The Act

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (479)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

   Slavoj Zizek

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's reading of Kant reveals a more uncanny Kantian ethics than liberal interpretations allow: the Kantian transcendental subject (empty, decentred) is the Freudian subject of desire, and this entails grounding ethics not in the Good or superego-morality but in desire's non-pathological a priori cause (objet petit a), yielding a 'critique of pure desire' that radicalises Kant's own project.

   in the final confrontation between the journalist and the mother, it is the mother who accomplishes the ethical gesture against the journalist, whose very humanitarian and caring behaviour is ultimately unethical.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.15

   Introduction

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with Kant constitutes a double move: exposing the perverse underside of Kantian ethics (via "Kant with Sade") while simultaneously crediting Kant with discovering the irreducible dimension of desire and the Real in ethics — a discovery that must itself be supplemented by a further step toward the drive, which frames the project of an "ethics of the Real."

   Lacan turns ethics (in so far as it concerns the desire of the analyst and the nature of the analytic act) into one of the pivots of psychoanalysis

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.24

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's concept of the 'pathological' designates not the abnormal but the entire register of normal, drive-motivated action, and that the transition to the ethical requires not gradual refinement but a revolutionary break — a creation ex nihilo — structurally analogous to Lacan's conception of The Act, with the ethical dimension forming a Real-like surplus irreducible to the legal/illegal binary.

   Is not Lacan's own conception of the passage à l'acte itself founded on such a Kantian gesture? When Lacan states that 'suicide is the only successful act', the point is precisely this: after such an act, the subject will no longer be the same as before

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.46

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian subject of practical reason must pass through a moment of radical alienation and impossible choice (the 'excluded choice' of pure determinism) before attaining freedom, and that this structure—where the subject's fundamental disposition (Gesinnung) is itself chosen by a transcendental act of spontaneity that has no meta-foundation—is homologous to the Lacanian insight that the Other of the Other is the subject itself, grounding a 'psychoanalytic postulate of freedom' operative in the analytic cure.

   every relation between cause and effect then presupposes and includes an act (a decision which is not necessarily 'conscious') by means of which some Triebfeder is instituted as (sufficient) cause, that is, incorporated into the maxim that guides the subject's action.

5. #05

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

   The Lie > The Unconditional

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

   They situate the ethical act in a dimension which is neither the dimension of the law (in the usual, sociojuridical sense of the word) nor the dimension of a simple transgression of the law... but that of the Real.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.73

   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.

   paradoxical as it may sound, this could be an ethical act. What is inadmissible is that the subject claims that this duty was imposed upon him, that he could not act otherwise

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.95

   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.

   The act differs from an 'action' in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). After an act, I am 'not the same as before'. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse of the subject.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.100

   Good and Evil > Degrees of evil

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of "radical evil" is systematically misread when applied to empirical historical events like the Holocaust; it is instead a transcendental-structural concept—the necessary consequence of freedom itself—that explains the possibility of non-ethical conduct, not its empirical magnitude, and that this misreading enables a reductive "ethics of the lesser evil."

   The propensity to evil is not only the formal ground of all unlawful action, but is also itself an act (of freedom).

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.104

   Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that within Kantian ethics, "diabolical evil" and "the highest good" are structurally indistinguishable—both name the formal structure of an accomplished ethical act—and that any genuine act necessarily involves a transgression of the existing symbolic order, such that the difference between good and evil dissolves at the level of the act's structure, a conclusion Kant produced but refused to acknowledge.

   at the level of the structure of the ethical act, the difference between good and evil does not exist. At this level, evil is formally indistinguishable from good.

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.111

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > The act as 'subjectivation without subject'

    Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Kant's exclusion of 'diabolical evil' and 'highest good' as impossible for human agents stems not from intellectual courage but from a flawed conceptualization that links the Real to the will; following Lacan, she proposes that Acts do occur in reality precisely because jouissance (as the real kernel of the law) operates independently of will, introducing a 'fundamental alienation of the subject in the act' that dissolves the requirement for a holy or diabolical will and grounds ethics in the irreducible split between subject of enunciation and subject of the statement.

    My thesis would thus be that the 'highest evil' and the 'highest good' as synonymous with an accomplished act do exist, or, rather, they do occur - what does not exist is the holy or diabolical will.

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.116

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > The act as 'subjectivation without subject'

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the successful ethical act does not require abolishing the statement/enunciation split but rather fully discloses it—via the paradox-structure of the liar—such that the subject is not a divided subject but is 'objectified' in the act, passing over to the side of the object (objet petit a), which Lacan calls 'subjectivation without subject'.

    We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a 'headless subjectivation' or a 'subjectivation without subject'.

12. #12

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > Notes

    Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic apparatus, but note 23 makes a substantive theoretical move: it articulates Lacan's later reformulation of the subject/enunciation split in terms of the Other/jouissance difference, locating ethical responsibility in the fragment of jouissance that 'grows' from the act rather than in the Other-determined dimension of speech.

    there is something else which 'grows' from this act, namely, some jouissance. It is in this fragment of jouissance that we must situate the subject and his responsibility.

13. #13

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.119

    The Act and Evil in Literature

    Theoretical move: The passage constructs two paradigmatic figures of ethical failure — the 'Sadeian' (infinite approach to the object of desire, part-by-part) and the 'Don Juanian' (overhasty pursuit, one-by-one) — as the two faces of Kant's theory of the act, using Lacan's reading of Zeno's paradox to show that both fail to close the gap between will and jouissance and thus enter the territory of 'diabolical evil'.

    either one more step is required for the accomplishment of an (ethical) act, or such an act has already been left behind; either we still have not attained the object (of desire), or we have already gone beyond it.

14. #14

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.124

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the literary case of Valmont and Merteuil in *Les Liaisons dangereuses* to dramatize the Lacanian thesis that there is no sexual relation — that love (identification, the formula of One) and jouissance (always partial, never whole) are fundamentally incompatible — while also arguing that the path to autonomous subjectivity, in eighteenth-century ethical thought, runs through Evil as a deliberate project rather than mere knowledge.

    her act of surrender must be a result of reflection and sober decision... when she takes the decisive step, this step has to be accompanied by the clear awareness of what she is doing and what the consequences of her act may be.

15. #15

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.132

    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.

    he steps on to the path of no return. What is more, he does it precisely in the name of the good

16. #16

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's trajectory enacts a structural shift from the moral law (constitutive of subjective desire) to the superego, such that his acts become perpetually incomplete — each sacrifice only tightens the superego's snare rather than accomplishing anything — while Merteuil alone remains loyal to her desire, refusing to "give up on" it.

    Thus Valmont's act is an act that remains essentially unaccomplished. In order to accomplish it, he (perpetually) has to make 'one more effort'.

17. #17

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.138

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

    Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Molière's Don Juan as an embodiment of "diabolical evil" in the Kantian sense—not as transgression or atheism, but as a principled refusal to repent despite full knowledge of God's existence, which paradoxically hystericizes the big Other (Heaven) and exposes the breakdown of its authority, while also linking Don Juan's logic of conquest to Lacan's not-all (pas-toute).

    Don Juan's final gesture, his charity, thus has an entirely different impact: he does not give money to the poor man in spite of his perseverance but because of it; his is no longer an act of charity but, rather, the gesture of the master who recognizes and acknowledges in the slave his equal

18. #18

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.147

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural distinction between desire and the drive by reading Valmont (desire) against Don Juan (drive): Valmont perpetually defers satisfaction to maintain the gap of desire, while Don Juan attains satisfaction in each object yet is propelled by the irreducible hole constitutive of the drive itself, which Zupančič links to the not-all and objet petit a.

    he lacks time in advance in which to lay his plans, and time afterward in which to become conscious of his act.

19. #19

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.150

    The Act and Evil in Literature > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on "The Act and Evil in Literature," gathering citations from Lacan, Kierkegaard, Zizek, and others; while non-narrative in form, several notes contain substantive theoretical quotations on partial drive, jouissance, castration/repression, and the Master/Slave dialectic as applied to Don Juan.

    the very formal structure of his act was 'radically evil': his was an act of radical defiance which disregarded the Good of the community.

20. #20

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

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego

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

    the superegoic version of the (moral) law focuses on preventing the act from even taking place. But the only real guarantee that can be fabricated to prevent the act from even taking place is the advent of the figure of an absolute Other.

21. #21

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.179

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

    Theoretical move: The moral law in Kant has the structure of an enunciation without a statement—a "half-said"—and is constituted retroactively by the subject's act rather than pre-existing it; this convergence with Lacan's account of desire as the desire of the Other allows Zupančič to distinguish two ethical paths: the superego's pursuit of an Other that knows, versus the act that creates what the Law wants.

    it is only with his act that the subject creates what the Other (the Law) wants. Such is, for example, the act of Oedipus: Oedipus retroactively creates the symbolic debt into which he should have been born

22. #22

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Law is constituted only in the act of the subject, and that the point of encounter between law and subject is 'extimate' to both — neither simply conscious nor unconscious, but rather the cause of the unconscious (a separated-yet-internal part of the subject's flesh), which is anterior to and foundational for the unconscious itself.

    It is at this level that we must situate freedom, and the real dimension of the act.

23. #23

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.187

    Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Some preliminary remarks

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with tragedy is not a poetization but a first attempt at formalization—myth and tragedy function as instantiations of formal structures analogous to mathemes—and traces a triadic movement (Oedipus→Hamlet→Sygne de Coüfontaine) in which the relationship between knowledge, desire, and guilt is progressively transformed, culminating in a radical destitution of the subject that exceeds classical symbolic debt.

    Sygne, by contrast, finds herself in a situation where she must make the decision to act despite her knowledge, and to commit the deed which this very knowledge makes 'impossible'.

24. #24

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.215

    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.

    And in spite of this, he ventures his answer. In this, he comes closer than his mythical counterparts to the dimension of the Act in the proper sense of the term.

25. #25

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.223

    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: Zupančič argues that Oedipus is not a subject of retroactive quilting but rather its inverse: he travels the signifying chain in the "wrong" direction, enacting a linear thrust-forward that produces the retroactive constitution of meaning as its Real—thereby simultaneously installing the big Other (symbolic order) and demonstrating that the Other doesn't exist, making him the paradigmatic ethical act as vanishing mediator.

    In this way, his act is the paradigmatic act: he installs the Other (the symbolic order) while simultaneously demonstrating that the Other 'doesn't exist'.

26. #26

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.225

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder

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

    desperately asks her to give a sign which would confer some meaning on her unexpected suicidal gesture of saving the life of her loathed husband — anything, even if she didn't do it for love of him but merely to save the family name from disgrace.

27. #27

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.229

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

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

    Sophie's Act is the ethical act par excellence: to save at least one child, she has taken upon herself an impossible choice, and with it full responsibility for the death of the other child.

28. #28

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.232

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Sygne de Coufontaine's 'monstrous' ethical choice—doing one's duty at the price of one's humanity and faith—exemplifies a distinctly modern ethical dimension that begins precisely where conventional duty ends, and that Kantian moral law in its purest form (wanting nothing from the subject) coincides with desire in its pure state, opening a 'hole beyond faith' that is constitutive of modern ethics rather than a deviation from it.

    Sygne finally decides to go all the way, even if this path carries her towards the negation of all that she believes in, towards a 'monstrous' and 'inhuman' choice.

29. #29

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

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

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

    the temptation to purify her desire until there remains nothing but a single motive for her act, its final and irrevocable character.

30. #30

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.241

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

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

    the act in the proper sense of the term, the ethical act, resides in Sygne's 'no'. It is only this 'no' that propels her sacrifice into the dimension of the real.

31. #31

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.250

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > The Real in ethics

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that ethics is grounded in the encounter with the Real (or Badiou's 'event'), and that the central danger of Kantian ethics lies in misreading its descriptive ethical configuration as a 'user's guide' — thereby collapsing ethics into terror, masochism, or the obscure desire for catastrophe by treating the Real as a direct object of will rather than an irreducible by-product of subjective action.

    'there is no hero of the Event' ... the Real (the Event) does not have a subject (in the sense of a will that wants it), but is essentially a by-product of the action (or inaction) of the subject — something the latter produces, but not as 'hers'.

32. #32

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.257

    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.

    pure desire coincides with an act. This act is accomplished in the frame of the subject's fundamental fantasy; but because what is at stake is nothing other than this very frame, it ends up 'outside' the fantasy, in another field: that of drive.

33. #33

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.267

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

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

    In an act, there is no divided subject. Antigone is whole or 'all' in her act; she is not 'divided' or 'barred.' This means that she passes over entirely to the side of the object.

34. #34

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.274

    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.

    act 34, 37, 85, 95, 204, 228, 255 ... (im)possibility of 82, 86, 94, 96-104, 1 06, 1 48, 157

35. #35

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.143

    <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.

    Jack shooting himself... the gunshot angle proves fortuitously nonlethal, and with a wisp of blue smoke, Tyler is extinguished. Jack emerges as a new subject, activated by the scope of revolutionary destruction he has envisioned.

36. #36

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Dream of July 1982***

    Theoretical move: This passage presents a first-person dream narrative (recurring and then transformed on the seventh night) as raw clinical/autobiographical material, functioning as an illustrative case rather than advancing a theoretical argument in itself.

    I decide to talk to the lobster. I think to myself, 'I will make friends with the lobster,' and proceed to have a conversation that is not available to my waking memory.

37. #37

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.27

    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.

    The revolutionary act is simply the recognition that capitalism already produces the satisfaction that it promises.

38. #38

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.84

    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.

    the political decision, the decision concerning our way of life itself, disappears within the capitalist horizon. None of our everyday choices involves the risk of a radical transformation

39. #39

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.98

    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.

    it required an extraordinary political act to avoid complete collapse. Once this became evident, the Occupy movement could make the case that the antagonism between the 1 percent and the 99 percent had a political, rather than a natural, status.

40. #40

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.147

    THE OTHE R D OE S E X I ST

    Theoretical move: Capitalism produces neurosis not through repression but by sustaining the illusion that the big Other exists as a substantial authority whose demands align with its desire; the psychoanalytic critique of neurosis therefore names the ideological mechanism underpinning capitalist subjectivity, and emancipation requires dissolving this belief in the Other.

    Neurosis is dependence on an external authority that enables the subject to avoid taking responsibility for its own acts.

41. #41

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.166

    FAK IN G THE LIMIT

    Theoretical move: Attempts to set external moral limits on capitalism (Sandel, environmentalism) are structurally self-defeating because capitalism requires a limit to transcend; the only viable alternative is to inhabit the true infinite (Hegel/Lacan's self-limiting structure of subjectivity), which capitalism occludes by substituting the bad infinite and converting the existential burden of eternity into the finite anxiety of death and aging.

    We face the burden of having to act and to posit the cause of our own act. In this act, we take part in the true infinite with no assistance from external sources.

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.186

    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.

    Within a capitalist economy, the problem is not that potentially political subjects have become satisfied consumers but that all subjects value only ends. In such a system, the political act becomes unthinkable and even absurd.

43. #43

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.188

    THE IMM ANE N T ALTE R NATI V E

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

    Its discovery depends on a philosophical act on our part.

44. #44

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.225

    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.

    Giving up this illusion is a political act in a world of enforced scarcity; giving it up entails abandoning the capitalist ground under our feet.

45. #45

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques reality-benchmarked analytic technique (as exemplified in Lebovici's case) by arguing that confining transference, the drives, and Freudian topographies within the imaginary dyad reduces being to a fact of reality, alienates the subject further, and forecloses the symbolic coordinates where analytic effects properly reside.

    The core issue discussed in Lebovici's paper is the appearance of what she calls a transitory perversion (510, 1), which Lacan interprets as an acting-out.

46. #46

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

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

    Theoretical move: The L-schema is deployed to argue that the fundamental axis of analytic action is the Symbolic (between unconscious subjects), not the Imaginary (between egos), and that the analyst's strategic self-effacement/silence opens space for the unconscious to speak by dissolving the transference and instantiating the symbolic order as condition of possibility for the analysand's speech.

    the analyst's 'analytic action' can and should act upon the Imaginary axis only if and when its empty speech slips, stumbles, stammers, or falls silent in opportune moments of ego weakness

47. #47

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.102

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > From Odysseus to Oedipus

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transition from epic to tragic hero marks a structural shift from external to internal conflict, and that Oedipus exemplifies Lacan's account of 'subjective destitution' - the mortifying rupture of imaginary ego-identity required for the subject to access its desire - making tragedy the privileged site for psychoanalytic insight into the subject's unknowing.

    The most devastating thing about Oedipus's undoing is the extent to which it is brought about by his own actions.

48. #48

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

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

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

    God not only proves himself willing to give up his only son in order to save humanity but actually does so.

49. #49

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.44

    I > 1 > Eating Nothing

    Theoretical move: Anorexia is reframed not as victimization or feminist resistance but as the exemplary form of desiring subjectivity, one that directly "eats nothing" — the lost object itself — thereby laying bare the structural logic of desire: all objects are desirable only insofar as they fail to represent the impossible lost object, and freedom/dissatisfaction are the constitutive correlates of this originary sacrifice.

    the political act involves insisting on one's desire in the face of its impossibility, which is precisely what occurs in the death drive.

50. #50

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.139

    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.

    What separates psychoanalysis from almost all other modern thought is the attitude that it takes to normal subjectivity... it sees normality as the ability to act and to change the world.

51. #51

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.143

    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.

    normal behaviour involves an act, changing the public world rather than changing privately... 'Expedient, normal, behaviour leads to work being carried out on the external world.'

52. #52

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.151

    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.

    Once his cause becomes a lost cause, Hamlet can act... the moment for the act is always at hand because the fool's act has nothing to do with the readiness of the social authority for it.

53. #53

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.226

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Making the Impossible Possible

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not merely as ideological compensation for lack but as a genuinely subversive political force: by directing desire toward impossibilities that the symbolic order cannot contain, fantasy opens subjects to possibilities that ideology forecloses, thereby serving as the weak point of ideological closure rather than simply its accomplice.

    the fantasmatic dimension of Le Guin's novel functions as a political act, opening up possibilities that patriarchal ideology foreclosed.

54. #54

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.258

    I > 10 > Fighting against Faith

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that religious belief is not a contingent delusion but a structurally necessary effect of the gap within signification, and that the psychoanalytic counter-move is not Enlightenment atheism but insistence on the absolute necessity of faith — revealing belief's structural foundation in order to strip it of its political-delusional power and restore the subject to genuine political responsibility.

    Belief is a barrier to the genuine political act.

55. #55

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.271

    I > 10 > An Unconscious God

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that cinema — particularly Iñárritu's *Babel* — can reveal God as an unconscious structuring absence by thematizing contingency at the point where the binary signifier is missing; further, the social bond itself rests not on communicative rationality but on a groundless act of belief in signification, making faith the originary form of entry into the symbolic order.

    The contingent encounter offers the subject the opportunity to act — to thrust itself toward the other without any guarantee concerning how the other might respond.

56. #56

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.272

    I > 10 > Worshiping Contingency

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that genuine freedom requires not the absence of God (atheism) nor a transcendent lawgiver (theism), but rather the structural primacy of contingency occupying the place of the absent signifier — an "unconscious God" — which alone grounds the subject's self-positing act of self-limitation and secures a truly radical, non-utilitarian freedom.

    Through the self-destructive act, the subject frees itself from the dictates of nature and ideology, dictates that almost always manifest themselves through the prism of utility.

57. #57

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.289

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

    Theoretical move: The missing (binary) signifier is not absent from the symbolic structure but present as an absence that constitutes it from within; genuine political engagement therefore requires identification with this structuring absence rather than seeking to fill or eliminate it, inverting the hermeneutic pursuit into a psychoanalytic "finding."

    the subject to avoid the political act of identifying itself with the missing signifi er

58. #58

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.294

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Feminine Signifi er Isn't

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "missing signifier" of the feminine is not an external absence to be filled but an internal torsion within the signifying structure itself; authentic psychoanalytic politics consists not in expanding inclusion but in male subjects identifying with this internal void, thereby revealing that the divide between male and female subjectivity is a division within the subject rather than between subjects.

    the political act would involve the refusal, on the part of those on the inside, to accept the benefi ts that insider status provides.

59. #59

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.318

    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).

    Cameron includes the frame story in order to emphasize the betrayal and to show the possibility of repeating the act of freedom. When the elder Rose throws the valuable necklace... she repeats the gesture of freedom

60. #60

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.347

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 10. The Necessity of Belief

    Theoretical move: This notes section develops several interlocking theoretical claims: that psychoanalysis addresses the trauma of existence that neither God's existence nor nonexistence can resolve; that religion functions to mask social antagonism; that Pascal's wager affirms a point of non-knowledge irreducible to calculation; and that authentic events retroactively restructure the field of probability and meaning.

    at the level of the structure of the ethical act, the difference between good and evil does not exist. At this level, evil is formally indistinguishable from good

61. #61

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.349

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 11. The Case of the Missing Signifier

    Theoretical move: This passage's endnotes collectively argue that the missing (binary) signifier is an internal gap within the signifying structure rather than an external absence, and that genuine political transformation requires identification with this internal structural position rather than its replacement—a claim developed through engagements with Hegel, Lacan, Badiou, Derrida, and feminist theory.

    The ultimate point of Badiou's thought is not changing the situation through the political act but the very effort to engage in the political act itself.

62. #62

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_11"></span>**act**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes 'the act' as a distinctively Lacanian ethical concept: only that which is fully assumed—consciously and unconsciously—qualifies as a true act, thereby linking responsibility, unconscious desire, and the death drive into a single ethical framework that distinguishes the act from acting out, passage to the act, and mere behaviour.

    A fundamental quality of an act is that the actor can be held responsible for it; the concept of the act is thus an ethical concept.

