the restrictiveness that goes along with this identity.

12. #12

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.175

    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.

    The identification with the leader's power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition, whereas the identification with the leader's weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community.

13. #13

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.187

    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.

    it nonetheless brought with it an enjoyment not found in everyday obedience and symbolic identity.

14. #14

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.230

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > An Express Path to Trauma

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as simultaneously ideological (concealing the traumatic kernel that grounds social reality) and subversive: by luring the subject toward the very gap it conceals, fantasy stages an encounter with the Real that exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and thereby opens political possibility.

    creating the possibility of the subject's disinvestment from the symbolic structure and from symbolic identity

15. #15

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.316

    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).

    Antigone's isolation at the end of Sophocles's play depends on her abandonment of any attachment to her symbolic identity, while Jubal's isolation relies on the symbolic identity he has acquired

16. #16

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.320

    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.

    There is no symbolic identity that doesn't appear to hide a real other who possesses some secret means of enjoyment.

17. #17

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.114

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

    Theoretical move: Recognition's ethical value is undermined by its constitutive failure: it reduces the subject to a symbolic identity and never reaches the real other (the neighbor); genuine ethics and encounter with the other are grounded not in the sacrifice of enjoyment but in enjoyment itself, since it is the other's singular, untranslatable enjoyment that first constitutes the real other as such.

    Recognition reduces the subject to a symbolic identity — I am recognized as a professional, as a parent, as an American, and so on — and thus completely misses the subject's uniqueness

18. #18

    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 Burial's music and persona as the exemplary case for hauntology as a cultural-theoretical concept, arguing that Burial's sound articulates a mourning for lost collective futures (Rave, the underground) haunted by events never directly experienced, while his treatment of voice and anonymity constitutes a resistance to the spectacularizing logic of digital/media culture.

    I just want to be in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune.

19. #19

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

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

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

    the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster…but with Jimmy Savile OBE – Sir Jimmy Savile – Jimmy Savile, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great.

20. #20

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI:** *Western moralism.*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is a dialectical art whose foundational operator is 'ignorantia docta' — the analyst's formative ignorance that guides the subject along the paths of error toward truth — and that symbolic investiture (not psychological capacity) constitutes the dimension in which being is realised, with transference, the signifier, and non-sense articulated as interconnected structural phenomena.

    when the man says — and in saying it, is it, by virtue of a certain system of symbolic relations — says I am king — it is not simply accepting an office.

21. #21

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how the fundamental fantasy is anchored in a small set of phonemes (pe, je, li) that simultaneously encode the subject's proper name, the phallus/penis opposition, bisexuality, and the death drive — showing that the subject's singularity and phallic identity are constituted at the intersection of letter, desire, castration, and the irreducible rock of the death drive.

    the je of George Philip will tighten around the proud symbol to constitute his phallic identity, joli porc

22. #22

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

    B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity > The next session: THE SEMINAR PLA YS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "beyond of the pleasure principle" is identical with the beyond of signification — i.e., the unconscious as compulsion to repeat — and that this can be isolated even in ostensibly random sequences, demonstrating a "symbolic inertia" of the unconscious subject that exceeds dual intersubjectivity.

    symbolic inertia, characteristic of the subject, of the unconscious subject

23. #23

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.42

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek rehabilitates psychoanalysis against Malabou's critique by arguing that the death drive is not an opposing force to the pleasure principle but its transcendental, constitutive gap, and that the Lacanian barred subject is already a post-traumatic, 'living dead' form — a zero-level subjectivity shaped by destructive plasticity — which a properly read Hegelian dialectics (via 'absolute recoil') can accommodate without reducing negativity to teleological sublation.

    the subject who continues to live after its psychic death (the erasure of the narrative texture of its symbolic identity)

24. #24

    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 human being cannot be pure substance (the real of the body) or pure subject (symbolic identity), for it is composed of both body and meaning-making capacity.

25. #25

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.233

    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.

    a symbolic investiture not only endows the subject with new predicates; it also calls forth a largely unconscious 'citation' of the authority guaranteeing, legitimating one's rightful enjoyment of those predicates

26. #26

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

    3. *The Ethics of the Act*

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

    any attempt to draw too near to it results in the collapse of the subject's symbolic identity.

27. #27

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.194

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Other as Irreplaceable*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that love at its most fundamental attaches not to the symbolic qualities or historical identity of the beloved but to the irreplaceable singularity inaugurated by the encounter with language itself — a dimension that exceeds and resists the structuring of the symbolic order, illustrated through Lacan's reading of Antigone's love for Polyneces.