63. #63

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_146"></span>**passage to the act**

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural distinction between acting out and passage to the act: while both are defenses against anxiety, acting out remains within the symbolic (a message to the big Other), whereas the passage to the act is a flight into the real that dissolves the social bond and collapses the subject into the position of pure object (objet petit a).

    a passage to the act involves an exit from the scene altogether... a passage to the act is a flight from the Other into the dimension of the real. The passage to the act is thus an exit from the symbolic network, a dissolution of the social bond.

64. #64

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    The analytic ethic that Lacan formulates is an ethic which relates action to desire (see ACT). Lacan summarises it in the question 'Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?' (S7, 314).

65. #65

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_174"></span>**sadism/masochism**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: (1) it establishes Lacan's reversal of Freud's sadism/masochism hierarchy by grounding both in the invocatory drive, making masochism primary and sadism a disavowal of it; (2) it articulates the concept of 'scene' as the frame distinguishing acting out (remaining within the symbolic) from passage to the act (exit from the symbolic into the real via identification with objet petit a).

    The passage to the act, however, is an exit from the scene, is a crossing over from the symbolic to the real; there is a total identification with the object (objet petit a), and hence an abolition of the subject.

66. #66

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_19"></span>**anxiety**

    Theoretical move: Lacan radically reorients Freud's two theories of anxiety by tying it to the Real, the objet petit a, and the logic of lack—arguing that anxiety is not caused by separation from the mother but by the failure to separate, and that it is the only non-deceptive affect, arising specifically when lack itself is lacking (i.e., when objet petit a fills its place).

    Acting out and passage to the act are last defences against anxiety.

67. #67

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_12"></span>**acting Out**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of acting out is distinguished from the Freudian baseline by introducing the intersubjective dimension of the Other: acting out is not merely repetition substituting for memory, but a ciphered message addressed to a 'deaf' Other, locating the cause partly in the analyst's own interpretive failure (resistance of the analyst).

    Lacan dedicates several classes of his 1962–3 seminar to establishing a distinction between acting out and the PASSAGE TO THE ACT.

68. #68

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    Lacan's discussions of literary texts are thus not exercises in literary criticism for its own sake, but performances designed to give his audience an idea of how they are to read the unconscious of their patients.

69. #69

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_180"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0203"></span>**Seminar**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliographic and historical entry on Lacan's Seminar, tracing its institutional history, the oral-to-written transmission problem, and providing a complete chronological index of all twenty-seven annual seminars — functioning as reference material rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

    XV | 1967-8 | The psychoanalytic act.

70. #70

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

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

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

    She deploys collage in much the same way William Burroughs used it: as a weapon in time-war. The cut-up can dislocate established narratives, break habits, allow new associations to coalesce.

71. #71

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **XIX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference (Übertragung) is primordially a phenomenon of language—the displacement of repressed desire through disinvested signifying material—rather than an imaginary projection or emotional repetition, and grounds this in Hegel's formula "the concept is the time of the thing" to show that the unconscious operates outside clock-time precisely because it *is* time, thereby explaining why analysing the transferential situation transforms the subject's speech from empty to full.

    If they act, it is with their analyst in mind... find the meaning of speech in an act. In so far as the point for the subject is to gain recognition, an act is speech.

72. #72

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.235

    xvra > **The symbolic order** > **Contingence and essence**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Angelus Silesius's mystical poetry to articulate the end of analysis as the moment when contingency (trauma, historical accidents) falls away and being/essence is constituted — aligning the analytic terminus with a philosophical distinction between essence and contingence.

    That really is what is at issue, at the end of analysis

73. #73

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.112

    **IX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of analytic experience rests on full speech as a performative, symbolic act of recognition—not on imaginary transference or indoctrination—and critiques object-relations and superego-based accounts (Strachey, Klein) for remaining trapped on the imaginary plane, proposing instead to relocate the question to the narcissistic/ego economy of the subject.

    Full speech is speech which performs. One of the subjects finds himself, afterwards, other than he was before.

74. #74

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and law are structurally identical—sharing the same object—such that the Oedipus myth encodes the originary coincidence of the father's desire with the law; this identity is then mapped onto masochism (where the subject appears as *ejectum*/objet a), the castration complex, transference (structured around agalma and lack), and the passage à l'acte, illustrated through Freud's case of the young homosexual woman.

    To understand how the passage à l'acte occurred, it is not enough to say that the father cast an irritated glance.

75. #75

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.149

    **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the analytic paradox of "defence against anxiety" by arguing that defence is not against anxiety itself but against the lack of which anxiety is a signal, and he further differentiates the structural positions of the objet petit a in neurosis versus perversion/psychosis to clarify the handling of the transferential relation — culminating in a redefinition of mourning as identifying with the function of being the Other's lack.

    The goat that leaps onto the stage is the acting-out. The acting-out I'm speaking about is the movement that goes in the opposite direction to what modern theatre aspires to, where the actors step down into the stalls. Here the spectators get up on stage and say what they have to say.

76. #76

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.86

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object but has a distinct object structure: it is the cut that precedes and grounds signification, and as "that which deceives not," it is the cause of doubt rather than doubt itself—the only phenomenon that escapes the signifier's constitutive capacity for deception. This leads to the claim that action borrows its certainty from anxiety by transferring it, and that jouissance-on-command (as in Ecclesiastes/circumcision) marks the originary site of anxiety.

    To act is to snatch from anxiety its certainty. To act is to bring about a transfer of anxiety.

77. #77

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.121

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *passage à l'acte* is constituted by the subject's absolute identification with *objet a* — her reduction to and ejection from the scene as that object — and that this structural logic, rather than tactlessness or countertransference, explains why Freud himself enacts a *dropping* (passage à l'acte in reverse) when he terminates the treatment of the young homosexual woman. The topology of *a* in the mirror of the Other is shown to illuminate both hypnosis and obsessional doubt as different modalities of the object's structural invisibility to the subject.

    passage a l'acte are realized here. What occurs then is the subject's absolute identification with the a to which she is reduced.

78. #78

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.261

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Voice as a new form of objet petit a — separated, not reducible to phonemic opposition — by way of the shofar, which he deploys to distinguish the vocal dimension from the scopic, and to show that while the mirror-stage/eye level produces a closed image with no remainder, the voice opens the question of the big Other's memory (and thus repetition) in a dimension irreducible to space and the specular.

    what completes the subject's relation to the signifier in what might be called, in a first assimilation, his passage à l'acte.

79. #79

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.328

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anal object (objet a) functions as the *cause* of desire rather than its goal, and that inhibition is the structural locus where desire operates; this grounds a theory of the obsessional's recursive desire as a defence against genital/castration anxiety, whereby the excremental *a* acts as a "stopper" substituting for the impossible phallic object.

    An act is an action in that the very desire that would have been designed to inhibit it makes itself felt therein. Only in this grounding of the notion of act in its relation to inhibition can a justification be found for calling things *acts*

80. #80

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.272

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration anxiety is constituted by the *fading* of the phallic function precisely where it is expected to operate (the phallic stage), denoted (−φ), and uses the Wolf Man's primal scene—where the phallus is everywhere yet invisible, freezing the subject into a phallic-erect state—to show that objet petit a, jouissance, gaze, and anxiety converge at this structural moment; orgasm is then posed as the functional equivalent of anxiety because both confirm that anxiety is not without object.

    if you remember the bearings I've laid out, you will permit me to call them occasions of passage à l'acte.

81. #81

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.124

    BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

    Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the *passage à l'acte* from acting-out by locating the former on the side of the maximally barred subject who falls off the stage of the Other into the world, while developing the pre-specular logic of objects *a* as remainder and their relation to anxiety, ideal ego constitution, and depersonalization in psychosis.

    This being dropped is the essential correlate of the passage a l'acte. But which side this being dropped is seen from still needs to be specified. If you would care to refer to the formula of the fantasy, the passage a l'acte is on the side of the subject inasmuch as he appears effaced by the bar to the greatest extent.

82. #82

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.344

    **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and jouissance are structurally disjoint—separated by a central gap—and that the object *a* as the irreducible remainder is the cause of desire, not a brute forced fact; it then uses the inhibition-symptom-anxiety grid at the scopic level to reframe mourning as the labour of restoring the link to the masked object *a*, distinguishing Lacan's account from Freud's while following the same trajectory.

    At the level of the passage à l'acte stands the fantasy of suicide, whose character and authenticity stand to be reappraised in an essential way within this dialectic.

83. #83

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.132

    BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural distinction between acting-out and passage à l'acte by anchoring both to the object a and its cut-relation to the Other: acting-out is essentially a monstration (wild transference) that shows the a as cause of desire to the Other, while the symptom is self-sufficient jouissance that only requires interpretation through established transference. The originary cut is relocated from birth-separation to the embryonic envelopes, grounding a topological account of a as off-cut.

    Everything that amounts to acting-out stands in contrast to the passage a l'acte.

84. #84

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.333

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

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

    The passage à l'acte is to turn it on, but to turn it on without knowing what one is doing.

85. #85

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's case of female homosexuality to demonstrate that acting-out is structurally addressed to the Other, that the unconscious desire can operate through lying/fiction, and that Freud's own passage à l'acte (abandoning the case) reveals his inability to think femininity as evasive structure—while also critiquing ego-identification as the goal of analysis by pointing to the unassimilable remainder (objet a) it leaves untouched.

    it's acting-out, so it's addressed to the Other, and if one is in analysis, then it's addressed to the analyst.

86. #86

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's clinical failures with Dora and the female homosexual stemmed from his inability to identify the structural logic of hysterical desire—namely, that the hysteric's desire is to sustain the desire of the father, and that desire is fundamentally the desire of the Other—a formulation Lacan uses to retroactively correct and extend Freud's case-readings.

    the passage a l'acte breaking off the relationship by striking him, as soon as Herr K. says to her not, I am not interested in you, but, I am not interested in my wife

87. #87

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

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Freud's grammatical derivation of drive opposites (exhibitionism/voyeurism, sadism/masochism) as conflating grammatical subject/object with real functions, while conceding that through this very game Freud conveys something essential about the drive: what Lacan will call 'the trace of the act.'

    what, by means of this game, he conveys to us about the essence of the drive is what, next time, I will define for you as the trace of the act.

88. #88

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Wiederholen (repetition) from Reproduzieren (reproduction), arguing that true repetition is not a making-present of the past but an act structured in relation to a real that exceeds symbolic capture — thereby linking repetition to the enigmatic bipartition of pleasure and reality principles.

    That is why I have placed The Act with a large question-mark at the bottom of the blackboard so as to indicate that, as long as we speak of the relations of repetition with the real, this act will remain on our horizon.

89. #89

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

    ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines transference against ego-psychological and reality-adaptation frameworks by positing it as "the enactment of the reality of the unconscious," insisting that the unconscious is constitutively bound to sexuality — a linkage that post-Freudian analysis has progressively forgotten.

    the transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious

90. #90

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), articulates the lying structure of truth, anchors the analyst's position in the hystorization of desire rather than institutional validation, and grounds the pass-procedure in the object as cause of desire and the real as the 'lack of lack.'

    I have therefore designated as a 'pass' that putting of the hystorization of the analysis to the test

91. #91

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.181

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a fundamental antinomy between drive and satisfaction, arguing that the neurotic subject paradoxically achieves a form of satisfaction through displeasure, and that analytic intervention is justified precisely at the level of the drive where this paradoxical satisfaction must be rectified.

    If we interfere in this, it is insofar as we think that there are other ways, shorter ones for example.

92. #92

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freudian traumatic repetition not as a mastery mechanism governed by the pleasure principle, but as a constitutive division of the subject — the point at which 'resistance of the subject' transforms into 'repetition in act,' forcing a complete reconceptualisation of psychic unity and agency.

    the resistance of the subject, which becomes at that moment repetition in act.

93. #93

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is the "enactment of the reality of the unconscious," and that this formulation cannot be separated from the transferential effects of teaching itself — the teacher's speech not merely elucidates but partially engenders the reality it names, making the pedagogical situation structurally analogous to the analytic one.

    the transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious

94. #94

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.131

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the gesture from the act by a special temporality of arrest and suspension: the gesture is not an interrupted blow but something performed *in order to be* arrested, producing its signification retroactively in the suspended instant, thereby constituting a signifying rather than merely motor event.

    It is this very special temporality, which I have defined by the term arrest and which creates its signification behind it, that makes the distinction between the gesture and the act.

95. #95

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the painter's gesture as the originary "laying down of the gaze," arguing that the brush stroke is not deliberate choice but a terminal act that retroactively produces its own stimulus—inverting the temporal structure of signification (where identification is projected forward) into a scopic dimension where the "moment of seeing" is the end-point, thereby distinguishing gesture from act.

    This terminal moment is that which enables us to distinguish between a gesture and an act.

96. #96

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively a zone of the "unrealized" (not unreal), structured around a fundamental gap — the navel of the dream — and that post-Freudian ego psychology betrayed this dimension by "stitching up" the gap through psychologization; Lacan positions his own return to the signifier as reopening this gap with care, installing the law of the signifier in the locus of cause.

    it is part of the analyst's role, if the analyst is performing it properly, to be besieged—I mean really—by those in whom he has invoked this world of shades

97. #97

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), repositions the analyst as one who 'hystorizes only from himself', introduces the 'pass' as a test of analytic truth, and locates the object as cause of desire as the only conceivable idea of the object—with the lack of the lack constituting the Real.

    I have therefore designated as a 'pass' that putting of the hystorization of the analysis to the test

98. #98

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's clinical failures with Dora and the female homosexual stem from his lack of structural reference-points to identify the hysteric's desire as sustaining the desire of the father — illustrating the formula that "man's desire is the desire of the Other" through close re-reading of both cases.

    the passage a l'acte breaking off the relationship by striking him, as soon as Herr K. says to her not, I am not interested in you, but, I am not interested in my wife

99. #99

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Wiederholen (repetition) from Reproduzieren (reproduction), arguing that true repetition is not a making-present of the past but an act with structural relation to a real that exceeds symbolic capture — thereby situating The Act as the horizon-concept linking repetition and the real.

    That is why I have placed The Act with a large question-mark at the bottom of the blackboard so as to indicate that, as long as we speak of the relations of repetition with the real, this act will remain on our horizon.

100. #100

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freudian repetition (Wiederholen) not as a mastery mechanism governed by the pleasure principle, but as a structural hauling of the subject along a fixed path—most primitively manifest in traumatic neurosis as the binding of energy—where the subject's division into agencies undermines any unifying, synthesizing conception of the psyche, and where "resistance" must be entirely rethought as repetition-in-act.

     the resistance of the subject, which becomes at that moment repetition in act.

101. #101

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the painter's gesture—unlike the deliberate choice it appears to be—is a terminal act in which the gaze is "laid down" materially, reversing the usual temporal order of stimulus and response and thereby distinguishing gesture from act in the scopic dimension.

     This terminal moment is that which enables us to distinguish between a gesture and an act.

102. #102

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes gesture from the act by introducing a special temporality of arrest and suspension: a gesture is not an interrupted blow but something performed *in order to be* arrested, producing its signification retroactively ("behind it"), whereas the act is what carries through to completion.

     It is this very special temporality, which I have defined by the term arrest and which creates its signification behind it, that makes the distinction between the gesture and the act.

103. #103

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the cause of the unconscious must be conceived as a "lost cause" — neither a full existent nor a non-existent — and that repetition's defining feature is not return but the constitutive missed encounter (tuche), a structural gap that underwrites the impossibility of fully objectifying analytic experience.

     either I assume quite simply my implication as analyst in the eristic character of the discord of any description of my experience

104. #104

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Freud's grammar-based logic of drive opposites (voyeurism/exhibitionism, sadism/masochism) as a confusion of grammatical with real functions, while arguing that Freud's deeper contribution is what the drive reveals about 'the trace of the act' — a concept to be formally defined.

     what, by means of this game, he conveys to us about the essence of the drive is what, next time, I will define for you as the trace of the act.

105. #105

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD

     Theoretical move: The training of analysts requires that the analyst know what structures the movement of trust in the clinical relationship — identified as transference — which turns on the figure of the Subject Supposed to Know; without adequate criteria, this training degenerates into mere ceremony or simulation.

     since for the psycho-analyst there is no beyond, no substantial beyond, by which to justify his conviction that he is qualified to exercise his function—the substitution, in this instance, can be interpreted in only one way—as simulation.

106. #106

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines hypnosis structurally as the confusion of the ideal signifier (identification) with objet petit a, and then distinguishes analytic desire precisely as the operation that maintains the maximal distance between identification and a — thereby positioning the analyst as an "upside-down hypnotist" whose desire separates rather than fuses these poles, culminating in the traversal of fundamental fantasy where fantasy becomes drive.

     This crossing of the plane of identification is possible. Anyone who has lived through the analytic experience with me to the end of the training analysis knows that what I am saying is true.

107. #107

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

     Theoretical move: Milner's presentation argues that Plato's *Sophist* anticipates the logic of the signifier by showing that non-being is not an additional term in a series but the very condition of computation itself — the 'locus of zero' — and that this structure is homologous to the Lacanian subject as non-being inscribed in discourse; Lacan closes by anchoring this in his tripolarity of subject, knowledge, and sex as derived from the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real.

     The passage à l'acte within the verb when I lack predication ....... and I obtain here the phantasy.

108. #108

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the closed seminar as a site where psychoanalytic teaching must become the principle of an action rather than mere intellectual sustenance, using the o-object (objet petit a) as cause of desire to ground a new ethics of subjective action; meanwhile Stein's commentary on Leclaire's Poord'jeli analysis deploys Freudian condensation/displacement to probe the relationship between unconscious fantasy, the signifier, and the dream-as-rebus.

     I want here people who are interested in their action, in what is involved in this essential change of ethical and subjective motivation, which is what analysis introduces into our world.

109. #109

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's theory of chance (the "rule of parts") and the passion of the gambler to articulate the structure of the subject's relationship to the lost object (objet petit a): chance/randomness is the site where science touches the real, while the gambler's act reveals that what is at stake is always the recovery of the object lost to the signifier—culminating in the claim that Pascal's Wager encodes the fundamental structure of desire as the subject's claim on (o) within the field of the divided Other.

     at the end of the act, for it is necessary that there should be an act and an act of decision, at the end of this, whose conditions a certain signifying framework must first of all have defined

110. #110

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager as a structure that introduces the split between being and existence, and identifies the "nothing" staked in the wager—the life one loses without losing anything—with objet petit a as the cause of desire, thereby grounding the wager not in probability theory but in the subject's relation to the Real qua impossible.

     A wager is an act that many people engage in. I say that it is an act; there is in effect no wager without something which does away with decision.

111. #111

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's theory of chance (the "rule of parts") and the figure of the gambler to argue that the passion of gambling is structurally homologous to the subject's relation to the signifier: the gambler bets on a mode of encounter with the real in which the lost object (objet petit a) is not implicated in the usual signifying loss, while Pascal's Wager ultimately reveals the field of the Other as barred — the signifier of the barred Other (S(Ø)) — as the structural condition for any claim of desire's object.

     at the end of the act, for it is necessary that there should be an act and an act of decision, at the end of this, whose conditions a certain signifying framework must first of all have defined

112. #112

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.239

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* to demonstrate how the Objet petit a (the Infanta as the 'girl = phallus', the slit, the hidden central object) structures the field of vision, showing that the subject is constituted by the cut of the object on the cross-cap, while the function of the Other as 'blind vision' (an empty, void Other) supports the truth of representation without itself seeing — with direct consequences for the end of analysis as the subject's encounter with the o-object.

     Is this not done so that we analysts, who know that here is the meeting point of the end of an analysis, should ask ourselves how, for us, there is transferred this dialectic of the o-object

113. #113

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager as a structural staging of the subject's relation to the Real, arguing that the "nothing" wagered (the life at stake) is not mere nullity but the Objet petit a as cause of desire — that fleeting, ungraspable object — and that chance (*hasard*) must be understood as the Real qua impossible-to-question, radically distinct from modern probability theory.

     A wager is an act that many people engage in. I say that it is an act; there is in effect no wager without something which does away with decision. This decision is remitted to a cause that I would call the ideal cause, and which is called chance.

114. #114

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.131

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

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

     The act is founded on repetition. What, at first approach, could be more welcoming for what is involved in the sexual act.

115. #115

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.241

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

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

     An act, you should note, if you remember the way I introduced it, has no need to be thought, to be an act. The question even arises whether that is not why it is an act!

116. #116

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     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.

     Is there this knot, definable as an act, in which the subject grounds himself as sexed, that is, as male or female

117. #117

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.218

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

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

     the passage from the function to the act. And the putting into question of whether this act may merit the title of sexual act. There is none? … There is? … Chi lo sa?

118. #118

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

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

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

     the act is signifying. It is a signifier which is repeated, even though it happens in a single gesture, for topological reasons which make possible the existence of the double loop created by a single cut. It is the establishment of the subject as such.

119. #119

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.145

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

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

     We will remain there for today, designating for the next time what we now have to advance on the function of acting-out.

120. #120

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism, neurotic rejection, and the sexual act cannot be understood through moralistic or pleasure-based frameworks but require a rigorous logical articulation of the subject's structural position; the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the Other, the phallus, the mother) that prevents any simple dyadic union, and feminine jouissance remains irreducible to what psychoanalytic theory has so far been able to articulate.

     To perform an act, is to introduce this relation of signifiers through which the conjuncture is consecrated as significant, namely, as an opportunity to think.

121. #121

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is structured around a constitutive gap—the castration complex—such that jouissance beyond the pleasure principle is only oriented negatively, through the suspense (detumescence/castration) of the phallic organ; there is no phallic object, only its absence, which is the very condition of possibility for the sexual act, and feminine jouissance can only be oriented from this same reference point of castration.

     the interest of introducing the word act is to open up the question… of whether, in the sexual act… it is related to the advent of a signifier representing the subject as sex for another signifier, or whether it has the value of what I called in another register, the encounter, namely, the unique encounter!

122. #122

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.150

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces acting-out as the structural representative of the deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act: because the analytic intervention misreads or inadequately articulates what is at stake (as in Kris's ego-psychological "surface" intervention), the patient enacts/stages what was not properly interpreted, bringing the oral object-a "on a plate." This positions acting-out as the inverse shadow of the analytic act, and advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act is structurally non-sexual yet topologically related to the sexual act via the analytic couch.

     Is not the insistence which is equally put, the burgeoning of developments about what is called the 'situation', or again the 'analytic situation', is this not designed also to allow us to elude the question about what is concerned in the analytic act?

123. #123

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage re-articulates alienation as the structural elimination of a closed, unified field of the Other (no universe of discourse), and situates truth, jouissance, symptom, and repetition as the key concepts that must be reintegrated once the Other is understood as disjoint — building toward a quadrangular schema whose four poles are alienation, the unconscious/Es, castration, and the act/repetition.

     The function, on the other hand, on the right-hand pole, of this privileged and exemplary mode of the establishment of the subject which is the passage à l'acte.

124. #124

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight/Möbius strip) provides the structural model for both repetition and alienation, showing how the "additional One" (Un-en-plus) generated by the retroactive return of repetition fractures the Other and the subject alike, and that the act emerges precisely at the point where the passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition intersect on these non-orientable surfaces.

     What relationship is there between this passage a l'acte of alienation and repetition itself? Well then, very precisely, what can and what ought to be called: the act. Today, I want to put forward the premises of a logical situation of the act as such.

125. #125

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.136

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio) as the mathematical model for the structure of the sexual relation, arguing that subjective satisfaction in the sexual act cannot be grounded in homeostatic/pleasure-principle models nor in complementarity (key-and-lock), but requires a third term (phallus/castration, child-phallus equivalence) whose structural logic is captured by this uniquely determined, incommensurable proportion—linking repetition, the division of the Other, and the problem of the object.

     the signifying articulation of what is involved in the repetition implied in the sexual act. Is it truly what I have said what the tongue promotes for us... namely, an act, after having insisted on what is involved in the act, in itself, in terms of conditioning, first of all, by the repetition which is internal to it.

126. #126

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the neurotic's relation to fantasy from the perverse by situating their respective jouissance-arrangements in topological-spatial figures (toilet, bedroom, boudoir, parlour), and closes by announcing that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is foreclosed — a structural definition of the analytic act that will anchor the following year's seminar.

     The title that I will give to my lectures next year, will be, The psychoanalytic act.

127. #127

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: The Act is defined not as motor discharge but as the intrinsic repetition of the signifier upon itself—a double loop that constitutes the subject as pure division; its effects are measured topologically by the mutation of surface produced by the cut, and Verleugnung is specifically identified as the rubric for the ambiguity that results from these effects.

     It is impossible to define it otherwise than on the foundation of the double loop, in other words, of repetition. And it is precisely in this that the act is foundational for the subject.

128. #128

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.154

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

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

     where is the psychoanalyst … the analytic act, in any case, has no business. There remains this (1) and this (2): the capital O and the small o

129. #129

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.254

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy has a grammatically closed structure ("a child is being beaten") that is the correlative of the alienation-choice "I am not thinking," and that jouissance in perversion must be distinguished from the neurotic fantasy's role as a measure of comprehension/desire — with perversion defined through the impasse of the sexual act rather than through the fantasy structure itself.

     There is no sexual act… there is only… something of the sexual act… il n'y a pas …, il n'y a que …, d'acte sexuel …l'acte sexuel

130. #130

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted precisely as the cut between the field of the One and the field of the Other (the unconscious), with topology—surface defined by its edge, volume defined by its cutting—providing the structural model; the Other is ultimately revealed to be the Other of objet petit a, whose incommensurability generates every question of measure.

     There is no subject of the truth, unless it is of the act in general, of the act which, perhaps, cannot exist qua sexual act.

131. #131

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

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

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

     Repetition, I have said, to which there corresponds, as foundational of the subject, the passage à l'acte. I showed you, I insisted on … the importance of this status of act that the sexual act has.

132. #132

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.

     This style is the act in which he keeps quiet (il se tait). Tacere is not silere

133. #133

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.167

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual act is not a secret but a structural necessity announced by the unconscious itself, and that the Objet petit a — formalized as the "golden number" — functions as the incommensurable third term that both generates the sexual dyad and prevents its closure, articulating the impossibility of the sexual relationship through logical and mathematical formalization (Boolean algebra, imaginary numbers, the golden number).

     This could be sustained and illustrated by reminding you of what I called act, namely, this reduplication of a motor effect as simple as 'I am walking'.

134. #134

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "One too many" signifier—structurally outside the signifying chain yet immanent to it—enables interpretation to function not as a mere meaning-effect (metaphor) but as a truth-effect; he then complicates the Cartesian cogito through material implication and the middle voice (diathesis) to show that the subject is constituted through the act of language rather than through the intuition of self-thinking.

     the subject is more than involved, is fundamentally determined by the very act in question… it is not simply the position of *acting being* (*être-agent)*, but in the position of subject

135. #135

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the function of fantasy in neurosis from its function in perversion by mapping clinical structures onto spatial metaphors (bedroom, toilet, boudoir, wardrobe, parlour, bog, analyst's office), culminating in the claim that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is presented as foreclosure (Verwerfung), thereby anticipating the seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

     breaks through in the ambiguous sense which makes of it at once a passage à l'acte and, for us who are reading it, an acting out

136. #136

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.150

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

     Theoretical move: By introducing the concept of acting-out via the Kris case and the English etymology of 'to act out', Lacan argues that acting-out is a response to an inadequate or failed analytic intervention—specifically, a deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act itself—thereby linking the structure of acting-out to the inexact position of the analytic act relative to repression and the symptom.

     we have all the same something present in the theory, which combines the function of the analyst... the analytic function then, is brought closer to something which is of the register of act.

137. #137

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.146

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory systematically effaces the structural character of the sexual act as a *cut* (an act in the strong sense), substituting a discourse of relational adequacy ('genital stage', 'tenderness') that evades the irreducible discordance and failure built into that act; he introduces the 'psychoanalytic act' as a distinct concept requiring its own structural formalization, in contrast to—and as a corrective upon—the sexual act it takes as its reference point.

     Repetition, I have said, to which there corresponds, as foundational of the subject, the passage à l'acte. I showed you, I insisted on the importance of this status of act that the sexual act has.

138. #138

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.221

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act cannot be grounded in the pleasure principle or in any imaginary phallic object; rather, jouissance-beyond is structurally evoked by detumescence as its negative limit, and castration means precisely that there is no phallic object — which is the condition of possibility, not the obstacle, for the sexual act. Feminine jouissance can only orient itself through the same castration reference-point as masculine jouissance, making the 'sexual relation' constitutively non-existent except as good intention.

     the interest of introducing the word act is to open up the question … of whether, in the sexual act … it is related to the advent of a signifier representing the subject as sex for another signifier, or whether it has the value of what I called in another register, the encounter

139. #139

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.254

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy is structured like a language (as a grammatically closed sentence), introduces jouissance as a new theoretical term to account for the economy of fantasy, and distinguishes neurotic fantasy (as a closed, inadmissible meaning correlative to alienation's forced choice) from perverse jouissance—articulated through the impasse of the (non-existent/only-existing) sexual act—insisting these are structurally distinct rather than analogically continuous.

     There is no sexual act, I said, in so far as we are incapable of articulating its resulting affirmations… Nevertheless, there is only this act, put in suspense at this level, that can account for this something… which is called perversion.

140. #140

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.136

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act cannot be modeled on organic satisfaction or simple complementarity (key/lock), but requires a structural, mathematical account of the "measure and proportion" implicit in repetition — introducing the Golden Ratio (mean and extreme ratio) as the formal analogue for the third element (phallus/castration) that structures the sexual relation, linking this to the incommensurable and to objet petit a.

     trying to give you the signifying articulation of what is involved in the repetition implied in the sexual act... an act, after having insisted on what is involved in the act, in itself, in terms of conditioning, first of all, by the repetition which is internal to it.

141. #141

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.218

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a narrative fantasy but a structural condition—being "normed" with respect to the sexual act—and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the introduction of jouissance to a value-function through negation/castration, while simultaneously repudiating ego-psychological entity-multiplication and the notion of primary narcissism as an analytic foundation.

     the passage from the function to the act. And the putting into question of whether this act may merit the title of sexual act.

142. #142

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.241

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

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

     An act, you should note, if you remember the way I introduced it, has no need to be thought, to be an act. The question even arises whether that is not why it is an act!

143. #143

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation, understood as the elimination of the Other as a closed unified field (i.e., the impossibility of a universe of discourse), is the logical starting point from which he derives the interrelated poles of a structural quadrangle articulated around repetition, the act, the unconscious (Id), and castration - with truth emerging as the emanation from a disconnected field of the Other, made manifest in the symptom.

     the function, on the other hand, on the right-hand pole, of this privileged and exemplary mode of the establishment of the subject which is the passage à l'acte is.

144. #144

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage defines the Act as structurally equivalent to repetition-in-a-single-stroke (the double loop of the signifier), grounded in the topology of the Möbius strip cut; it argues that the act constitutes the subject as pure division (Repräsentanz), and that Verleugnung names the ambiguity produced by the act's effects, distinguishing the act from mere motor performance, imitation, and acting-out.

     It is impossible to define it otherwise than on the foundation of the double loop, in other words, of repetition. And it is precisely in this that the act is foundational for the subject.

145. #145

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.145

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

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

     designating for the next time what we now have to advance on the function of acting-out.

146. #146

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.207

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

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

     To perform an act, is to introduce this relation of signifiers through which the conjuncture is consecrated as significant, namely, as an opportunity to think.

147. #147

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.167

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual act is not a secret but an open cry of the unconscious, and develops this through the mathematical-logical structure of Objet petit a as the "golden number" — showing that in the sexual dyad, the difference (small o) cannot resolve into a dyad but rather loops back to produce o itself, thereby formalizing why a third term (the phallus/partial object) is always required and the sexual act structurally fails to unite the sexed subjects.

     This could be sustained and illustrated by reminding you of what I called act, namely, this reduplication of a motor effect as simple as 'I am walking'.

148. #148

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     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.

     is there this knot, definable as an act, in which the subject grounds himself as sexed… is the sexual act possible?

149. #149

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.129

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

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

     the act is signifying. It is a signifier which is repeated, even though it happens in a single gesture, for topological reasons which make possible the existence of the double loop created by a single cut. It is the establishment of the subject as such.

150. #150

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.

     This style is the act in which he keeps quiet (il se tait). Tacere is not silere, and nevertheless they overlap at an obscure frontier.

151. #151

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.154

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

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

     where is the psychoanalyst… the analytic act, in any case, has no business. There remains this (1) and this (2): the capital O and the small o

152. #152

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted precisely by the gap between the field of the One and the field of the Other (the unconscious), such that the subject is always a structural degree below its body; this topological account displaces both Eros-as-unity fantasies and Cartesian soul/body dualism, and repositions objet petit a (small o) as the incommensurable origin from which all questions of measure arise.

     There is no subject of the truth, unless it is of the act in general, of the act which, perhaps, cannot exist qua sexual act.

153. #153

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight) is the structural ground of both repetition and alienation, and uses this topology to argue that the Other is inherently "fractured" (barred), that the subject's division is ineradicable from truth, and that the Act emerges as the logical consequence of alienation's passage through the topology of repetition.

     What relationship is there between this passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition itself? Well then, very precisely, what can and what ought to be called: the act. Today, I want to put forward the premises of a logical situation of the act as such.

154. #154

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.130

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

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

     The act is founded on repetition. What, at first approach, could be more welcoming for what is involved in the sexual act.

155. #155

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates how the "signifier too many" (the barred signifier outside the chain) operates as the structural condition for interpretation, whose effect is properly a "truth-effect" rather than a mere meaning-effect; he then uses the Cartesian cogito and Benveniste's active/middle voice distinction to argue that the subject is constituted not through intuition of being-who-thinks but through the very structure of language and the act of speaking.

     the subject is more than involved, is fundamentally determined by the very act in question

156. #156

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the paradox that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" as a strictly logical consequence of psychoanalytic doctrine—not a naturalist scandal—while simultaneously arguing that the psychoanalytic act culminates in the analysand rejecting the analyst as objet petit a (the "o-object"), a formulation he notes has gone entirely uncontested.

     After having defined the psychoanalytic act which I defined in a very risky fashion, I even put in the centre this acceptation of being rejected like the o object

157. #157

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **Annex 3**

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

     the act (simply) takes the place of an assertion, whose subject it changes... the psychoanalytic act seems suited to throw greater light on the act, because it is an act that reproduces itself from the very doing that it commands.

158. #158

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: At the culmination of a training analysis ("the pass"), the analysand discovers that the subject supposed to know has been reduced to the objet petit a (the analyst as residue/rubbish), and that the subject of every act is constitutively absent from the act itself — a subject without essence, mirroring the o-object's lack of essence, which is the structural truth that the unconscious shares with the end of analysis.

     Objects without essence which are, or not, to be re-evoked in the act starting from this sort of subject which, as we will see, is the subject of the act, of every act, I would say, in so far as like the subject supposed to know at the end of the analytic experience, it is a subject which is not in the act.

159. #159

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses an anecdote about an unintentional witticism to pivot toward a theoretical claim: it is the elevation of an utterance to the field of the Other that retroactively constitutes it as wit, and this logic of retroactive constitution through the Other is precisely what structures the psychoanalytic act.

     very properly speaking in what belongs to the psychoanalytic act

160. #160

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.84

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the tetrahedron of alienation (the "either/or," "I am not/I do not think," etc.) to articulate the structure of the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the analyst's unique advantage is knowing from experience what is involved in the Subject Supposed to Know, and that the telos of the analytic act is to reduce that subject to the function of the objet petit a.

     If I am speaking this year about the act, and am posing the question of the act... what is involved in the act in the perspective that the psychoanalytic act opens up

161. #161

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     **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.

     The psychoanalytic act essentially consists in this sort of subject-effect that operates by distributing, as one might say, what is going to constitute the support.

162. #162

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the events of May 1968 and the institutional crisis of his École as the occasion to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively determined by jouissance while simultaneously requiring protection from it, and to formulate the key lemma that "there is no transference of transference" — a claim whose misreading by contemporaries demonstrates both the necessity of his strategic unreadability and the gap between the act and its subsequent theoretical appropriation.

     Was I careful enough in approaching what is required to situate the psychoanalytic act: to establish what determines it from enjoyment and the ways at the same time it must protect itself from it?

163. #163

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the triad "I read / I write / I lose" to differentiate three levels of knowing and to position the psychoanalytic act as structured around failure and parapraxis, arguing that the analyst's act is irreducible to teaching (thesis) or doing (faire), and that the passage from analysand to analyst marks the critical, untheorised limit at which the act encounters its own obstacle.

     The psychoanalytic act designates a shape, an envelope, a structure such that, in a way, it makes everything that up to then has been established, formulated, produced as a status of the act, depend on its own law.

164. #164

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **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.

     what can the psychoanalytic act mean, if in effect the psychoanalytic act is, all the same, committed by the psychoanalyst?

165. #165

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **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.

     it is a curious act of faith that is affirmed by putting one's faith in what is put in question, since by simply engaging the psychoanalysand in the task one prefers this act of faith, namely, one saves him.

166. #166

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: By re-reading the founding scene of transference (the hysteric throwing her arms around Freud's neck after hypnosis), Lacan argues that the subject supposed to know is the indispensable structural hinge of transference, and that the psychoanalytic act consists precisely in putting that presupposition in question — thereby distinguishing transference from mere love and revealing the objet petit a as the object at the heart of love's apparatus.

     since I introduced it as constituting the psychoanalytic act, the degree to which it is essential for the configuration as such of transference.

167. #167

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.148

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

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

     We are still of course, at the psychoanalytic act. Why, in short, am I speaking about the psychoanalytic act? It is for psychoanalysts. They are truly the only ones who are implicated in it.

168. #168

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.

     To take a further step, let us now come to the only point where the act can be questioned: at its point of origin.

169. #169

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is grounded in the analyst's fantasy, which is the opaque source from which interpretation "unfreezes" the analysand's word; the gap between the "subject supposed to know" and a proposed "subject supposed to demand" names the true site of analytic intervention, reducible finally to the objet petit a as lack and distance rather than mediation, and establishing that the subject-Other relation is irreducibly asymmetrical — there is no dialogue.

     What I would have led you towards this year, if I had been able to speak about the psychoanalytic act up to the end, would have been in order to tell you that it is not for nothing if I spoke to you about the desire of the psychoanalyst.

170. #170

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.97

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Aristotelian logical category of the subject—understood as that which slips away beneath predication, represented by the empty box in Peirce's schema—is precisely captured by his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier," thereby grounding the analytic situation in a logic of the subject as non-being, and linking the history of logical debate to the concealed question of desire.

     the act defines by its cutting edge what is involved in the passage in which the psychoanalyst is instaured or established

171. #171

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.109

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act has a two-stage language-effect structure culminating in the analyst's self-institution as the rejected object (objet petit a), and that the leap from analysand to analyst (la passe) is systematically concealed by the institutional organisation of psychoanalysis, which preserves an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know in place of genuine interrogation.

     Let us take up again what is involved in the psychoanalytic act, and let us clearly posit that today we are going to try to advance in this direction, which is that of the psychoanalytic act.

172. #172

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.36

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

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

     If the psychoanalytic act is very precisely that to which the psychoanalyst seems to oppose the most frenzied miscognition, this is linked not so much to a sort of subjective incompatibility

173. #173

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.89

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around the analyst's refusal to act, which makes transference possible, and that the Objet petit a is the horizon-terminus toward which every act tends — a claim illustrated via the asymmetry Clausewitz introduces into war-discourse as a structural analogue to the analytic situation.

     Here we are then at this point $ which situates what is specifically involved in the psychoanalytic act, in so far as it is around it that there is suspended the resistance of the psychoanalyst.

174. #174

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the irreducibility of the language-effect as its object and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust — thereby distinguishing it from psychotherapy and from Hegelian absolute knowing — and grounds this in the structural difference between hysteria and obsession as two modes of the subject's relation to the repressed signifier.

     it is precisely from the fact of knowing that in every act, there is something which escapes him as subject... at the end of this act, the realisation is, let us say for the moment, at the very least veiled about what he has to accomplish

175. #175

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic act is constituted by a structural feint: the analyst must pretend (while knowing otherwise from their own analysis) that the Subject Supposed to Know is tenable, in order to set the process in motion—but the act itself exceeds doing (faire) and produces a renewal of the subject's presence precisely by excluding the analyst-as-subject from its agency.

     The essential psychoanalytic act of the psychoanalyst involves this something that I am not naming, that I outlined under the name of feint, and which becomes serious if this becomes forgetting, to feign to forget that one's act is to be the cause of this process.

176. #176

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.102

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

     Theoretical move: By deploying Aristotelian syllogistic logic—specifically the middle term—Lacan argues that the Objet petit a functions as the true middle term connecting the psychoanalysand-as-subject to the psychoanalyst-as-predicate, such that the psychoanalyst is defined not as a pre-given identity but as a production of the psychoanalysing task, sustained by the analyst's identification with the o-object in itself.

     the conjunction of the act and the task. How do the two connect up?

177. #177

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Pavlov's experimental apparatus, far from being a materialist reduction of the speaking being, inadvertently reproduces the fundamental structure of language (the subject receiving its own message in inverted form), thereby making Pavlov an unwitting structuralist whose 'leaky' edifice conceals ideological presuppositions about what is 'already there' in the brain — a critique that pivots toward the question of the psychoanalytic act and what any founder of an experience does not know about its structural presuppositions.

     what this experiment signifies qua act, for this subject - Pavlov here - who in this case does nothing more than very exactly, and without being aware of it, pick up in the most correct form the benefits of a construction

178. #178

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the discussion of the analytic act as requiring not a metaphorical but a rigorous, formal logical network, announcing an escalation in the emphasis on logic as constitutive of the orientation and endpoint of his discourse rather than merely descriptive of it.

     this question that I am posing about the analytic act which presents itself as something that profoundly implicates each one of those who are listening to me here as analysts

179. #179

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

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

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

     It can only be judged with regard to an act which is to be constructed like the one that, reiterating castration, is established as a passage à l'acte.

180. #180

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of 'the act' is constitutively signifying (not merely motor), that its meaning is always retroactively constituted (Nachträglich), and uses a critical reading of a contemporary report on transference and acting-out to distinguish his own theoretical position—that the act is new and unheard-of in its psychoanalytic formulation—from both ego-psychological reductions of transference and naive intersubjective readings of his own Rome Discourse.

     What is an act for the psychoanalyst? It will be enough, I think, to make myself understood at this level, for me to articulate, for me to recall, what each and every one of you know, that no one is ignorant of in our time, namely, what is called the symptomatic act

181. #181

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "psychoanalytic act" as a pivot to argue that the structural subversion of the subject it enacts cannot be confined to analysts alone—it concerns everyone—while simultaneously critiquing behaviourist/Pavlovian reductions of the signifier-chain as a fundamental misrecognition that forecloses the properly structuralist (and thus analytic) dimension of the act.

     the act as it operates psychoanalytically, what the psychoanalyst directs of his action into psychoanalytic operancy

182. #182

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces The Act as the constitutive inauguration of a beginning where none naturally exists, arguing that the act's structure is essentially signifying rather than efficacious-as-doing, and uses this framework to approach the psychoanalytic act specifically through the forced-choice logic of alienation ('either I do not think or I am not'), thereby linking the act to the splitting of the subject and the unconscious.

     An act is linked to the determination of the beginning, and very especially where there is need to make one, because, precisely, one does not exist.