    It is to this elemental dimension of her brother—to this 'what is, is'—that Antigone is attached and that she juxtaposes with Creon's edict

28. #28

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

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

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

    men are doing the opposite, trying to arrive at their phallic symbolic identity which eludes them forever

29. #29

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

    Theoretical move: The passage proposes a five-stage dialectical schema of sexuality's evolution—from asexual reproduction through symbolic redoubling to posthuman disintegration—where each stage marks a new mode of actualisation of sexual difference, culminating in the collapse of both biological and symbolic levels under posthuman conditions.

    a biological man can be a woman in its symbolic identity, etc.

30. #30

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.47

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

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Dune* deploys the voice as an "impossible object" — an object-cause of desire that destabilizes rather than secures symbolic authority — in order to construct a fully fantasmatic world where the originary loss of the privileged object has not occurred, enabling direct access to jouissance and collapsing the boundary between internal and external reality.

    The voice doesn't just disturb others; it deprives the subject using it of her/his own sense of symbolic identity. To use the voice is to identify with a detached object.

31. #31

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.69

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the failure to fully commit to fantasy — epitomised by Sailor's investment in symbolic/phallic authority and Lula's investment in imaginary authority — is not a warning against fantasy but a demonstration of what is lost when subjects orient themselves toward the Other's recognition rather than following the logic of fantasy to its gap-exposing conclusion.

    fantasy also has the potential to destroy the assurances of symbolic identity and the comforts of imaginary bonds, forcing us to experience an enjoyment that leaves us exposed and vulnerable.

32. #32

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.50

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged > The Worms and the Spice

    Theoretical move: By reading the spice in Lynch's *Dune* as *das Ding*, McGowan argues that the film uniquely depicts—rather than merely promises—total (feminine) jouissance, showing how the Thing's presence within the fantasmatic world collapses the constitutive exclusion that founds social reality, and thereby reveals the identity of ultimate enjoyment and ultimate horror.

    when one immerses oneself in enjoyment, one loses one's symbolic anchoring and becomes absurd. One moves beyond the bounds of sense.

33. #33

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.101

    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.

    what is subjected to the comic treatment is the Other as the guarantee of a fixed or steady correlation between 'someone' and his or her symbolic identity

34. #34

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.427

    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.

    the lesson of Lacan is that our symbolic identity, precisely, cannot be reduced to an expression of intimate psychic idiosyncrasies.

35. #35

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.377

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that in contemporary global capitalism the apparent "chaos" of decentralized power is itself an ideological mask for unprecedented centralized control, and that the "speculative identity" of opposites (tolerance/intolerance, democracy/alienation, public/private) means that the very gaze that perceives the Other's defects is the source of those defects — culminating in the claim that democracy requires a minimum of alienation lest the empirical people become alienated from themselves in their Leader.

    if, at the level of their symbolic identity, all subjects are equal... every reference to their properly symbolic mandate is prohibited

36. #36

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.271

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: The passage proposes a new axis of class struggle between slum-dwellers (a dispossessed counter-class) and the "symbolic class" (uprooted cognitive-cultural workers who mistake their particularity for universality), raising the question of whether an emancipatory coalition between slum collectives and the progressive fraction of the symbolic class can serve as the political seed of the future.

    the so-called 'symbolic class' (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists, and so on)

37. #37

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

    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 > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides, including a key note on Lacan's self-critical shift in conceiving the analyst's position from a stand-in for the big Other to an embodiment of objet petit a, and scattered remarks on perversion, sexuation, the four discourses, and Badiouian politics.

    the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject's imaginary misrecognitions, and to make him or her accept their proper place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place which effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity

38. #38

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.94

    11

    Theoretical move: Desire is structurally constituted by the impossibility of the objet petit a and is irreducible to the social order that produces it; ideology requires fantasy as a supplement to stabilize desire's inherent radicality, and the ethics of psychoanalysis—refusing to give ground relative to one's desire—demands embracing lack as constitutive rather than seeking its fantasmatic elimination, a stance the cinema of desire uniquely enables.

    The authentic subject of desire rejects the symbolic identity that the big Other offers it because this identity (one's position or status within the social world) demands a compromise of desire.

39. #39

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.248

    29 > **20. Steven Spielberg's Search for the Father**

    Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on Spielberg) argues that Spielberg's films consistently stage the failure of paternal/symbolic authority to protect the subject from the gaze, and that the subject's only recourse is to sacrifice symbolic identity rather than master the gaze, which remains an irresolvable deadlock of desire.

    He gives up the identity that the signifier 'David Mann' provides for him, and in doing so, he defeats the trucker.