183. #183

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reflects ceremonially on the interrupted Seminar on the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the act's constitutive paradox—that the analyst must operate from a position that gives the lie to their own position—requires the concept of Verleugnung (fetishistic disavowal) rather than Verwerfung (foreclosure), while also registering the political events of May 1968 as an index of a structural gap in the universe of knowledge.

     after having opened up a concept like the psychoanalytic act, fate decided that you would only have on this subject half of what I had intended to say about it

184. #184

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's concepts of true/false self and therapeutic regression as a symptomatic case study to argue that any miscognition of the analytic act inevitably leads—however gifted the analyst—to a negation of the analytic position, thereby confirming the necessity of a theoretical critique of the psychoanalytic act.

     the slightest miscognition of what is involved in the analytic act, immediately draws the one who assumes it... to the negation of the analytic position.

185. #185

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural function — neither an insult nor a psychological category but a knot of "dé-connaissance" (mis-knowing) — in order to argue that the psychoanalytic act must reckon with the irreducible overlap between truth and stupidity, grounded ultimately in the inappropriateness of the sexual organ for enjoyment and the constitutive failure of truth when it encounters the sexual field.

     I would not say the most specific, but the new dimension of the act that analysis introduces. This itself, I mean to make this rapprochment, and to pose a question about it, this itself is an act, mine.

186. #186

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of an analysis (which belongs to the analysand as task) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and its replacement by the objet petit a as cause of the subject's division constitutes the act that makes one a psychoanalyst — thereby grounding the logic of the phantasy in the structure of alienation, desire, castration, and the lost object.

     Is it an act to begin a psychoanalysis, yes or no? Yes, assuredly. Only who performs this act? ... it is clear that if there is an act, it is probably necessary to look for it elsewhere ... it is on the side of the psychoanalyst.

187. #187

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes *savoir* (knowledge as operative, structural) from *connaissance* (knowing as representation), and uses Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment to argue that what is truly demonstrated there is the structural formula of the signifier — that "the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier" — thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in any organo-dynamic or spiritualist model.

     it is a matter only of introducing the function that I have to develop before you... what is involved in the psychoanalytic act

188. #188

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates the concept of the "psychoanalytic act" by distinguishing it from both motor activity/discharge (the physiologising, reflex-arc model favoured by ego-psychological theorists) and from mere action, arguing that an act is constitutively tied to a signifying inscription — and thereby implicates the Subject and the unconscious in a way that demands a wholly different theoretical framework.

     If we have to introduce and very necessarily at the level of psychoanalysis the function of the act, it is in as much as this psychoanalytic doing profoundly implicates the Subject.

189. #189

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     **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.

     this gap, which still remains between the act and the doing, is what is at stake. This is the burning point around which people have been racking their brains

190. #190

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical frame that psychoanalysis uses to contain and regulate the irreducible gap between male and female jouissance, while the 'o-object' (objet petit a) — not castration itself — is the structural operator through which subjectification of sex is accomplished, with castration being merely the elegant sign of a remaining outside jouissance that psychoanalysis cannot access.

     at the end of the analytic act, there is on the stage, this stage which is structuring, but only at this level, the o

191. #191

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.34

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

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

     the first strictly coherent aspect of what I am in the process of trying to produce this year before you under the name of psychoanalytic act, outside what I called the manipulation of transference, there is no analytic act.

192. #192

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a triangular mapping of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as cardinal poles to locate the Barred Subject, the unary stroke (first Identification), and the objet petit a, arguing that Truth belongs to the Other/Symbolic, Jouissance to the Real, and Knowledge to the Imaginary—positioning the analyst in the void between them. He then reads Winnicott's transitional object as an inadvertent, incomplete articulation of the objet petit a, showing how object-relations theory approaches but fails to theorize the subject commanded by that object.

     all we have been able to do is to re-evoke the dimensions in which there are deployed our references concerning the function of the symptom when we have posited it as putting a check on what is knowable, on knowledge, which always represents some truth... the analytic act

193. #193

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as "Wo $ tat … muss Ich (o) werden" — where the barred subject acted, the analyst must become the waste-product (objet a) of the new order introduced — thereby defining the psychoanalytic act as a saying (un dire) that structurally supersedes Aristotelian virtue, Kantian universalism, religious intentionality, and the Hegelian-Marxist political act.

     the status of the act, in so far as this act is curiously related to a certain number of original introductions, in the first rank of which is the Cartesian cogito, in as much as the psychoanalytic act permits the question to be posed again.

194. #194

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorized as the analyst's acceptance of the transference structured around the Subject Supposed to Know, which is constitutively doomed to 'désêtre' — a fall into the Objet petit a — while the end of analysis realizes the subject precisely as lack, culminating in castration as the subjective experience of the absence of unifying jouissance.

     The psychoanalytic act, if it is an act and it is indeed from this that we began last year, is something that puts to us the question of articulating it, of saying it, which is legitimate.

195. #195

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.106

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively paradoxical: the analyst operates *as* the objet petit a (not *being* it fully) while simultaneously being the only one capable of putting in question the Subject Supposed to Know on which transference—and the very possibility of the analytic act—depends; this produces the analysand as a kind of manufactured product, linking psychoanalytic alienation to the Marxist problematic of alienated labour.

     what can the psychoanalytic act mean, if in effect the psychoanalytic act is, all the same, committed by the psychoanalyst?

196. #196

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the psychoanalytic act as that which constitutes a true beginning precisely where none naturally exists, arguing that the act's defining feature is its signifying point (not its efficacy as doing), and uses this to reframe the Freudian 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' as the structural formula of the psychoanalytic act — anchored in the forced choice of alienation ('either I do not think or I am not') developed in the logic of the phantasy.

     An act is linked to the determination of the beginning, and very especially where there is need to make one, because, precisely, one does not exist.

197. #197

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

     Theoretical move: In this closing ceremonial address, Lacan reflects on the interrupted transmission of his theory of the psychoanalytic act, identifying Verleugnung (disavowal) as the concept he had reserved to articulate the analyst's position in relation to the Subject Supposed to Know, and situates the May '68 events as an unexpected enactment of the 'act' dimension his seminar had been developing.

     after having opened up a concept like the psychoanalytic act. fate decided that you would only have on this subject half of what I had intended to say about it

198. #198

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation works not through dialogue or mediation but through the asymmetrical relation between the Subject Supposed to Know and a newly posited 'subject supposed demand,' mediated by the objet petit a as lack and distance — and that truth reaches the analysand from the analyst's own fantasy, through the gap (Möbius strip) that constitutes the Other.

     What I would have led you towards this year, if I had been able to speak about the psychoanalytic act up to the end, would have been in order to tell you that it is not for nothing if I spoke to you about the desire of the psychoanalyst.

199. #199

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.

     To take a further step, let us now come to the only point where the act can be questioned: at its point of origin.

200. #200

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

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

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

     It can only be judged with regard to an act which is to be constructed like the one that, reiterating castration, is established as a passage à l'acte.

201. #201

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of analysis (on the side of the analysand) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know gives way to the Objet petit a as cause of the subject's division — and it is this terminal act that grounds the analyst's capacity to begin each new analysis.

     Is it an act to begin a psychoanalysis, yes or no? Yes, assuredly. Only who performs this act? ... it is clear that if there is an act, it is probably necessary to look for it elsewhere ... if it is not on the side of the psychoanalysand, it is on the side of the psychoanalyst.

202. #202

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.84

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

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is structurally defined through the tetrahedron of alienation (the forced choice between "I do not think" and "I am not"), and the analyst's function is to reduce the Subject Supposed to Know to the objet petit a — a move that distinguishes genuine analytic structure from mere discourse and rehabilitates resistance as a structural necessity rather than a defect of the analysand.

     If I am speaking this year about the act, and am posing the question of the act... what is involved in the act in the perspective that the psychoanalytic act opens up

203. #203

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that at the conclusion of a training analysis, the analyst is reduced to the objet petit a (a residue without essence), and the subject supposed to know is simultaneously subverted — a moment Lacan calls "the pass" — such that the analysand-becoming-analyst installs the o-object at the place of the subject supposed to know, discovering that the subject of every act is a subject not-present-in-the-act, and that all o-objects are without essence.

     He who at the end of a training analysis takes up, as I might say, the challenge of this act... the subject of the act, of every act, I would say, in so far as like the subject supposed to know at the end of the analytic experience, it is a subject which is not in the act.

204. #204

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical framework that contains and limits psychoanalytic operations rather than explaining masculine enjoyment, and that the structural logic of the analytic act culminates in the relation $◇a — where castration is the sign of an irreducible gap between male and feminine enjoyment that psychoanalysis cannot close.

     at the end of the analytic act, there is on the stage, this stage which is structuring, but only at this level, the o, at this extreme point that we know to be at the end of the destiny of the hero of tragedy.

205. #205

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.109

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as a double language-effect in which the analysand's completion of analysis and the analyst's self-institution as psychoanalyst (the "pass") are structurally inseparable; the act's strangest consequence is that the subject who takes the analyst's position recognises himself as caused—in his division—by the rejected object (objet a), and the uninterrogated leap of this consecration is systematically concealed by analytic institutions that preserve an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know.

     Let us take up again what is involved in the psychoanalytic act, and let us clearly posit that today we are going to try to advance in this direction, which is that of the psychoanalytic act.

206. #206

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian primary process introduces jouissance as a constitutive dissatisfaction—not reducible to general psychology's satisfaction-seeking—and then maps the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) onto a topological diagram, locating Truth at the Other/Symbolic pole, Jouissance at the Real pole, and Knowledge as an imaginary idealisation, with the barred Subject, the unary stroke (I), and objet petit a as the three projected points, using Winnicott's transitional object as a clinical illustration that points toward—but stops short of—the full concept of the objet petit a as the subject's first object of enjoyment.

     since we have been speaking about the psychoanalytic act, all we have been able to do is to re-evoke the dimensions in which there are deployed our references concerning the function of the symptom

207. #207

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Pavlovian conditioned reflex as a structural illustration to argue that the signifier's operation always implies the presence of a subject, while simultaneously distinguishing knowledge-as-savoir from mere representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in organo-dynamic or idealist models.

     it is a matter only of introducing the function that I have to develop before you... what is involved in the analytic position... what I mean by the term of psychoanalytic act

208. #208

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.34

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

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

     the first strictly coherent aspect of what I am in the process of trying to produce this year before you under the name of psychoanalytic act, outside what I called the manipulation of transference, there is no analytic act.

209. #209

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Pavlovian experimentation to demonstrate that its presupposed materialism is structurally equivalent to the speaking being's relation to language (receiving one's message in inverted form), and this structural miscognition is symptomatic of a broader ideological occlusion—serving as the ground from which to approach the question of the psychoanalytic act and the presuppositions unknown to its subject.

     This indeed is going to be what is at stake in connection with the psychoanalytic act.

210. #210

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes three levels of "mathesis" (I read / I write / I lose) to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure and loss, and that teaching (thesis/antithesis) is not itself an act — but the act's topology, in which failure is primary, is what analysis uniquely inaugurates and what analysts themselves resist recognising.

     A teaching is not an act. It has never been one. A teaching is a thesis, as was always very well formulated at the time when people knew what a teaching in the university was.

211. #211

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function irreducible to a mere insult, arguing that the psychoanalytic act must grapple with the overlap between truth and stupidity—specifically, that the sexual act (marked by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment) renders truth irreducibly compromised, which is the very dimension the psychoanalytic act operates within.

     I mean to make this rapprochment, and to pose a question about it, this itself is an act, mine.

212. #212

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.43

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the Subject Supposed to Know is constitutive of the analytic situation from its very inception, and that the psychoanalytic act is defined precisely by the analyst's feigned (and potentially forgotten) displacement of that function—a displacement that is the condition of truth, not of knowledge.

     The essential psychoanalytic act of the psychoanalyst involves this something that I am not naming, that I outlined under the name of feint, and which becomes serious if this becomes forgetting, to feign to forget that one's act is to be the cause of this process.

213. #213

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rewrites Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as "Wo $ tat... muss Ich (o) werden" — the analyst must become the waste product (objet a) of the new order they introduce — positing the psychoanalytic act as a saying (dire) that supersedes prior normative frameworks (Aristotle, Kant, religious intention, Hegel's law of the heart, the political act) by making the subject's own dissolution the condition of the act.

     Measure the distance travelled from this perspective on the act to that of Kant.

214. #214

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates his seminar on the psychoanalytic act by arguing that 'act' cannot be reduced to motor activity or energetic discharge (as in ego-psychology and physiologising theories); rather, the act is constituted by its correlative inscription in the Symbolic order, thereby implicating the subject—and specifically the unconscious—in a way that distinguishes it categorically from mere action or behaviour.

     If we have to introduce and very necessarily at the level of psychoanalysis the function of the act, it is in as much as this psychoanalytic doing profoundly implicates the Subject.

215. #215

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **Annex 3**

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

     the act (simply) takes the place of an assertion, whose subject it changes... The psychoanalytic act seems suited to throw greater light on the act, because it is an act that reproduces itself from the very doing that it commands.

216. #216

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is defined as the analyst's acceptance of supporting the transference — specifically, sustaining the function of the Subject Supposed to Know while knowing it is destined to fall — such that the analytic process culminates not in knowledge but in castration as subjective experience: the subject's realisation of itself exclusively as lack, figured by (-φ) and the incommensurability of Objet petit a to 1.

     The psychoanalytic act, if it is an act and it is indeed from this that we began last year, is something that puts to us the question of articulating it, of saying it, which is legitimate. And even going further, implies the consequences of the act in so far as the act itself is in its proper dimension a statement (un dire).

217. #217

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     **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).

     the subject of the psychoanalytic act is supported, how, on the principle of the fact that the act by which psychoanalysis is established, starts elsewhere?

218. #218

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the strategic obscurity of his texts as a protection against ideological capture, while articulating that the psychoanalytic act is determined by its relation to jouissance (from which it must simultaneously protect itself), and advancing the lemma that "there is no transference of transference" as a key formula distinguishing the psychoanalytic act from ordinary clinical transference.

     Was I careful enough in approaching what is required to situate the psychoanalytic act: to establish what determines it from enjoyment and the ways at the same time it must protect itself from it?

219. #219

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the seminar's theoretical trajectory as oriented not toward a loose metaphorical use of "logic" but toward a rigorous, formal logical network that necessarily implicates the analytic act—positioning logic as constitutive of, not merely descriptive of, the analytic discourse.

     this question that I am posing about the analytic act which presents itself as something that profoundly implicates each one of those who are listening to me here as analysts

220. #220

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act—understood as a structural subversion of the subject's relation to knowledge—concerns not only analysts but everyone, and uses the foil of behaviourist/Pavlovian reductionism to mark precisely what the act is not: it cannot be grounded in conditioned-reflex models because the signifier-to-signifier link is already presupposed in the experimental setup itself.

     the psychoanalytic act. It is clear that what I said the last time, could not but encounter this murmur of satisfaction

221. #221

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of the statement "I am not" to anchor the split subject of the unconscious, then extends this logical paradox to the claim that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" — not as naturalist provocation but as a structural consequence of desire being constructed through the unconscious, with the psychoanalytic act defined as the analyst being rejected like the objet petit a at the end of analysis.

     After having defined the psychoanalytic act which I defined in a very risky fashion, I even put in the centre this acceptation of being rejected like the o object, it is enormous, it is new, no one ever said that.

222. #222

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses an anecdote about an unwitting witticism to introduce the theoretical register of the psychoanalytic act: the elevation of a speech-event to the field of the Other is what constitutes it as wit, and this same structure of reference to the Other is what must be grasped when formalising the psychoanalytic act as a distinct dimension of the unconscious.

     not at the level of all the registers of what happens in the unconscious, but very properly speaking in what belongs to the psychoanalytic act

223. #223

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.35

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

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

     why then should it not be the same about what is involved in the analytic act? Assuredly what can enlighten us is whether we, for our part, can say something about it that goes a little further.

224. #224

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.89

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constituted by the analyst's refusal to act, which structurally opens the space for transference and the Subject Supposed to Know; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the necessity of signifying sequence for any 'consequence' to be conceivable, and maps the objet petit a as the horizon-end of every act, not just the analytic one.

     Here we are then at this point $ which situates what is specifically involved in the psychoanalytic act, in so far as it is around it that there is suspended the resistance of the psychoanalyst.

225. #225

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's true/false self distinction as a symptomatic case of misrecognition of the analytic act: the analyst who posits a "true self" waiting behind a "false self" covertly installs himself as the locus of Truth, thereby negating the properly analytic position—an error all the more consequential in a capable analyst.

     the slightest miscognition of what is involved in the analytic act, immediately draws the one who assumes it… to the negation of the analytic position.

226. #226

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     **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 constitutes the subject as divided ($) through the transference-function of objet petit a, and this structural division is analogous to the tragic schize between spectator/chorus and hero; furthermore, the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is grounded not in totality but in the cause effected by objet petit a, making undecidability an intrinsic feature of any subject-indexed logic.

     The psychoanalytic act essentially consists in this sort of subject-effect that operates by distributing, as one might say, what is going to constitute the support.

227. #227

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper concept of transference is only fully illuminated once the 'subject supposed to know' is introduced and its fracture in the analytic act is understood; the originary scene of Freud's patient embracing him out of hypnosis reveals that what the hysteric seizes is the objet petit a—not love as sentiment—thereby grounding the entire structure of the analytic operation in the subject's relation to this object rather than in narcissistic identification.

     since I introduced it as constituting the psychoanalytic act... at what moment of the psychoanalytic act, I was going to link all of that to the passage à l'acte, to acting-out.

228. #228

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the act (as distinct from mere motor activity) is constitutively signifying and only achieves its full status nachträglich, while simultaneously critiquing the reduction of transference to an intersubjective relation or a mere defensive concept by ego-psychological and American analytic orthodoxy.

     What is an act for the psychoanalyst? It will be enough, I think, to make myself understood at this level, for me to articulate, for me to recall, what each and every one of you know... what is called the symptomatic act

229. #229

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.137

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is defined not by a criterion external to it but by the psychoanalyst as instrument, and that the psychoanalytic act brings the subject to an awareness of its constitutive, irreducible division as a language-effect — a division that definitively refutes the Hegelian project of exhaustive self-knowledge (gnothi seauton / pour-soi) and is exemplified in the contrasting logical structures of hysteria and obsession.

     what I am trying to tell you this year, under this title of the psychoanalytic act.

230. #230

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **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 passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around the forced alienating choice (the 'cogito' quadrangle of "either I do not think, or I am not"), wherein the analyst supports the function of objet petit a so that the analysand can accomplish division-as-subject; this is contrasted with science (which forecloses the subject-effect after Descartes) and revolutionary thinking (which touches the subject-effect but cannot yet isolate its act), making the psychoanalytic act a privileged site for theorising what an act is as such.

     the psychoanalytic act can operate to bring about this something that we will call the identification of the psychoanalyst.

231. #231

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.97

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act forces a return to the foundational problem of logic — the status of the subject — and that his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier" re-opens what mathematical logic elides: the initiating positing of any signifier. Using Peirce's schema of the empty box, he demonstrates that the subject is constituted as nothing (no stroke), an effect of discourse rather than a bearer of being (ousia), and that psychoanalysis uniquely ties together the history of logic's ambiguities about the subject by revealing desire as the hidden stake behind logical debates.

     the act defines by its cutting edge what is involved in the passage in which the psychoanalyst is instaured or established

232. #232

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between 'the act' and 'the doing' is the central problem of psychoanalytic practice, distinguishing the analyst's peculiar position—a doing of pure speech in which the subject absents itself so the signifier may operate—from mere activity, and linking this to the question of the Subject Supposed to Know, the logic of quantifiers, and the impossibility of meta-language.

     it must all the same be noted that this gap, which still remains between the act and the doing, is what is at stake.

233. #233

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.383

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand because she already embodies the 'subject supposed to know' in her flesh, making the cut that separates this supposition from the unconscious structure (master/woman) the pivotal operation of analytic treatment; in parallel, the obsessional's relation to the master reveals that his desire is constitutively impossible.

     the operation of analytic treatment turns around this cut which is a subjective cut

234. #234

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally linked to the field of the big Other as the locus of knowledge, and that the objet petit a — as cause of desire and division of the subject — is what psychoanalysis reveals within that field; he further advances that there is no sexual relationship (logically definable), only the sexual act, which alone produces what would otherwise be an impossible relation.

     what is at stake, as I announced last year, is indeed an act in so far as it is in relationship with what I called, stated, proposed, as being the o-object.

235. #235

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.172

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager as a structural matrix for desire, arguing that the objet petit a (the "o-object") has neither use nor exchange value but is precisely what animates the relationship of the subject to the word and to the act — thereby displacing Hegel's fight-to-the-death for pure prestige as the paradigm of risk, and grounding this in the Name of the Father as inaugurated by Freud.

     there is no other game except risking everything for everything, that this is even what is called simply to act. He called that the fight to the death for pure prestige. This is precisely what psychoanalysis allows to be rectified.

236. #236

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.355

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure: the objet petit a emerges as a substitute for the gap left by castration (the impasse of the sexual relationship), the analyst incarnates the 'subject supposed to know' only to evacuate the o-object at analysis's end, and transference is properly defined not through repetition alone but through its structural relation to the subject supposed to know as the illusory One of the Other—while the analyst occupies the paradoxical position of a scapegoat who bears the o-object so the subject can be reprieved from it.

     the dimension of the act, of the sexual act in any case, but at the same time of all acts, what has been obvious for a long time, is that its proper dimension is failure.

237. #237

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic knowledge is constitutively related to—yet irreducible to—sexual knowledge: the drives are "montages" oriented toward satisfaction within a horizon that is the sexual, but the sexual act itself does not exist in any structural sense, and analytic knowledge is not a technique but a mode of "knowing how to be with it" (savoir y être) that reveals how one is always already in the sexual field without knowing it—a dupery that benefits no one and implicates all fields of knowledge.

     I posed for the question of the act different premises… there is no sexual act.

238. #238

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     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.

     the question about the psychoanalytic act, is, as I told you earlier, that of the decisive act that from the psychoanalysand makes there arise, be inaugurated, be established the psychoanalyst.

239. #239

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.253

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural homology between Freud's three 'impossible professions' (governing, educating, analysing) and his own Four Discourses, arguing that the shift from the Discourse of the Master to its capitalist-University variant constitutes the key theoretical lens for understanding contemporary student unrest, while warning that "speaking out" can function as "dead meat" — mere signifier without discourse — unless grounded in proper discursive analysis.

     We are quite ready here truly to have, it has all the appearances of this function called the analytic act. Das Analysieren means nothing other than this term that I used as the title of one of my seminars.

240. #240

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of the unconscious is analogous to mathematical logic (Gödel-type incompleteness), where the "false" (falsus) is causally operative in the production of being through interpretation — and that Freud's unique insight into this topology was sustained by a Jewish hermeneutic tradition (the Midrash) of reading the letter literally, rather than by any natural truth.

     You know that I wanted for a few months to introduce the enormity of the psychoanalytic act.

241. #241

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.22

     **ANALYTICON**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the four discourses (Master, Hysteric, University, Analyst) and argues that psychoanalytic knowledge cannot be transmitted like ordinary university knowledge, because the being of the psychoanalyst—what is produced when a psychoanalysand commits to becoming an analyst—is the real question, a point left open in his seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

     This is what I tried to articulate when I spoke about The psychoanalytic act. My seminar that year, it was 1968, I interrupted before the end

242. #242

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the usual claim about the Freud-Saussure relationship by arguing that the unconscious is the condition of linguistics (not the reverse), and that language is the condition of the unconscious — positioning the Lacanian reading of Freud as what makes modern structural linguistics possible rather than derivative of it.

     dared to define passage à l'acte and acting-out, very exactly terms that I had put forward to them as opposing one another, but simply inverting what I attributed to each one of them

243. #243

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     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.

     if it is true that there can only be an act in a context already filled with everything involved in the incidence of the signifier... there cannot be any act in the beginning, in any case no act that can be described as murder.

244. #244

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure is the effect of language already operative in reality—not a representational function of any subject—and uses this to demarcate psychoanalysis from linguistics and ethnology: neither can master the unconscious because psychoanalysis operates within a particular tongue where there is no metalanguage, the signifier represents a subject (not another signifier), and sexual non-relation is the irreducible structural remainder that myth and linguistics cannot formulate.

     what, by articulating it as the psychoanalytic act, I thought I could illuminate more than any other act

245. #245

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.235

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism *lathouse* (from the Greek root of *aletheia*, its aorist form gesturing toward concealment rather than disclosure) to name the objects of consumer-technological civilization that cause desire — distinguishing these from the *alethosphere* — and then pivots to define the analyst's position as a *lathouse*: the one who must inhabit the impossible (not merely the impotent) relation to truth, where the Real is precisely what is impossible in any formalised field.

     The ideal psychoanalyst would be the one who commits this absolutely radical act, of which the least that can be said is that to see it being done is anxiety provoking.

246. #246

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* to push the question of truth and meta-language to its limit: because any assertion is already self-announcing as true, adding a truth-predicate is superfluous, yet this very superfluity reveals that there is no meta-language — only the desire of the Other, from which all 'blackguardism' (wanting to be the big Other for someone) is deduced.

     In any act whatsoever, what escapes is what is important. And this is also the step taken by analysis, in the introduction of the bungled act as such, which is, after all, the only one that we know with certainty is always successful.

247. #247

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **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.

     At the limits of discourse, in so far as it strives to make the same semblance hold up, there is from time to time something real, this is what is called the passage à l'acte

248. #248

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

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 9 June 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that writing constitutes an act in its own right — that the written word carries a distinct theoretical import irreducible to spoken utterance, making the distinction between saying and having-written a fundamental one for the functioning of the written letter.

     if you have sufficiently heard what I have been tackling this year about the function of writing, well then, I will have no need to justify any further that it is effectively an act.

249. #249

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     **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 Im Anfang war die Tat, as your man says, there where the act was right at the beginning it is perhaps exactly the same thing as to say en arche, in the beginning was the word. There is perhaps no other act than this.

250. #250

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     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.

     But the act remains that at the level at which discourse functions which is not analytic discourse, the question is posed of how this discourse has succeeded in catching hold of bodies.

251. #251

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that there is no sexual relationship in the speaking being—not as mere wordplay, but as a structural impossibility grounded in the constitutive failure of jouissance and the irreducibility of lack at the centre of sexuality—while positioning the psychoanalyst's knowledge as the knowledge of impotence, distinct from both scientific and religious discourses.

     there is nô act except a failed one and that it is even the only condition of a semblance of success. This indeed is why suicide deserves to be objected to.

252. #252

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is irreducible to need or instinct and must be brought into existence through naming in the analytic act; resistance belongs to the analyst, not the subject; and the figure of Oedipus at Colonus enacts the Freudian "beyond the pleasure principle" as the point where destiny is fully realized and what remains exceeds any instinctual cycle.

     He accepts his destiny at the moment when he mutilates himself, but he had already accepted it at the moment when he accepted the crown.

253. #253

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.295

     XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the sophism of logical time (haste as the third temporal moment) to distinguish between language as an eternal, imaginary structure and speech as a symbolic act of creation — arguing that truth in the symbolic order is inseparable from the precipitous act that attests to it, and that this creative dimension of speech is what differentiates the Freudian/symbolic framework from Platonic reminiscence.

     The acceleration, the precipitation in the act, reveals itself in this instance to be coherent with the manifestation of the truth.

254. #254

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > XVII

     Theoretical move: Desire, as Freud deploys it in the Traumdeutung, is structurally unnameable — it is never unveiled as a positive content but exists only in the stages of the dream-work (condensation, displacement, etc.); once caught in the dialectic of alienation and the demand for recognition, desire is asymptotically deferred, and its limit-point is death. Fantasy, meanwhile, emerges as a distinct register — neither effective satisfaction nor mere distortion — tied to the imaginary and first theorised by Freud through the detour of the ego.

     the psychoanalysis of Oedipus is only completed at Colonus, when he tears his face apart. That is the essential moment, which gives his story its meaning, and, from the point of view of Oedipus, it is acting-out.

255. #255

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **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.

     it is in the consequences of what is said that the act of saying is judged.

256. #256

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     **Introduction**

     Theoretical move: In this opening session, Lacan frames the symptom as belonging to the Real, introduces the question of analytic identity and set-formation (can analysts "make a set"?), and links imbecility in the analytic discourse to the ethics of each discourse — previewing the year's central thesis that non-dupes err by refusing to play the game of a discourse's structure.

     this passe by which in short what is at stake is that each one contributes his stone to the analytic discourse by bearing witness to how one enters into it.

257. #257

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes that for the obsessional, death is a 'parapraxis' (failed act), linking the structure of obsession to the impossibility of grasping death as a genuine act; simultaneously, he pivots to the problem of feminine ek-sistence, arguing that women exist not under a universal 'The' but as numerable ones — a move that articulates the Not-all against any totalizing universal.

     death is only approachable by an act. Again, for it to be successful, someone would have to commit suicide knowing that it is an act, which happens very rarely.

258. #258

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 8: Tuesday 18 March 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot—understood through the topology of the torus—displaces the insoluble question of objectivity and grounds the three consistencies (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) as irreducible, such that their triple points generate meaning, phallic jouissance, and the Name-of-the-Father respectively; identification is then reformulated as three distinct operations corresponding to the three registers of the knot's real Other.

     The saying is a consequence, it is not the voice, the saying is an act.

259. #259

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the Passe as the moment at which the split between knowledge and the locus of enunciation is overcome, producing a paradoxical "communion in non-being" at S(Ø) where subject and Other share the same lack, beyond fantasy and transference—this constitutes the structural condition for the emergence of a heretical, self-responsible analytic subjectivity.

     an analyst who has not Passed through this dispossession of his thinking

260. #260

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.24

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological operation of turning the Symbolic torus inside-out—analogous to what psychoanalysis performs on the unconscious—produces a fundamentally different arrangement than the Borromean knot: the Symbolic comes to totally envelop the Real and Imaginary, raising a structural problem about what a completed analysis actually does to the subject's organization of the three registers.

     Someone who has experienced a psychoanalysis is something which marks a passage...the fact of having gone through an analysis is something which cannot be in any case restored to the previous state, except of course by carrying out another cut

261. #261

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: Through a game-theoretic allegory (Bozef/king chess positions), the passage argues that the subject's total dispossession before an omniscient Other (Absolute Knowing at R3) forces the emergence of the repressed signifier S2 into the Real—constituting aphanisis/fading—and that the only exit from this petrified position is a single word ("it is you," S(Ø)) which, rather than merely keeping one's word, *sustains* speech as an act anchored in the subject's desire, making the pass (passe) the topological test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating.

     the passe as a topological montage that would allow us to take into account if effectively when a subject enunciates something, he is capable of bearing witness, namely, of transmitting the articulation of his enunciating to his enunciated.

262. #262

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     **X**: What does systematising mean? [*Laughter]* > **Annexe to Session VIII** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 11 April 1978**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures the topological grounding of psychoanalysis by moving from a simple Möbius strip to a doubled/tripled one that flattens into a threefold knot, arguing that the absence of the sexual relationship—screened by the incest prohibition and crystallised around the Oedipus myth—requires a material geometry of thread and fabric rather than a metaphorics of thought, because the passage from signifier to signified always involves a loss that mere 'free association' cannot overcome.

     There must exist an act which is not mentally defective. I try to produce this act in my teaching.

263. #263

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.

     The analyst, for his part, slices (tranche). What he says is a cut.

264. #264

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: By analysing a clinical case (Lebovici) where misidentification of the phobic object as "phallic mother" and countertransferential interventions drive the subject from phobia into perversion and ultimately passage à l'acte, Lacan argues that conceiving the analyst as a real object (the "bundling" model) distorts the analytic relation and produces pathological rather than therapeutic effects.

     It is immediately after this intervention that the subject makes a definitive passage à l'acte and finds the perfect location, the choice site in the real

265. #265

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the structures of neurosis and perversion by mapping Dora's hysteria as a perpetual metaphorical self-positioning under shifting signifiers (Frau K. as her metaphor), while the young homosexual woman's perversion operates metonymically—pointing along the signifying chain to what lies beyond, namely the refused paternal phallus—and uses Lévi-Strauss's exchange theory to ground why woman is structurally reduced to object within the Law of symbolic exchange.

     Freud can interpret the act of jumping off the railway bridge at the critical and terminal moment of her relationship with the lady and the father as a demonstrative way of herself becoming this child that she has not had

266. #266

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the normal Oedipal resolution installs the subject symbolically as bearer of the phallus through a paternal pact, and that when this symbolic mediation fails, imaginary solutions (fetishism, perversion) emerge as substitute modes of binding the three imaginary objects — with fetishism paradigmatically analysed as an oscillating specular identification between mother and phallus that can never achieve symbolic stabilisation.

     each of which can be significantly qualified as a passage à l'acte. During this passage à l'acte, something is brought about that is both a fusion and a point of access to what lies beyond

267. #267

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.402

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "oblative" (altruistic) resolution of obsessional neurosis is itself an obsessional fantasy, and proceeds to map four cardinal points of obsessional desire—centering on the maintenance of the big Other as the locus of signification—before distinguishing "acting out" from the exploit and from fantasy as a message addressed to the analyst that exposes the subject's impasse with demand, desire, and the castration complex.

     Acting out is certainly produced on the way to the analytic realization of unconscious desire... it's an attempt to solve the problem of the relationship between desire and demand.

268. #268

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.414

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference and suggestion constitute two distinct but constantly confused lines in analytic practice, and that it is desire — as the field of the divided subject — which resists the collapse of transference into suggestion/demand; neurosis is reframed not as a quantitative deficit of desire but as a structural arrangement that maintains desire's articulation against this collapse.

     human action is not as harmonious as all that... we never see anything but this, which makes it quite difficult to define acting out clearly.

269. #269

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.427

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical practice that reduces the treatment of obsessional neurosis to a two-person relation and ratifies the subject's fantasmatic production at the level of demand rather than desire, showing through detailed case analysis that such indoctrination—centered on the imaginary other and phallic fantasy—produces regression, acting out, and artificial transference effects rather than genuine analytic cure.

     a true acting out by the subject who went to look through the door of the lavatories on the Champs-Elysees at women urinating - that is, who went in search of the woman as phallus, literally

270. #270

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.469

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical case in which treatment ends not in genuine symbolic resolution but in the imaginary absorption of the phallus—a mechanism already operative in obsessional neurosis—arguing that a "more successful symptom" is not an adequate terminus for analysis, since the symbolic place of the phallus-as-mediator between man and woman has not been worked through.

     the acting out that marks precisely what has been missed... shows that something else should have been realized

271. #271

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     IMPOSSIBLE ACTION

     Theoretical move: By reading Hamlet against Oedipus through a quasi-algebraic comparison of homologous signifying threads, Lacan establishes that what is structurally decisive in Hamlet is the father's knowing of his own murder — the inversion of the Oedipal unknowing — and that Hamlet's inability to act is indexed by the derangement of his desire, whose barometer is his fantasy relation to Ophelia.

     Surely, everything in Hamlet is aligned for him to act, and yet he does not act. This is obviously where the problem begins.

272. #272

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.500

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation — defined as the form into which desire flows, reducible to the pure play of the signifier — and perversion together constitute a dialectical circuit that resists social normalization, and that the analyst's function is to occupy the position of desire's midwife by maintaining the "cut" as the privileged mode of psychoanalytic intervention.

     The cut is undoubtedly the most effective mode of psychoanalytic interpretation. Many analysts would like to make it mechanical and subject it to a preordained length of time. Well, I not only cut sessions altogether differently, but I add that it is one of the most effective methods of intervening.

273. #273

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     THE DESIRE TRAP

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's play-within-the-play scene not merely as a strategic ruse to expose Claudius but as Hamlet's attempt to construct a "fictional structure of truth" that orients him with respect to his own desire—and identifies the analyst's position with Hamlet's intermediary role of stepping "between" subject and desire.

     he does not even draw his sword from its scabbard ... Here, once again, Hamlet caves in.

274. #274

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     IMPOSSIBLE ACTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hamlet's procrastination is not an Oedipal hesitation but a structural impossibility: action is blocked because both father and son already know (the Other knows), and it is only through a "slow birthing of castration" — the realization of what was missing from the start — that the act becomes possible, though at the cost of Hamlet's own death.

     the mainspring that constitutes the whole difficulty of the problem Hamlet faces in assuming responsibility for his action [assumer son acte], is the fact that both the father and son know

275. #275

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.440

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of fantasy — defined by the aphanisis of the subject at the height of desire — is the hub from which neurotic (and perverse) clinical structures differentiate: the subject must find something to sustain desire in the face of the Other's desire, generating the distinct solutions of phobia, hysteria (unsatisfied desire), and obsession (impossible desire).

     fantasy that in perversion is the only thing that reveals the passage à l'acte [acting out].

276. #276

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.368

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a structural account of the phallus in Hamlet to show that the subject's radical position—at the level of deprivation—is to *not be* the phallus, and that the phallus, even when empirically real (Claudius), remains a shadow that cannot be struck without the total sacrifice of narcissistic attachment; this leads Lacan to coin "phallophanies" as the lightning-fast appearances of the phallus that momentarily expose the subject's desire in its truth.

     It is only when he is fatally wounded, and knows that he is, that he can perform the action that lays Claudius low.

277. #277

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the ethical thesis that the only genuine form of guilt is "having given ground relative to one's desire," grounding this in the structural relationship between the subject, the signifier, and an irreducible "keeping of accounts" that persists across moral, religious, and political frameworks; this is illustrated through Antigone, Philoctetes, and a reading of the film *Never on Sunday*.

     As a consequence of the tragic act, the hero frees his adversary too.

278. #278

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's close reading of Sophocles' *Antigone* argues that the play's central organizing term *Atè* — the limit that human life can only briefly cross — structures Antigone's desire as an orientation toward the beyond of the human, making her not monstrous but the embodiment of desire aimed past the boundary of civilization, with the surrounding drama functioning not as action but as a temporal "subsidence" that reveals the irreducible relation of the tragic hero to the dimension of truth.

     Antigone carries out the deed the first time. But what goes beyond a given limit must not be seen.

279. #279

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the oral, anal, and genital stages through the dialectic of demand and desire, showing how each stage structures the subject's relation to the Other differently, culminating in the genital/castration stage where objet petit a is defined as the Other minus phi (a = A - φ), revealing that the subject can only satisfy the Other's demand by demeaning the Other into an object of desire.

     What he doesn't have at his disposal at the moment of the birth and revelation of genital desire is nothing other than the (sexual) act [son acte]. He has nothing but a promissory note. He institutes this act at the level of a project.

280. #280

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions psychoanalytic action as a necessary response to the unconscious/repressed, critiques Ego Psychology as a mass-formation obstacle to analytic efficacy, and begins dismantling the conflation of ideal ego and ego-ideal by grounding both in narcissism as rethought through the mirror stage — thereby clearing space for a renewed account of analytic action and the structure of fantasy.

     psychoanalytic action is an attempt to respond to the unconscious... acting out* is the type of action by which, at a certain moment of the treatment... the subject demands a more accurate response from us.

281. #281

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.290

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

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

     it is against her will (against everything that determines it, not in her life but in her being) that, through an act of freedom, she goes against everything related to her being right down to its very roots

282. #282

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as producing not a stable subject but a vanishing subject ("I think and I am not"), whose constitutive vacillation demands a structural guarantor—the Master Signifier as unique, absolutely depersonalised trait (einziger Zug)—which grounds the signifying chain and points toward the Subject Supposed to Know.

     it is that it has all the characteristics of what we call in our vocabulary an impulsive action (un passage á l'acte). The first phase of Cartesian meditation has the mark of an impulsive act.

283. #283

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.89

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Project of Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely negative psychoanalysis, centred on the death drive as constitutive lack rather than as a path to enjoyment, must abandon all positive agendas (healing, emancipation, improved enjoyment) and function as a non-redemptive, comic-tragic witness to the irrevocable loss at the core of subjectivity and social bonds.

     They don't act out of a positive project. The act of the hopeless hero is negative… 'He doesn't act out of a desire to eliminate loss by constructing a better world in the future; instead, he acts out of an embrace of loss'.

284. #284

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.106

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that existentialism gestures toward the death drive through its affective categories (Angst, despair, being-towards-death) but ultimately betrays it by offering a compensatory benefit (authenticity, overcoming bad faith), whereas a genuinely negative psychoanalysis would refuse all such rewards — with art emerging as the only practice that is faithful to the death drive precisely because its 'benefit' is immanent to the self-destructive process itself, not a subsequent reward.

     That's the last stage of the act of suicide which is life.

285. #285

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > OBSERVATIONS ON THE THIRD ANTINOMY.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental idea of freedom—understood as spontaneous, unconditioned causality—is philosophically necessary to ground the possibility of a first beginning of a causal series, distinct from a first beginning in time; this move justifies attributing a faculty of free action to substances within the natural order without violating the deterministic succession of natural causes.

     this resolution and act of mine do not form part of the succession of effects in nature, and are not mere continuations of it; on the contrary, the determining causes of nature cease to operate in reference to this event

286. #286

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes mathematical from dynamical antinomies to argue that while mathematical cosmological ideas require homogeneous sensuous conditions (forcing both sides false), dynamical ideas admit an intelligible, non-phenomenal condition that stands outside the series, thereby allowing nature and freedom to coexist without contradiction—freedom as a transcendental idea grounding practical freedom through the distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves.

     although a certain thing has not happened, it ought to have happened, and that, consequently, its phenomenal cause was not so powerful and determinative as to exclude the causality of our will

287. #287

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that transcendental freedom and natural necessity are compatible by distinguishing the empirical character (causality of reason as it appears in phenomena, fully determined) from the intelligible character (reason as a purely intelligible faculty, unconditioned by time), thereby showing that the same action can be subject to both natural law and rational self-origination without contradiction.

     the agent commenced with it an entirely new series of effects... This causality of reason we do not regard as a co-operating agency, but as complete in itself.

288. #288

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.64

     chapter 2 > Shofar

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object voice — paradigmatically embodied in the shofar — is not simply opposed to logos but is its hidden support: the paternal voice that founds the Law is structurally identical to the "other" voice it ostensibly persecutes, and both are organized around an ineradicable lack (S(A/)) that links voice, jouissance, femininity, and the impossible foundation of the Other. The voice is further theorized as the missing link between bodies and languages, connecting Lacanian object-theory to Badiou's ontology.

     the voice, as a senseless remainder of the letter, is what endows the letter with authority, making it not just a signifier, but an act... its passage à l'acte

289. #289

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.132

     The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

     Theoretical move: The voice occupies the structural position of sovereignty (inside/outside the law simultaneously), functioning as a permanent threat of a "state of emergency" within the symbolic order; this topology extends to psychoanalysis, where the analyst's silence incarnates the object voice as a pure enunciation compelling the subject's response—making the voice the pivot of transference and of political, ethical, and linguistic subjectification alike.

     this pure excess of the voice is compelling, although it does not tell us what to do and does not offer a handle for recognition and identification... one has to respond to the 'mere voice' which is just an opening, a pure enunciation compelling a response, an act, a dislocation of the imposing voices of domination.

290. #290

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.118

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego > Viva voce

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as the constitutive internal exterior of logos across key Ideological State Apparatuses (church, court, university, elections), showing that written law, sacred scripture, institutional knowledge, and democratic will can only be enacted and made performative when assumed by a living voice—a structural topology that is not archaic residue but the very mechanism by which symbolic/legal acts acquire their force.

     its living presence must be fixed by a written protocol which alone can function as a legal act. Yet the written word has no power if it is not preceded by, and based in, the living voice.

291. #291

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.108

     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.

     The moral law is like a suspended sentence... a sentence demanding a continuation, a sentence to be completed by the subject, by his or her moral decision, by the act.