40. #40

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.215

    **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy, unlike pure desire (which remains confined to the level of the signifier and thereby insulates the subject from the real other), exposes the subject to the real other by making it vulnerable—and this vulnerability constitutes the ethical dimension of fantasy that the cinema of intersection (Wenders) uniquely reveals.

    the fundamental value of fantasy lies in its ability to deprive the subject of its defenses, to strip away the security of a symbolic identity.

41. #41

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.152

    20

    Theoretical move: The cinema of integration (exemplified by Spielberg) responds to the traumatic encounter with the gaze by erecting a fantasized living father who promises to master what the symbolic (dead) father cannot—the void of signification from which the gaze emerges—thus trading the freedom rooted in trauma for ideological obedience and illusory security.

    Whereas the dead father lacks the power to stabilize the subject's symbolic identity, the fantasy of the living father has this power. He assures us that we are not alone and that we have a substantive identity

42. #42

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.218

    29

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the cinema of intersection—exemplified by David Lynch's films—reveals the constitutive failure of the sexual relationship by depicting fantasy in its full structure rather than abridging it at the nodal point, thereby exposing that the objet petit a is nothingness itself, and that genuine enjoyment in the real depends on surrendering the ideological fantasy of romantic completion.

    the object doesn't complete the subject but instead deprives the subject of all symbolic identity and shatters the world in which the subject exists.

43. #43

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.192

    25

    Theoretical move: The cinema of intersection is theorized as politically transformative because it stages a direct encounter with the gaze as the impossible real, enabling subjects to identify with objet petit a, thereby shattering their dependence on the Other and opening the possibility of authentic political acts that exceed ideology's pre-given options.

    To identify with the object is to insist on one's particular way of enjoying at the expense of one's symbolic identity.

44. #44

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.193

    **The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Tarkovsky's "cinema of intersection" achieves its distinctive effect by dramatically separating the worlds of desire and fantasy only to reveal their fundamental identity—that the objet petit a remains constant across both registers—thereby exposing the traumatic proximity of the gaze and dissolving the illusion of difference that sustains ordinary desiring subjectivity. This move is theorized as simultaneously Hegelian (identity-in-difference) and Lacanian (the drive's monotony beneath desire's metonymy).

    The stability of our symbolic identity and of the world of desire depends on the idea of fantasy's absolute difference.

45. #45

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.30

    **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Radicality of the Cinema**

    Theoretical move: Cinema is theorized as uniquely capable of staging the encounter with the gaze qua objet petit a — an encounter that ordinary waking life systematically elides — and this traumatic encounter constitutes both the political threat cinema poses to ideology and the basis of subjective freedom from the big Other's symbolic authority.

    its inability to provide support for the subject's own symbolic identity. The big Other sustains its hold over the subject through the creation of a world of meaning.

46. #46

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.34

    **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **Deployments of the Gaze**

    Theoretical move: McGowan proposes a four-part typology of cinema's possible relations to the gaze as objet petit a—fantasy-distortion, sustaining absence, fantasmatic domestication, and traumatic encounter—arguing that this deployment of the gaze constitutes the fundamental political and existential act of cinema, and that Lacanian film theory has historically elided cinema's potentially radical dimension.

    an encounter that completely relocates spectators in relation to their symbolic identity

47. #47

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.210

    **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

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

    Fantasy can provide an actual opening to the other only if we remain within its logic and accept the threat that it can pose to the stability of our symbolic identity.

48. #48

    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.

    Their ethos consists in a drive to abandon everything that would confine them within a symbolic identity.

49. #49

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.81

    **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.

    There's no doing without it. Identity forms through giving a content to our subjectivity. So our subjectivity is always just an empty form, and identity is necessary. We have to have a symbolic identity.

50. #50

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

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

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

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

51. #51

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.189

    [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.

    Because identity is always symbolic identity, the only aim of identity politics can be that of social recognition for a particular identity.

52. #52

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.153

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

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

    Identity is always symbolic identity. As symbolic identity, it depends on the recognition of others to establish it.

53. #53

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.191

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

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

    The revelation of Bellwether's chemical manipulation of various predators in order to coerce them into acting like predators is the film's most important moment.

54. #54

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.14

    <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **KANT’S STRANGE BEDFELLOW**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kantian universality—specifically the universality of the moral law—is the condition of possibility for genuine freedom and singularity, because it alienates subjects from their particular (heteronomous) identities and thereby enables them to relate to those identities from a distance rather than being trapped within them.

    a bad faith attempt to identify completely with my particular symbolic identity.