292. #292

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.162

     Silence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that silence must be theorized across Lacan's three registers—symbolic (silence as structural differential element), imaginary (silence as supposed plenitude), and real (silence as the mute insistence of the drives)—and that the analyst's silence is not merely an absence of speech but an act that homologizes the silence of the drives, making it the operative lever of analytic practice.

     silence does not entail just stillness, peace, an absence of sounds—in its proper sense it is the other of speech... even more, an act... turning the silence into an act.

293. #293

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Doubt as virtue*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious doubt, far from undermining faith, is the very condition that makes authentic decision and genuine love possible — only in the space of undecidability can a truly free, non-self-interested commitment be made, which Rollins figures through the concept of a "Holy Saturday experience."

     it is only in the midst of undecidability that real decisions can be made.

294. #294

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prosperity*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

     We exist for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christlike endeavour to create such a world.

295. #295

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Background to the service*

     Theoretical move: Rollins argues that the theological weight of the crucifixion is only accessible when it is severed from the immediate comfort of the resurrection—the "closed tomb" as a testing-ground for faith stripped of economic return—thereby reframing the Easter singularity not as a consoling unity but as a site of irreducible decision and gift.

     it is at the foot of the cross that one may truly consider embracing Christianity without the comfort of thinking that such a giving of one's life is also the means of gaining it back

296. #296

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Infinite readings and transfinite readings*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that biblical interpretation is bounded by a "transfinite" rather than infinite range of legitimate readings, and that this hermeneutics must be governed by a "prejudice of love" oriented toward the singular other — a "double hermeneutic" that reads both tradition and the encountered situation, and which may demand the paradoxical abandonment of one's tradition in order to remain faithful to it.

     Would you kill your beliefs? In other words, would you be prepared to give up your religious tradition in order to affirm that tradition?

297. #297

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Acts of love*

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Derrida's analysis of the gift, the passage argues that authentic (divine) love is structurally impossible to consciously perform: a truly unconditional gift requires that neither giver nor receiver knows a gift has been given, mapping onto a Christlike love that operates below the threshold of self-reflection — and thereby gesturing at the limit of the subject's intentional agency.

     a love that is born from God is a love that gives with the same reflex as that which causes a bird to sing or the heart to beat

298. #298

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     The End of All Things > How to Do Things with Actions: The Moral World

     Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Carl Christian Erhard Schmid's Kantian moral rationalism as a system built on a series of necessary impossibilities: pure rational action is theoretically impossible yet practically necessary, and this tension—mediated by concepts of the categorical imperative, respect, autonomy, and the postulate of God—transforms the natural world into a moral 'splace,' a space of rational-moral causality inscribed within phenomenal reality.

     Acting in a purely rational manner, I do the impossible, which is, nevertheless, absolutely necessary. I am compelled to do so.

299. #299

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical inversion: rather than awaiting a future catastrophic event to transform social coordinates, it proposes that the transformative "comet" has already occurred (unacknowledged), and that abolishing freedom—embracing catastrophe—is the precondition for imagining a genuinely different form of freedom.

     we first have to abolish freedom and embrace catastrophe, disaster, and the apocalypse

300. #300

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.31

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p27" class="page"></span>Exaggerating Exaggeration, or Letting (God) Be . . . (God)

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's radical defense of predestination and absolute necessity through an Adornian/Hegelian lens, the passage argues that genuine freedom is not a human capacity but an impossible event of grace that can only be received through total despair and passive surrender—a structure isomorphic to the Lacanian subject's relationship to the Real and to anxiety as the condition of truth.

     A true decision/choice . . . presupposes that I assume a passive attitude of 'letting myself be chosen.'

301. #301

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     <span id="unp-ruda-0011.xhtml_p2" class="page"></span><span id="unp-ruda-0011.xhtml_p3" class="page"></span><a href="#unp-ruda-0009.xhtml_toc" class="xref">Provocations</a>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in a historical conjuncture where freedom has become a signifier of oppression, "comic fatalism" is the only stance that can think freedom non-indifferently — operationalized through a series of imperative paradoxes that negate the subject's existence, freedom, and survival as a precondition for genuine action.

     Act in such a way that you accept the struggle you cannot flee from!

302. #302

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.133

     Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > First as Fatalism of Substance, Then as Fatalism of the Subject

     Theoretical move: Hegel's "absolute fatalism" is not resignation but the paradoxical precondition of genuine freedom and subjectivity: only by assuming that everything is always already lost—the apocalypse has already happened—can the subject emerge through the act of *Entlassen* (release), making fatalism and subjectivity structurally identical rather than opposed.

     Hegel calls this act a 'release' (Entlassen)... there is an act involved; this is what the Ent of Entlassen suggests. At the same time, however, the lassen implies that this act is an act of letting things be.

303. #303

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny II: Male Illusions and Female Choices

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" through the asymmetry between male and female developmental logics, Ruda argues that the female logic—as a forced choice of one's own unconscious that precedes and exceeds the Oedipus complex—reveals a non-arbitrary, non-conscious freedom irreducible to the male totalizing illusion, making "woman" the name for an emancipatory act rather than a fixed entity.

     if woman is a name for this choice, this also means that within the female logic woman does not exist (as a fixed entity). Rather woman is a name for this act.

304. #304

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desiring Fortune

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Descartes's fatalism (as belief in divine providence and immutable necessity) serves not as a simple external determination but as the precondition for a proper practice of freedom, by countering the will's unfreedom caused by desiring things dependent on fortune—which corrupts temporality, contingency, and self-determination—and thereby opposing Aristotelian eudaimonistic ethics.

     Cartesian fatalism rejects this inconsistent, obscure idea of the aims, ends, and means of human conduct. It thereby formulates the preconditions for a proper practice of truth and freedom

305. #305

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Predestination as Emancipation > Is There a Choice?

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Luther-Erasmus debate on free will to argue that genuine freedom is not a possessed capacity but an event that befalls the subject from outside, restructuring the concept of freedom from voluntary self-determination to a forced encounter with radical contingency — a theological precedent for Ruda's broader argument about abolishing freedom as self-possession.

     Faith begins 'only where the illusion of a remote 'inner world' is disturbed.' ... my 'inner' approaches me radically from 'the outer.'

306. #306

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.100

     The End of All Things > The Conflict of Determinisms: Intelligible Fatalism

     Theoretical move: Ruda, reading Schmid's "intelligible fatalism," argues that the subject emerges from an unresolvable conflict between two determinisms (rational/moral freedom and phenomenal causality), such that freedom is neither a given capacity nor contingency but is constituted retroactively through the forced, impossible decision to act morally—yielding a split subject and a transcendental antagonism as the only ground of ethics.

     the very existence of the capacity is proven exclusively through the actions that will have realized it... freedom might be realized (and thus constituted) anytime if we first accept the struggle from which it emerges.

307. #307

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.104

     The End of All Things > Brief Addendum: Kant with Schmid

     Theoretical move: By reading Kant's "The End of All Things" alongside Schmid's conflict of determinisms, Ruda argues that reason is structurally compelled to imagine its own total end: without this act of totalization, the struggle between phenomenal and noumenal determinism collapses into a mere human condition (existentialist fatalism), so imagining the apocalypse is itself a rational, and therefore quasi-fatalist, imperative.

     Act in such a way that you never forget to imagine the end of all things!

308. #308

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

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

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

     the act of subjective destitution is the logical outcome of not ceding on one's desire

309. #309

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.123

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *. . . To Forcing the Act*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, via Zupančič, that forcing the Real to appear as a direct ethical goal collapses into terror and a simulacrum of ethics, and that a genuine ethics of the act must distinguish between the terror inherent in the encounter with the Real and terror as a deliberate strategy—a distinction that also cautions against the nihilistic privileging of destruction found in certain readings of the death drive.

     the inevitable result of any attempt to force the real to appear through an act (or an event) is a state of terror

310. #310

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.104

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Temptation to Give Up*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event is structurally threatened by the Symbolic order's ideological valorization of utilitarian balance, which pathologizes the very excess and imbalance that genuine subjective commitment requires — making betrayal of the event the socially 'healthy' option.

     it, like the Lacanian act, threatens the very parameters of its symbolic existence, potentially generating a high level of anxiety

311. #311

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.239

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *4. The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes) works through the parallels and tensions between Lacanian singularity and Badiou's truth-event, arguing that both posit a subject of truth as a fissure in the symbolic order defined by its radical break with social situatedness, while also examining the paradoxical relationship between the subject's agency and the contingency of the event via Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner.

     which, for Lacan, emerges through analysis or the ethical act

312. #312

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.20

     *Introduction* > *What Sublimation Can Do*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity should be located not only in acts of symbolic rupture (subjective destitution) but also in the creative reformulation of symbolic systems from within, positioning the interface between the Symbolic and the Real — exemplified by sublimation and Joyce's sinthome — as the proper site of both singularity and resistance.

     recent efforts to connect singularity to acts of subjective destitution...can lead to conceptual dead ends that squander some of the most robust potentialities of Lacanian theory

313. #313

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.18

     *Introduction* > *The "Perseverance in Being"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—understood as the "perseverance in being" that resists conceptual/social capture—must be located at the level of the Lacanian real (drive energies), and that the dominant post-Lacanian reading of singularity as "subjective destitution" (radical break with the symbolic) is theoretically insufficient because it universalises alienation and cannot distinguish constitutive from circumstantial forms of it.

     the subject who is willing to destroy itself in a vehement act of 'subjective destitution'—an act that represents an absolute break with the dominant establishment—attains the heroic status of someone who is ready to sacrifice his or her social viability

314. #314

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.118

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard alignment of Lacan with revolutionary politics (Žižek's "inassimilable real") is an oversimplification, and that the later Lacan—better captured by Badiou—reconceptualizes the real as nameable and reweavable into the symbolic, thereby opening space for incremental as well as revolutionary political and ethical action grounded in subjective singularity.

     the only 'real' political actor is one who is willing to forgo all social supports and to defy all social directives in favor of an uncompromising act that shatters the symbolic status quo.

315. #315

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.169

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Symbolic "Dispossession"*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Butler's theory of "dispossession" as premised on a covert nostalgia for self-possession, arguing that the Lacanian insight that the subject is constituted through the Other's language need not entail a disempowered or persecuted subjectivity; sublimation and the point de capiton demonstrate that symbolic insertion can be enabling rather than merely tyrannical.

     the only way to counter it is to opt out of it altogether, whether through the ethical/divine act or (perhaps more commonly) through a gradual withdrawal of all affective attachments.

316. #316

     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'.

     the act is, by definition, one 'of annihilation, of wiping out': 'we not only don't know what will come out of it, its final outcome is ultimately even insignificant, strictly secondary in relation to the NO! of the pure act'

317. #317

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.93

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegem­onic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.

     the act shatters the cycle of repetition—of business as usual—when the subject (or a social movement) has had enough, when things have reached a point of no return.

318. #318

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.236

     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.

     analysis cannot be conceptualized as 'a teleological occurrence' but must, rather, be viewed as 'a taking-advantage of the disruption of previous attempts to construct a teleology'

319. #319

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.161

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the act constitute two distinct but complementary ethical orientations within Lacanian ethics—both are modes of fidelity to the Thing—thus correcting the tendency to privilege the act as the sole or supreme form of Lacanian ethical praxis, and reframing "not ceding on one's desire" as a matter of keeping desire alive rather than pursuing destructive jouissance to its limit.

     while the jouissance of the act neutralizes the symbolic, sublimation aspires to reconfigure it by bringing bits of jouissance into the realm of signification

320. #320

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.46

     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.

     I am somewhat hesitant to endorse efforts by Žižek to advocate a drastic break with all symbolic investments.

321. #321

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.82

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

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

     daring or destructive acts that fit the template of Lacanian ethics are usually staged by individuals (or social groups) who inhabit deprivileged subject positions.

322. #322

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.113

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Lures of Power*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's two "lures of power"—reifying the void and absolutizing truth—are countered by the structural incompleteness of naming, and that this incompleteness aligns Badiou with Lacan's insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the Real and its symbolization, while also positioning sublimation ethics as a superior framework for both personal and social transformation.

     Žižek's contention that naming the event is a form of ideological interpellation... there is an unbridgeable gap between the act and its symbolization, between the encounter with the real and the signifier.

323. #323

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.150

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *"Deviant" Satisfactions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and symptom formation share a common structural root—both are responses to excess jouissance circling the Thing—but are distinguished by their relationship to the signifier; sublimation mobilizes the signifier to produce singular creativity, while the symptom marks the signifier's failure to contain the drives. Sublimation is thus theorized as the privileged site of singularity's social inscription, capable of revising the repertoire of satisfactions even against normative interpellation.

     it constitutes the cornerstone of my attempt to theorize singularity as a social phenomenon, why it offers a viable alternative to the ethical (or divine) act

324. #324

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.80

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Will to Begin Again*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the act holds an irreducible tension: while the act is a suicidal, non-teleological encounter with the death drive that annihilates the subject as social agent, it simultaneously harbours a transformative potential — a "will to begin again" — that can reconstitute subjectivity and even catalyse social change, a dimension often eclipsed in post-Lacanian readings.

     The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). . . . in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not)

325. #325

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.270

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index listing key concepts, names, and page references from a book on Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument but maps the conceptual terrain of the work.

     ethical act and, 81–82 simulacra ethical act, 70 suicide as ethical event, 107–8

326. #326

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.76

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Act of Subjective Destitution*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Edelman's queer-theoretical appropriation of the Lacanian act of subjective destitution and sinthome, arguing that his alignment of queer subjectivity with pure negativity and the death drive forecloses transformative political action; against Edelman, the author proposes that the future is not a suturing of lack but the condition for its ongoing, open-ended translation into new signification.

     they should, in short, perform the act: 'the act of repudiating the social.' It is in this sense that the sinthomosexual 'stands for the wholly impossible ethical act.'

327. #327

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.122

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *From "Divine" Violence . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's valorization of "divine violence" by arguing that it collapses the necessary tension between transgressing and affirming normative limits, and risks "forcing the encounter with the Real" — a move that forecloses the context-specific political work of symbolization in favor of an absolute ethical act.

     is it really true that the sociosymbolic order is, in every instance, so thoroughly tyrannical that only a divine 'intervention' can rectify the situation?

328. #328

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.162

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Debt of Desire*

     Theoretical move: The ethics of sublimation is grounded in a "debt of desire" to the signifier that constitutes subjectivity, and its ethical force lies in maintaining an open-ended, mobile orientation toward the lost Thing — resisting the symptomatic congealing of the repetition compulsion into narcissistic fixation — so that the variability of the object is welcomed rather than suppressed.

     The ethics of sublimation shares a basic similarity with the ethics of the act, namely that, like the latter, it pursues the thread of desire

329. #329

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.249

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *6. The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes to a chapter on sublimity and love, develops the theoretical relationship between Das Ding, sublimation, the drive, jouissance, and the Real, arguing that aesthetic and sublimatory processes mediate our proximity to the Thing while the drive's satisfaction lies in its perpetual circling rather than attainment.

     sublimation may under some circumstances be a means of carrying the effects of the ethical act into the symbolic . . . if the event (or act) is going to be transformative rather than merely destructive, it needs to be made sense of—it needs to be translated into symbolic terms.

330. #330

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.268

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is an index from a book chapter, listing topics, concepts, and proper names with page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical passage—no argument is advanced—but it maps the conceptual terrain of the book, including Lacanian concepts such as jouissance, sinthome, objet a, the real, sublimation, and singularity.

     Letourneau, Mary Kay, ethical act, and, / 66–67 / Parks, Rosa, ethical act and, 39 / political implications of ethical act, / 77–78

331. #331

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.87

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Service of Goods*

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian act constitutes a genuine ethics precisely by rupturing the "service of goods" — the Other's disciplinary demand to subordinate desire to utility and social adaptation — and, when jouissance defeats the signifier, opens the possibility of revolutionary politics beyond mere repetition or incremental reform.

     the act shatters the subject's paralyzing devotion to what Lacan calls the 'service of goods': the tendency of the Other to privilege practical concerns of productivity and mass consumption over the integrity of the subject's desire.

332. #332

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.171

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Other vs. the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals a productive distinction between two levels of the Other—the tyrannical demands of authority figures versus the symbolic order as a generative structure of meaning-production—and that the very alienation imposed by the signifier is the condition of possibility for creativity, love, and singularity, rather than an irremediable wound to be mourned.

     In Žižek's case—as I have stressed—this blind spot leads to an overvalorization of the ethical/divine act.

333. #333

     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."

     ending with the idea that the act of subjective destitution is the ethical act par excellence.

334. #334

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.61

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The "Truth" of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Against reductive readings that cast Lacan as a defender of hegemonic law, this passage argues that Lacanian analysis aims not at social adaptation but at releasing the singularity of the subject's desire from beneath the Other's oppressive signifiers—and that refusing to cede on one's desire constitutes both the clinical goal and a form of political resistance.

     there are two closely related avenues of resistance opened up by Lacanian theory: the 'truth' of the subject's desire and the so-called 'ethical act'

335. #335

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.120

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Transformative vs. Revolutionary Politics*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's valorization of the suicidal act and the jouissance of the Real as the only escape from a wholly corrupt Symbolic is theoretically incoherent and politically self-defeating, and that a viable politics requires interrogating the interplay of the Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary rather than evacuating the Symbolic altogether.

     Zˇ izˇek does frequently specify that the act can rearticulate the symbolic fi eld—that, as he puts it, although the act is suicidal, its 'stakes are symbolic'

336. #336

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.98

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

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

     Like the Lacanian subject of the act, Badiou's subject of truth exhibits a radical 'decenteredness' in relation to the normative expectations of its social setting.

337. #337

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.242

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *5. The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: This passage (a notes section) deploys Žižek's and Zupančič's arguments to develop the theoretical claim that the Real's internal contamination of the Symbolic ensures the big Other's constitutive incompleteness, while also staging the political-ethical deadlock that follows from Lacanian theory when it confronts questions of action, revolutionary violence, and the Kant-Sade nexus.

     continue to dream of an absolute, cataclysmic revolutionary act of violence. . . . Žižek is never ready. His work lingers in endless postponement

338. #338

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

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 262–263) listing concepts, proper names, and page references; it is non-substantive as continuous theoretical argument but indexes key Lacanian concepts deployed throughout the work.

     ethical act and, 70–72

339. #339

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.201

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     Throughout this book, I have offered different ways to read Lacanian ethics, gradually working my way from the ethical act to the ethics of sublimation.

340. #340

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.108

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Event vs. the Simulacrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's ethic of fidelity to the truth-event is both a radicalization of Lacanian ethics (transposing "do not cede on your desire" into a persevering devotion to the event) and a point of divergence from Žižek's Lacanian critique, which holds that naming the event inevitably re-sutures its disruptiveness back into the symbolic order, whereas for Badiou naming is the very mechanism by which the impossible becomes possible.

     even if Badiou's event, like the Lacanian act, transfigures the basic coordinates of the subject's existence, Badiou resists connecting ethics to the death drive

341. #341

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.177

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Lacan with Dr. Phil*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity, though risking conflation with self-help authenticity, is distinguished by existential bewilderment rather than self-possession; and that the opacity of the subject (its being riven by the unconscious/drive/repetition) does not license ethical abdication but instead demands a heightened, self-reflexive accountability toward others that goes beyond Butler's ethics of forgiveness.

     an ethical/divine act of absolute defiance, an uncompromising faithfulness to a truth-event

342. #342

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.96

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Badiou's theory of truth-events onto Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Badiou reconceptualises the Lacanian act and ethics of psychoanalysis by making the social/collective transformation that is only a byproduct in Lacan constitutively necessary to the event itself, thereby shifting the subject's fidelity to rupture from a 'private' experience to a premise of collective change.

     Like Lacan's act, Santner's miracle, and Rosenzweig's daimon, the truth-event opens the possibility for new possibilities or, to use Badiou's own wording, the 'possibility of the impossible'

343. #343

     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.

     Žižek's exploration of the act of subjective destitution as a leap into the deadly jouissance of the real regardless of consequences

344. #344

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.247

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c18_r1.xhtml_page_239" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="239"></span>*18*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a clinical-autobiographical move in which the analysand's attempt to assume total guilt is itself identified as a defensive maneuver—a neurotic alibi that reinstates ego-mastery against the more destabilizing analytic revelations of self-deception and hidden aggression, while simultaneously raising the question of the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation when applied to another's life and death.

     All she needed to do was to repeat what I had already spoken but had myself been unwilling to hear... The flood of consequences then came on by itself, with an energy of its own.

345. #345

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.26

     **SUNDAY TO MONDAY, MARCH 13**

     Theoretical move: This autobiographical passage records the immediate traumatic aftermath of a son's suicide, enacting rather than theorizing the structure of trauma: the refusal of the Real to register, the compulsive return to the moment of the act, and the search for a hidden secret in the frozen instant that might make the loss intelligible.

     His finger is on the trigger… At what point will it release the firing mechanism? At what point will it change everything? At what point will he be blasted out of existence?

346. #346

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.28

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Abraham and absolute fidelity

     Theoretical move: By aligning Abraham and Judas as structurally parallel figures—both divinely chosen for a murderous act, both renouncing an intimate—the passage argues that the distinction between betrayer and faithful servant collapses into a difference of perceived motive rather than actual deed, thereby reframing betrayal as a possible mode of absolute fidelity.

     at the very point when he decided to thrust that knife into the heart of his son, the radical act of renunciation had occurred and the transgression against both his son and the natural law had been committed.

347. #347

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.141

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The intervention of God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the most radical form of Christian doubt is not atheism or deism but rather the inversion that retains the reality of divine *intervention* while suspending certainty about God's existence—making the Event/happening primary and theological belief secondary, so that doubt becomes the natural outworking of faith rather than its enemy.

     For Christians it is a happening, an event, that we affirm and respond to, regardless of the ebbs and flows of our abstract theological reflections concerning the source and nature of this happening.

348. #348

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.27

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Opposites attract

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a dialectical reversal by positioning Abraham and Judas—conventionally figured as opposites (faith vs. betrayal)—as potentially intimate counterparts, thereby destabilizing the conventional identification of fidelity with doctrinal submission and opening the question of whether betrayal can itself be a mode of faith.

     while Judas is commonly understood as having let go of God for the sake of earthly treasure, Abraham let go of his earthly treasure, his own son, for the sake of God.

349. #349

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.6

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the deepest fidelity to a tradition (Christianity as the exemplary case) requires a structural act of betrayal of that tradition—that "Jesus" and "Judas" are inseparable positions, like the two sides of a Möbius strip—and invokes Lacan's "a letter always reaches its destination" to frame the author's own writing as self-address, lending psychoanalytic grounding to the paradox of faithful betrayal.

     I am asking whether Christianity, in its most sublime and revolutionary state, always demands an act of betrayal from the Faithful.

350. #350

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.158

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Beyond believe, behave, belong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for inverting the standard Christian order of belief→behavior→belonging into belonging→behavior→belief, grounding this reversal in a radically subjective, unlocalizable 'miracle' of transformation; it draws on a Hebraic model of communal ritual and interpretive wrestling to contend that authoritative, objectified belief actually undermines truth, and recruits Pascal's Wager to show that entering communal practice is the proper site for the miracle of faith rather than doctrinal assent.

     Whether or not I say that I believe in God, the evidence of my belief is shown in whether I live as though there is a God or not.

351. #351

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Wrestling with God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to God within the Judeo-Christian tradition is structurally constituted by wrestling with, contradicting, and even disobeying God — introducing a paradox in which betrayal and fidelity are not opposites but mutually implicated, and obedience itself can demand disobedience.

     Jacob does not seem in any way repentant when he discovers who this stranger really is, and God, far from seeming to have a problem with such an unrepentant follower, bestows the victor with the blessing of a new name

352. #352

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.151

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter008.html_page_145"></span>Deeper than magic and reason

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Christian concept of miracle must be relocated from the domain of supernatural physical intervention (which remains epistemically contestable) to the domain of an interior, subjective transformation — an event that reconfigures one's entire relation to past, present, and future without registering as a natural object — thereby distinguishing the truly 'supernatural' from the merely spectacular.

     Forgiveness, love, and hope are all miraculous in the supernatural sense that the rabbi of Gur was hinting at… the miracle is not something that can be judged by the conceptual framework used in scientific research.

353. #353

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.118

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Conversion as birth

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious truth (specifically Christian conversion) operates at the level of subjective transformation rather than objective propositional content, such that God is encountered not as a present object but as an immanent-yet-absent source that can only be 'experienced' as absence by those already transformed — making truth irreducibly tied to the subject rather than reducible to verifiable claims.

     conversion as a radical change in the subjectivity of the individual... it transcends all of this.

354. #354

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.139

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The call comes first

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity has the structure of a "religion without religion," in which the transformative event (the Word of God) takes precedence over propositional belief or the metaphysical question of God's existence — and that the divine call is constitutively inseparable from its heeding, meaning it is heard only in its transformative effect.

     the communication of God is such that nothing is said in the saying. Rather, a life-giving event takes place, a happening occurs, an earthquake in our being fractures us.

355. #355

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter009.html_page_173"></span>Transformance art

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christian truth exceeds any religious system or conceptual grasp, and proposes "transformance art" as a collective practice that short-circuits belief systems not to install doubt but to open an encounter with an event (the "miracle") that is structurally unintelligible and irreducible to rational dissection.

     spaces that rupture everyone and cause us all to rethink. Amidst the myriad religious communities that seek to be places that provide understanding, we need to form a space that takes this away

356. #356

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > What would Jesus do?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an act which appears outwardly as betrayal can, when viewed from the perspective of foreknowledge and divine complicity, constitute the highest act of fidelity — destabilising the binary of betrayal/faithfulness and reframing Judas's act as a structurally necessary, willed sacrifice rather than a simple transgression.

     such discussion opens us up to conceive the difficulty of viewing this act as a simple and straightforward act of betrayal... a betrayal may be approached as an act of fidelity if looked at in a different light.

357. #357

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.21

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The obedience of Judas

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Judas's betrayal of Jesus may have been a commanded act of fidelity rather than a mere treachery, developing a paradoxical logic in which the highest faithfulness takes the form of betrayal—a move that is used to distinguish a universalizing, incarnational Christianity from Gnostic escapism, and grounded by a Žižekian inversion of the relation between divine command and fidelity.

     Jesus himself not only wanted Judas to betray him but actually demanded it… for his mission to expand and impact the whole world, this betrayal needed to take place

358. #358

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter001.html_page_16"></span>The misguided fidelity of Judas

     Theoretical move: The passage reinterprets Judas's betrayal not as cold-blooded malice but as a misguided fidelity — an attempt to force a political-messianic confrontation — thereby using the figure of Judas to introduce the book's central paradox that betrayal can be an act of loyalty.

     Judas, frustrated by the lack of concrete political action among the disciples, was actually attempting to force Jesus' hand, placing him in a situation in which he would have to act in a decisive manner against the ruling powers

359. #359

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The Witness of the Jesus of the Gospels

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious truth (as witnessed in the Gospel of John's "life" language) operates not as an object of experience but as a "counter-experience" — a transformative event that changes one's entire mode of being in the world without introducing any new empirical object, structurally analogous to Lacanian notions of the Real as that which transforms without being seen or touched.

     he was speaking of an event that opens up a whole new world of experience... This event in which nothing changes is an event so radical that nothing remains the same.

360. #360

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Theodrama

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christian faith requires a perpetual self-overcoming—a "faithful betrayal"—whereby any religious system birthed from the originary Event must be continuously subverted and overturned, not as an external correction but as a constitutive feature of faith itself, enacted through "transformance art" gatherings that suspend identity, refuse pastoral hierarchy, and point toward an unspeakable Happening beyond objectification.

     Christianity's self-overcoming is a feature of the faith from its very inception. This act of overcoming was required from the very beginning and will continue without end or resolution until the very end.

361. #361

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.59

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic faith is not secured by ideological self-image (ego-ideal) but is revealed precisely through the stripping away of religious belief-as-ideology, so that true conviction emerges from the subject's confrontation with lack and powerlessness rather than from identification with a flattering image of the self.

     Within months he had a breakdown, and soon afterward gave up his line of work completely... he then went on to give to the poor all the riches he had accumulated and began to use his considerable managerial expertise to challenge the very system he once participated in.

362. #362

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Word of God" is not a textual object but an incarnated act: meaning is constituted only in its performance by a subject, not in its propositional affirmation. This logic is then extended in a parabolic reversal where the oppressed become the living Word directed at the powerful, inverting the usual subject/addressee of ethical command.

     The Word is formed only when it is performed; it exists in the world only when it is lived out by a subject who dwells fully in the world.

363. #363

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.69

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that institutionalized religious practice functions as a "safety valve" that reproduces the very social order it purports to resist — a logic illustrated through The Matrix and Bonhoeffer's theology — and that authentic faith requires total worldly immersion rather than the consolation of a designated religious sphere; the accompanying parable then dramatizes the tension between ethics-without-guarantee and faith instrumentalized for personal salvation.

     Each day we have forsaken our very lives for him because we judged him wholly worthy of the sacrifice, wholly worthy of our being. But now... I am concerned that my children... may follow him... selfishly, because his sacrifice will ensure their personal salvation.

364. #364

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.147

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine forgiveness is unconditional and precedes repentance rather than following it, deploying a theological-deconstructive reading of the Prodigal Son parable to distinguish an "impossible" gift-logic from the economic/conditional logic that normally masquerades as forgiveness.

     a forgiveness without conditions, a forgiveness that would forgive *before* some condition was met

365. #365

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.102

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

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

     he finally knew why he had been called. He knew what needed to be done. He understood now what his destiny was.

366. #366

     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 > DIS-COURSES\

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine religious truth cannot be communicated through detached logical discourse but only through the performative 'dis-course' of the parable, which transforms the subject at the level of action rather than mere cognition—a structure homologous to Lacanian fetishistic disavowal, where the gap between knowing and doing reveals a split between intellectual assent and embodied transformation.

     Rather, the parable facilitates genuine change at the level of action itself.

367. #367

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.9

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses parabolic fiction to collapse the inner/outer distinction in faith, arguing that authentic belief is legible only through embodied, subversive action, and that the fictional 'alternative universe' functions as a mirror that reveals the reader's actual ideological universe.

     authentic faith is expressed, not in the mere acceptance of a belief system, but in sacrificial, loving action.

368. #368

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses two parabolic fictions to argue that apparent betrayal or negation can be acts of fidelity, and that the very concept of God may require its own self-negation — a theological maneuver that structurally parallels the Lacanian logic of the Real as that which escapes every symbolic capture.

     Judas as one of the most courageous figures in the Bible, as one who betrayed Christ, not because of a love for money... but rather because he knew what would result from that betrayal.

369. #369

     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="chapter020.html_page_114"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, via parable and Biblical exegesis, that genuine fidelity to a teaching requires its betrayal or transgression — pure identification with the Master's words is itself the deepest form of betrayal — and that divine power operates by always siding with the excluded and marginalized, even at the cost of its own defeat.

     it would seem that Jesus wishes to teach his disciples an important lesson by taking their side and then allowing the woman to defeat him.

370. #370

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.74

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic affirmation of the Resurrection (and of Christ's lordship) is not an intellectual/propositional act but an incarnated, lived praxis—and that orthodox doctrinal belief can itself become a barrier to this affirmation; it then reinforces this via a parabolic inversion of the Prodigal Son, where waiting, desire, and unresolved lack become the site of genuine fidelity.

     Christians are not called to believe in the Resurrection but rather are called to be the site where Resurrection takes place—the site where Christ's presence is testified to in action.

371. #371

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.97

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a parable to argue that authentic faith requires active defiance of divine command when that command contradicts the ethical demand already inscribed in the Other's face — staging the paradox that fidelity to God is achieved through disobedience to God, and that lukewarm compliance is the real heresy.

     I do not need the Scriptures or your words to tell me what I ought to do… So, my God, I defy you precisely in order to remain faithful to you.

372. #372

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.80

     Fuzzy Math > **Dialectical Fraud** > **Primitive Accumulation**

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Kierkegaard's *Two Ages*, the passage argues that the "dialectical fraud" of modernity operates through a false social arithmetic—a sorites paradox—whereby mere quantitative accumulation (of opinions, chatter, money, signatures) is ideologically mistaken for qualitative transformation, producing individual weakness, decisive incapacity, and the dissolution of meaningful subjectivity into endless talk.

     no amount of deliberative artistry is sufficient to constitute a decisive action

373. #373

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.300

     A Play of Props > **The Jam**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "jam" in communication — where empty speech stutters into contamination — is not a breakdown but a breakthrough: the point at which the return of the repressed creates the condition of possibility for full speech, recollection, and the resubjectification of history that Lacan identifies as the very foundation of psychoanalysis.

     This assumption of the subject of his history, insofar as it is constituted by speech addressed to another, is clearly the basis of the new method Freud called psychoanalysis

374. #374

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.121

     Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity** > **Epistemic Probability**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Christendom is leveraged to show how "epistemic probability" — the habit of assessing degrees of belief by historical evidence — becomes naturalized as "second nature," displacing the paradox and leap of faith with a penchant for proof, and thereby rendering authentic religious subjectivity impossible.

     to embrace the paradox of Christianity in a willingness to suffer as Jesus did is to become spiritually contemporaneous with him

375. #375

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.231

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part I: The Concrete Universal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a collection of endnotes that do bibliographic and conceptual ancillary work: it anchors the chapter's argument about comedy and the universal/particular relation by citing Hegel on the comic emptying of the Beautiful and the Good, by glossing the Borat example as a short circuit between the generic and the individual, and by cross-referencing Žižek, Dolar, and Santner on sublimation, the object-voice, and creaturely life.

     comic characters (actors) to carry on with their 'act' beyond the fictional framework (stage, movie) to which they belong. The promotion tour of *Borat* was done by Borat himself.

376. #376

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.164

     Repetition

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that repetition is not merely a comic technique but constitutive of the comic genre itself, and uses Marx's *Eighteenth Brumaire* to distinguish between 'good' repetition (producing the new), 'bad' repetition (farce/ghost), and a third, comic-structural form of pure repetition that emerges precisely when the imperative to break with repetition is most absolute—linking the philosophical discovery of repetition as an independent concept to the post-Hegelian tradition.

     a stubborn attempt to do something against all odds, which, because of its repetitious character, leaves the realm of the heroic and enters a territory closer to the comic not because it keeps failing, but because it keeps insisting

377. #377

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.336

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Towards a <span id="scholium_35_towards_a_quantum_platonism.xhtml_IDX-1843"></span>Quantum Platonism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for a "Quantum Platonism" in which the Idea (eidos) is not an abstract universal but the virtual field of variations that subtends reality—itself always a partial, collapsed version of an impossible whole—and that this structure, visible in Kieslowski's eidetic film variations, Freud's reconstructed fantasy, Benjamin's translation theory, and Picasso's cubist distortion, is homologous to the Lacanian futur antérieur of the Unconscious and to Hegel's Understanding as the power of separation.

     Instead of just blaming Trump, the Left should learn from him and do the same. When a situation demands it, we should shamelessly do the impossible and break the unwritten rules.

378. #378

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.458

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads Beckett's procedure of abstraction—the gap between the "material of experience" and the "material of expression"—as the formal operation by which the Real/Impossible interrupts any seamless passage to social totality, and argues that this same logic of the almost-closed circle (humanitarian charity reproduces what it opposes) can only be broken by a real-impossible act.

     it is impossible to break out of it, which means one can do it by means of a real-impossible act.

379. #379

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.371

     **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: Žižek argues that the Lacanian "bar" is not Butler's liberal-hegemonic bar of contingent social exclusion but the constitutive split that separates the subject as void from all objective content—grounded in primordial repression and the fundamental fantasy—and that emancipatory transformation requires not gradual inclusion but the radical act of traversing the fantasy, which institutes an entirely new mode of historicity rather than extending an existing one.

     Lacan's premise is that we can—not integrate/subjectivize the fundamental fantasy but—suspend it, its structuring power, and he calls this radical move 'traversing the fantasy.'

380. #380

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.389

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that true freedom paradoxically coincides with necessity—through a dialectical reading of Luther's Protestantism and Lacan's objet a, Žižek contends that radical freedom emerges not from unconstrained choice but from the unbearable situation of predestination where one must choose without knowing which choice is predetermined, thereby collapsing the opposition between freedom and determinism.

     Authentic political acts take place like this: in them (what was considered) 'impossible' happens and, by way of happening, it rewrites its own past and emerges as necessary, 'predestined' even.

381. #381

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.409

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic ethical action—whether Karen's autonomous withdrawal, Morck's self-sacrificial compassion, or the post-tribulationist "impure" believer—requires abandoning the safety of a big Other and confronting the Real in its senseless indifference; only a "Christian atheist" who acts without divine guarantee can be truly and unconditionally ethical, with Christianity's core being the only consequent atheism and atheists the only true believers.

     After these three betrayals—Mrs. Tilford's, Joe's, Martha's—comes the only true ethical gesture. At Martha's funeral, after performing the short rite, Karen walks away alone

382. #382

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.181

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading two films (*The Discovery* and *Arrival*) through the opposition of linear vs. circular time, Žižek argues that Repetition is not mere playful re-enactment but is ethically motivated by a past failure, and that the only exit from the loop is an act of self-erasure—saving the other at the cost of never having met them—while *Arrival* inverts the formula by making the "flashback" a flash-forward, thus subverting the Hollywood couple-production narrative.

     the only way to save her is to lose her, to erase even the past of meeting her

383. #383

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.90

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Buddha, Kant, <span id="scholium_11_buddha_kant_husserl.xhtml_IDX-235"></span>Husserl

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Husserl's phenomenological epoché enacts a "splitting of the Ego" structurally homologous to Buddhist anatman and, paradoxically, to a perverse de-subjectivization — the subject becoming the transparent instrument of the Other's will — thereby exposing the politically dangerous underside of any stance that dissolves subjectivity's constitutive hysteria.

     the enlightened stance in which the difference between life and death no longer matters … we regain the original self-less unity and are directly our act.

384. #384

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.442

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Philippe Petit's high-wire act and Prokofiev's return to the USSR as parallel figures of "the Act" — a gesture combining meticulous planning with abyssal purposelessness — to argue that simple beauty produced under conditions of terror is not mere escapism but ideology at its most efficient, precisely because it is "homogenizable" (not identical) with the dominant order while retaining its own coherent artistic greatness.

     Why did he do it? As he himself replied, for no reason at all, just for the sake of it—such abyssal gestures which combine utter simplicity with meticulous planning are acts.

385. #385

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.13

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

     Theoretical move: The passage maps the book's structural architecture (theorem/corollary/scholia) as a self-enacting ontological form, and closes by defending the "thwarted identity" of the Real—the irreducible gap between transcendental space and reality—against both new realist critics and the ideological "fine art of non-thinking" that converts the symbolic into image and forecloses genuine thought.

     Scholium 4.2 describes an act that differs from Badiou's event: Sergei Prokofiev's 'crazy' decision to return to the Soviet Union in 1936.

386. #386

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.52

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

     a free act occurs as its own cause, it opens up a new causal chain from its zero-point. So insofar as 'second death' is the interruption of the natural life-cycle of generation and corruption, no radical annihilation of the entire natural order is needed for this—an autonomous free act already suspends natural causality

387. #387

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.184

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading the film *Arrival* through the opposition of circular (heptapod) and linear (human) temporality, Žižek argues that the circle of time is always-already an ellipse structured around a disavowed cut, and that the act of "willing the inevitable" is not empty but ontologically necessary—the finite, sexualized subject's capacity to intervene with a decision is what the holistic Other lacks and needs, making temporal finitude superior to atemporal plenitude.

     It is Louise, the woman, who (based on her grasp of the language of heptapods) does the act, makes the decision, and thereby undermines the circular continuity from within

388. #388

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.1

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

     Theoretical move: Žižek proposes "dialectical materialism of a failed ontology" (DM2) against Stalinist DM1, arguing that the theoretical space of dialectical materialism is topologically "unorientable" — structured like a Möbius strip or cross-cap — because antagonism is not the struggle of external opposites but the constitutive self-contradiction of an entity with itself, a minimal reflexivity (gap, mediation, failure) that cuts through every immediate unity, including sexuality.

     a withdrawal which is not a retreat into passivity but perhaps the most radical act of them all.

389. #389

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.330

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real harbours a constitutive self-blockage that generates appearing from within, against Badiou's presupposition of appearing as given and his masculine-exceptional logic of Truth-Event; the Death Drive and the feminine Not-all formula are mobilised to articulate this as the properly Lacanian (and Hegelian) alternative to Badiou's ontology.

     another dimension appears in reality like a secular miracle or act of grace, it cuts into the flow of reality

390. #390

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.407

     **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: Žižek argues that true ethical universality requires a militant, partisan stance rather than neutral tolerance, and that the excess of subjectivity (Hegel's "night of the world") is the condition of redemption rather than the source of evil — evil properly resides in the "ontologization" of excess into a global cosmic order. This is illustrated through a reading of *The Children's Hour*, where the structure of false appearance reveals that truth has the structure of a fiction, and that an authentic ethical act consists in breaking out of the closed social space rather than seeking reconciliation within it.

     the film's ending culminates in Karen's heroic gesture to effectively break out of this closed social space

391. #391

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "empty gesture" by which substance becomes subject—requiring a point of exception (Monarch, Christ) where free subjectivity is "quilted" into the substance—is the elementary operation of ideology itself: the symbolization of the Real that posits the big Other into existence; conversely, "subjective destitution" in analysis reverses this by accepting the non-existence of the big Other and keeping open the gap between Real and symbolization, at the cost of annulling the subject itself.

     the individual who takes upon himself the idiotic mandate of performing the empty gesture of subjectivation - of supplementing the given, substantial content by the form of 'This is my will'

392. #392

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The symptom's 'return of the repressed' operates from the future rather than the past — meaning is retroactively constructed through the symbolic process, not excavated from hidden depths — and this temporal paradox entails that transference is a necessary illusion through which Truth is constituted via misrecognition, a structure equally operative in historical repetition (Luxemburg, Hegel).

     the subject is confronted with a scene from the past that he wants to change, to meddle with, to intervene in ... only through his intervention does the scene from the past become what it always was: his intervention was from the beginning comprised, included.

393. #393

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.79

     Eating before Knowing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's materialist turn is grounded in the priority of the moral act over theoretical idealism: acting in and on the world collapses the Kantian barrier between phenomena and things-in-themselves, thereby demonstrating that knowledge cannot remain at a remove from its object and that morality must actualize itself rather than perpetually striving toward an unreachable ideal.

     The moral act must transform the world. It touches and involves itself with the world that it aims to change.

394. #394

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.229

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

     Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's affirmative ontology of Becoming as positive flux without lack, the passage argues—through a Hegelo-Lacanian reading of Woolf's *Mrs Dalloway*—that subjectivity is constituted by an irreducible structural lack, and that this very lack (figured as absence, the void, *das Ding*, *objet a*) is what generates multiplicity, desire, and the intensity of lived experience rather than cancelling them.

     His death is 'an attempt to communicate' (*contra* Deleuze's 'necessarily communicating world') by closing the gap that subject opens in substance, by launching himself into the 'sheer' objectivity of death.

395. #395

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.187

     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.

     It is the freedom of the Act, the potential to rupture the prescribed parameters of the social order, which is why for Lacan such acts are exemplified by Sade's outrageous graphomania, or by Antigone's defiance

396. #396

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.86

     The Philosopher's Stone > The Subject Breaks Itself

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's subject distinguishes itself from inert matter not by transcending contradiction but by internalizing and enacting it—thinking is the primary form of self-destruction that constitutes subjectivity, and this is the very move by which idealism becomes materialism.

     The subject can make this contradiction its own. It does so when it acts against itself.

397. #397

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.21

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

     Theoretical move: Lynch's cinema achieves a distinctively Hegelian-Lacanian effect by separating the realms of desire and fantasy, immersing the spectator completely in the fantasmatic world until its traumatic underside is revealed, thereby enacting speculative identity (self-recognition in absolute otherness) and forcing an encounter with the Real as the impossible within the symbolic order.

     Lynch's films always end the same way—with an impossible act that fundamentally alters the very structure of the filmic world.

398. #398

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Laura Palmer's ethical act in *Fire Walk with Me* consists in embracing the death drive (figured by the ring's circular absence) against phallic authority (figured by BOB/the letter), and that this act—possible only once Laura acknowledges the lack in the Other—constitutes the film's privileged ethical position, one the spectator is invited to share.

     But we immediately see the cost of the impossible act: the embrace of the death drive costs Laura her life.

399. #399

     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.

     By returning to this choice and reversing his earlier decision, Henry frees himself from his own sacrifice, just as the film suggests that we can.

400. #400

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.137

     ,'\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 > Conclusion: The Ethics of Fantasy

     Theoretical move: The passage works through competing ethical frameworks—Lacan's desire-based ethics, Žižek's drive-based ethics, and Kant's freedom-through-law ethics—to argue that Lynch's films enact a Hegelian speculative identity between the realms of desire/theoretical reason and fantasy/practical reason, a synthesis that Kant himself failed to reach but Fichte and Hegel accomplished.

     Kant identifies freedom and the ethical act. It is our capacity for ethical acts that proves to us that we are free, and it is only in ethical acts that we truly affirm our autonomy.

401. #401

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.120

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that fantasy has an ethical dimension—not as escapism but as the very site of freedom—by mapping Kant's two Critiques onto Lynch's filmmaking: the first Critique's anti-fantasmatic stance gives way, as does Lynch's early ambivalence, to a Kantian practical reason whose moral law identifies fantasy as the locus of autonomy that exceeds the symbolic order and makes the ethical act possible.

     complete identificarion with rhe fantasy's derou r has the status of an emical act, an act in which we d isrega rd the entire fi eld ofrepresentation and the dictates of symbolic law.

402. #402

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.103

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

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's ethical dimension lies not in its retreat from the Other but in the humiliation it compels: by externalizing one's innermost subjectivity, the fantasizing subject is exposed to the Other's look, and fully embracing rather than retreating from this exposure constitutes the genuine ethical act.

     his ethical act does not remain isolated but changes his world.

403. #403

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.73

     ,'\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**

     Theoretical move: By "subjectivizing the impossible object-cause of desire" in *Fire Walk with Me*, Lynch forces spectators to inhabit the perspective of the fantasy object itself, revealing that at the core of that object is not plenitude but a fundamental emptiness—a void that destabilizes the cultural fantasy of femininity by collapsing its constitutive contradictions into a single figure.

     The impossible act occurs throughout the experience of watching the film. Through its deployment of the fantasy surrounding Laura Palmer, the film places us in the impossible perspective of the object within this fantasy.

404. #404

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.42

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Other** Side **of Fontosy** > **The Normal and the Abnormal**

     Theoretical move: By staging the full realization of fantasy in *The Elephant Man*, McGowan argues that Lynch reveals fantasy's constitutive cost: the impossible object is produced by desire's own structuring lack, so its realization dissolves both the object and the desiring subject, demanding an ethical speculative identification with the monstrous other rather than a safe humanitarian distance.

     one accomplishes an ethical act. It seems silly, of course, to talk about the bare act of watching a film as an ethical act

405. #405

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.89

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Enduring the Desire of the Other > The Entrence of the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the superego is the psychical internalization of the law that arises precisely from the subject's sacrifice of desire: the more desire is surrendered, the stronger the superego's command to surrender more, trapping the subject in the dialectic of law and desire rather than opening onto an ethics of desire — illustrated through Lynch's Lost Highway, where Fred's abandonment of desire energizes the Mystery Man as superego-figure.

     the subject sees only symbolically circumscribed avenues for action rather than a real opening to act. Such openings appear as impossibilities for the subject tied, through the dialectic of law and desire, to the question of what the Other wants.

406. #406

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.211

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus consolidates and defends Fink's interpretive positions on Lacan's formulas of sexuation, the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the structure of the signifier, and the Other jouissance—correcting common misreadings while flagging key conceptual distinctions (existence vs. ex-sistence, the bar of negation, the role of the phallus, S1/S2, and object a).

     instead of being a genuine action or an action in the 'full' sense of the term, the sexual act is always a bungled action, an acte manqué

407. #407

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.315

     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.

     they now confront an almost impossible task. If The Matrix Revolutions were to succeed, it would have to produce nothing less than the appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary politics today, a blueprint for the political act the Left is desperately looking for.

408. #408

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.275

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophy of finitude constitutes an "ontology of provisory existence" that structurally mirrors Cartesian provisional morality, but that Heidegger's great political temptation—and error—was to collapse the irreducible parallax gap between ontological truth and ontic order, leading to an illegitimate displacement from individual being-toward-death to communal sacrificial fate.

     'it doesn't matter what you decided, what ultimately matters is the form of an unconditional decision, your fidelity to your choice, your assuming of your choice as fully yours'

409. #409

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.366

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Robert Schumann as a Theorist of Ideology

     Theoretical move: By reading Schumann's "Humoresque" as a structure of absent melody sustained by its unplayed virtual voice, Žižek argues that ideology operates analogously: explicit ideological text is always sustained by an unspoken obscene supplement, and genuine critique of ideology ("moving the underground") must intervene in this obscene virtual layer rather than merely engaging the explicit symbolic Law.

     The true act is to intervene in this obscene underground domain, transforming it.

410. #410

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.104

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a Greimasian structural analysis of the analyst's position relative to Christ, Teacher, and Scientist, arguing that both Christ and the analyst *are* rather than merely *perform* their function — one through ontological being, the other through transference. This is extended into a broader Schellingian/Hegelian thesis that Evil is the actualization of a Ground that should remain potential, illustrated through the *Star Wars* saga's failure to dramatize how excessive attachment to Good generates Evil.

     they courageously remain faithful to their choice out of principle, not on account of the promise of any material or spiritual profit.

411. #411

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.136

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads the final scene of Henry James's *The Wings of the Dove* as a demonstration of how the intersubjective status of knowledge (knowing that the Other knows) restructures libidinal economy, and how Densher's "test" enacts a deceptive formal/informal dialectic aimed at deceiving the big Other—presenting a forced choice as freedom while the object-letter functions as a proto-Hitchcockian materialization of intersubjective tension.

     the true contours of her act can be discerned only through a close reading of the novel's final pages... This swift ending is to be read as somewhat akin to the analyst's intervention which concludes the session, a sudden unexpected closure which elevates a marginal detail into the significant Cut.

412. #412

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.130

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads Henry James's late style as a literary enactment of the Hegelian passage from Substance to Subject, in which the nominalization of predicates desubstantializes the subject and the loss of ethical substance becomes the very condition for a higher, mediated ethics of intersubjective dependence—a move Žižek then generalizes into a "parallax gap" at the level of political antinomy.

     Hyacinth's failure to carry out the act (and murder an upper-class figure) is also a sign of his lack of creativity: 'Hyacinth's refusal to destroy is also an inability to create'

413. #413

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.384

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" operates as a formal gesture of refusal—a Versagung analogous to Sygne's No—directed not against hegemonic power but against the very 'rumspringa' of ideological resistance (charity, activism, inner distance) that reproduces the system; and he exposes Western Buddhism as the perfect ideological supplement to virtual capitalism precisely because it licenses participation-with-distance.

     it is an act of Versagung, not a symbolic act. There is a clear holophrastic quality to 'I would prefer not to': it is a signifier-turned-object, a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order.

414. #414

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.204

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > "Positing the Presuppositions"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of causal determination but the retroactive capacity to choose which causes determine us — a "positing of presuppositions" structure that links Bergsonian retroactive possibility, Kantian self-determination, Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen, and Varela's autopoiesis into a single temporal-ontological loop.

     he stops, blocking the execution of his decision, arresting his gesture—does he not thereby confirm Libet's 'Hegelian' insight into how the elementary act of freedom, the manifestation of free will, is that of saying no, of stopping the execution of a decision?

415. #415

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.77

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

     Theoretical move: By reading Mrs. Robinson (and analogous figures like Julia in Brideshead Revisited) as ethical subjects rather than corrupt seducers, Žižek argues that an apparent prohibition sustaining promiscuity—keeping one person "pure" through one's own corruption—constitutes a genuine ethical act, thereby instantiating the dialectical structure of concrete universality where the particular sacrifice secretly upholds the universal.

     Mrs. Robinson is the only true ethical figure in the film: her promiscuity is part of her private deal with God

416. #416

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.347

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

     What is unthinkable for them is the 'absurd' act of decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of 'reasons,' in positive knowledge

417. #417

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.134

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.

     a properly Kierkegaardian moment in which the ethical itself is the temptation: Kate is right to dismiss Densher's 'ethical' rejection of the money as a fake

418. #418

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: By reading Henry James's *The Golden Bowl* and *The Wings of the Dove* through a Lacanian lens, Žižek argues that the network of protective lies ultimately serves to maintain the big Other's ignorance—keeping up social appearances—and that this "ethics of the unspoken" constitutes a false ethics, while "female masochism" is unmasked as a male fantasy rather than an attribute of feminine nature.

     no act that would tear the web of lies apart, or, in Lacanian terms, would disclose the big Other's nonexistence

419. #419

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.265

     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.

     the extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand

420. #420

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.88

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's account of the fall from innocence to sin must be supplemented by a Schellingian-Lacanian correction: Prohibition does not disturb primordial repose but resolves a prior, more terrifying deadlock created by primordial self-contraction (sinthome), yielding a three-stage sequence of anxieties that grounds a properly materialist theory of subjectivity and ethical engagement.

     This theme of a pure, senseless act that restores meaning to our earthly life is the focus of Tarkovsky's last two films... the act is accomplished by the same actor (Erland Josephson)

421. #421

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.381

     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.

     there is the violent act of actually changing the basic coordinates of a constellation. In order for the last kind of violence to take place, this very place should be opened up through a gesture which is thoroughly violent in its impassive refusal

422. #422

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.334

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'free choice' is always already a meta-choice whose conditions are ideologically pre-structured, and uses the Amish rumspringa as a model for how academic 'radical' distance from the state functions as a reproductive mechanism of hegemony rather than genuine resistance; against Critchley's ethics-first localism, Žižek proposes a parallax shift that reveals 'resistance' as feeding the power-machine, and authentic revolution as a 'Must' rather than an 'ought.'

     The will to revolutionary change emerges as an urge, as an 'I cannot do otherwise,' or it is worthless... an authentic revolution is by definition performed as a Must

423. #423

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.281

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Heidegger's apparent opposition between "decisionist" active will and passive Gelassenheit is a symptomal torsion-point revealing their deep complicity, and extends this diagnosis to Nietzsche's ethico-political antinomy (militarism vs. peace), resolving both by showing that the Real is not an inaccessible Thing but the gap/antagonism that makes perspectives incommensurable—a solution structurally opposed to the "Oriental" Gelassenheit, which is ultimately indifference, in contrast to the violent, subject-splitting love proper to Christian/revolutionary engagement.

     the call for a unilateral 'breaking the sword' the call for an act, if ever there was one

424. #424

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.285

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nazism was a pseudo-event (désêtre) while Stalinist Communism, despite its horrors, remained inherently related to an authentic Truth-Event (the October Revolution), making Stalinist "irrationality" a displaced return of genuine revolutionary negativity rather than mere nihilism—and uses this distinction to reframe Heidegger's complicity with Nazism and his failure to attribute "inner greatness" to Soviet Communism.

     no, Hitler did not 'have the balls' really to change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions—that is to say, he acted so that nothing would really change.

425. #425

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.66

     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: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.

     by giving priority to the Act as a negative gesture of radical (self-relating) negativity, as "death drive" *in actu,* I devalue in advance every positive project of imposing a new Order

426. #426

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.328

     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.

     Boostels' critique of the merely negative character of the Lacanian Act (as a gesture of assuming the nonexistence of the big Other, of traversing the fantasy, of the pure negativity of the death drive, to which he opposes Badiou's positive notion of the patient work which enacts fidelity to the Event)

427. #427

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.342

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the depoliticization of Human Rights traps both liberal humanitarianism and radical biopolitical critique in the same ontological deadlock, and proposes "Bartleby politics"—a withdrawal into passivity as the genuinely aggressive first act that clears space for real political change—as the way out.

     Bartleby's 'I would prefer not to' is the necessary first step which, as it were, clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity, for an act that will actually change the coordinates of the constellation.

428. #428

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.248

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Unconscious Act of Freedom

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kantian/German Idealist Self-Consciousness (the empty point of pure reflectivity) is structurally identical to Lacan's subject of the Unconscious, and that this identity is confirmed by Kant-Schelling's notion of a primordial, atemporal act of choice: what phenomenal self-awareness experiences as imposed nature is in fact a radically unconscious free act, meaning Self-Consciousness itself is radically unconscious.

     Kant and Schelling postulate a nonphenomenal transcendental, atemporal act of primordial choice by means of which each of us, prior to his temporal bodily existence, chooses his eternal character... this act is radically unconscious (the conclusion explicitly drawn by Schelling).

429. #429

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian subject is not a substantial self that undergoes dispossession but IS the void that emerges through that dispossession—a retroactive, self-positing structure—and uses this to mediate between Kantian autonomy and Hegelian ethical substance via the Lacanian logic of the Not-all, showing that irreducible contingency in ethics is the very condition of genuine responsibility and act.

     This brings us to the Lacanian notion of act: in an act, I precisely redefine the very coordinates of what I cannot and must do.

430. #430

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.105

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses the Darth Vader/Anakin figure to argue that the subject in the strict philosophical sense is constituted not by a human face but by an "excessive" ethical commitment that founds rather than corrupts the Good, and that the spectral Voice is the privileged medium of this inhuman subjectivity; this is further extended into a provocation about theology and materialism.

     our readiness to break the balance of the ordinary flow of life, and to put everything at stake for the Cause to which we adhere

431. #431

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.190

     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.

     The only way to break from the controlling logic of the ideology is to reject the possibilities that it presents and opt for the impossible... the act of accomplishing the impossible has the effect of radically transforming the framework.

432. #432

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.62

     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.

     Recognizing authority's obscenity is the path to freedom from it.

433. #433

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.255

     29 > **25. The Politics of the Cinema of Intersection**

     Theoretical move: This passage (an endnotes section) makes several subsidiary theoretical moves: it critiques Butler's "resignifying" as ideologically captured agency that never challenges the underlying structure, aligns capitalist democracy with fundamentalism as sharing the same logic, and reads Tarkovsky's use of color/fantasy against Hegelian thinking-without-hope and conservative nostalgia.

     resignifying reshuffles the cards that one has been dealt, but it never attempts to change the very nature of the game itself.

434. #434

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Nietzschean event has the structure of a "time loop" in which the subject who declares the event is constituted retroactively by it—the event is immanent to its own declaration—and that this constitutive splitting ("One became Two") is not a synthesis or mystical transformation but the minimal, topological difference (the "edge") that names the nonrelationship between two incommensurable terms, a logic Zupančič explicitly aligns with Lacan's formula of the sexual non-rapport.

     'I spoke my word, I break at my word, . . . as a proclaimer I perish'. To perish as a proclaimer, to break at one's word, is to become the thing one proclaims (or declares).

435. #435

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.14

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Nietzschean "declaration" is not caught in a lack of the Real but constitutes a specific duality in which declaration and event are co-immanent—the Real is not external to speech but structurally redoubled within it—and that this logic of the "Two" (rather than multiplicity) governs both Nietzsche's theory of the event and the temporal structure of truth and subjectivity.

     he posits it as something that philosophy carries within itself as the event/act of thought itself. The event is part of the 'process of truth'

436. #436

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.62

     <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.

     Forgetting, oblivion, is the very condition of possibility for an act in the strong sense of the word.

437. #437

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "event Nietzsche" constitutes a philosophical act analogous to Malevich's avant-garde artistic act: both locate the inner, inherent limit of their respective discourses and activate it as a site of creation, producing an implosion rather than a mere expansion—a vacuum of silence from which the event emerges.

     the affinity between Nietzsche's conception of a possible 'philosophical act' (one could also say: of philosophy as act), and Malevich's conception of a possible 'artistic act' (of art as act)

438. #438

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern "hedonism" is structurally grounded in the ascetic ideal (passive nihilism), and pivots to the Lacanian concept of sublimation—understood as the creation of new values by "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing"—to show that what Kant dismisses as mere pathological desire can carry the same structure as moral duty, thereby reframing the ethics of desire against Kantian moralism.

     for Nietzsche, 'the act is not an overcoming. The act is an event. And this event is an absolute break, the proper name of which is Nietzsche.'

439. #439

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.65

     <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.

     Could we not say that one of the fundamental reasons for the difficulty of Hamlet's position is precisely the structural incompatibility of memory and action—that is to say, the fact that action ultimately always 'betrays' memory?

440. #440

     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.

     an act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation bound by its conditions, it retroactively creates its own condition.

441. #441

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.249

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that political emancipation requires a move beyond the Master Signifier toward S(A) (the barred Other), and that this "subtraction" is only achievable through the psychoanalytic process of working-through and traversal of the fantasy — with writing itself (as in Sade's case) serving as the privileged site where the subject approaches the position of objet petit a and begins to transcend the symbolic order.

     thinking might only acquire the status of a contingent, concrete universal act after a long, laborious process of narrative re-framing

442. #442

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

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     his theory of violent deeds (called 'theory of the act') is exactly what his philosophy constantly asks for

443. #443

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage mounts a systematic critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan, arguing that his central ethical axiom "Do not give up on your desire!" is a fundamental misreading of Seminar VII, and that his use of Antigone as a paradigm for contingent, concrete-universal socio-political transformation is undermined both by internal inconsistencies and by a close reading of Sophocles' text.

     Žižek depicts Antigone as a figure who performs an autonomous ethical act, which renders her uncannily terrifying... and which allows her to exceed and transform the structure of the symbolic order.

444. #444

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

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for the chapter "The Subject Is Not Enough," containing only footnote references and one substantive aside (note 14) on the difference between Lacanian subjective non-identity and humanist self-distancing from ideology. It is primarily non-substantive bibliographic material.

     the whole thing in a way precisely comes down to what follows from the inaugural, critical subjective stance

445. #445

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section mounts a sustained scholarly critique of Žižek's readings of Hegel, Kant, and Fichte in *Less than Nothing*, arguing that Žižek's key moves—positing ontological incompleteness, a Nietzschean stance on power, material contradiction, and a Badiouian 'Act'—are either philosophically unargued, dogmatically metaphysical, or genuinely non-Hegelian.

     a true Badiouian act, the 'Act,' is said to be a 'radical and violent simplification … the magical moment when the infinite pondering crystallizes into a simple 'yes' or 'no.' ' 'Magical' is the right word, close to mystified and unintelligible.

446. #446

     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.

     He identifies the necessary violence of the radical act, of the act that challenges the givens of the ruling capitalist system, but he makes no sustained attempt to integrate the self-destructive violence of this act into his conception of emancipatory governance.

447. #447

     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.

     hopelessness is for me not just a zero level of getting rid of false hopes which opens up the way for a more authentic hope; it is in some sense also something we cannot ever be sure that we will really succeed in leaving behind—every hope involves an irreducible risk, it walks on the edge of a catastrophe.

448. #448

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.282

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     a desire fixated on a sublime object thus provides a minimal determination of the ethical act which is extremely unlikely to take place without the presence of an object of desire

449. #449

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to McGowan](#contents.xhtml_ch5a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek accepts McGowan's challenge that a theory of radical violence must extend into governance itself, but pushes beyond the modest proposal of constitutional amendment by surveying historical and contemporary forms of counter-violence to power—from Lenin's control commission to multi-party democracy to Jefferson's insurrectionism—and concludes that the persistence of communism as a 'living dead' specter is not utopian nostalgia but a symptom of structural necessity imposed by today's crises.

     Such a form of governance would translate the violence of the radical act into a rule of violence.

450. #450

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.261

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Nobus](#contents.xhtml_ch10a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kant's ethical ambiguity—between freedom as traumatic Real and freedom as asymptotically unattainable—mirrors the Sadean confusion about "second death," and both are resolved by the Hegelian-Lacanian move of grasping Substance as Subject (i.e., recognising that radical negativity/death drive is already the zero-level of reality, not a terminal destruction to be achieved).

     the free act in its abyss is unbearable, traumatic, so that when we accomplish an act out of freedom in order to be able to sustain it, we experience it as conditioned by some pathological motivations.

451. #451

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.4

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > On Critics and Disciples

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive editorial introduction surveying the secondary literature on Žižek, contrasting the present volume's constructive dialogue with prior polemical anthologies, and noting Žižek's peculiar failure to generate doctrinal disciples despite his popularity.

     This is evident, among other things, with reference to Žižek's theory of the act, which is wildly distorted in articles by Mark Devenney and Oliver Marchart.

452. #452

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The State of Self-Erasure

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's political thought contains a structural lacuna: while he theorizes self-destructive violence at the level of the revolutionary act (via Benjamin's divine violence), he fails to extend this logic into a theory of emancipatory governance or post-revolutionary normality, leaving "the next day" unthought—a gap the author proposes to fill by moving beyond divine violence toward a theorized self-destructive state violence.

     Despite all his theorization of the radical act, Žižek's thought has almost no account of the new regime that the radical act will institute.

453. #453

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.104

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > IV

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's use of "negation of negation" and "pure drive beyond fantasy" as un-Hegelian residues of positivist metaphysics, arguing through readings of Coetzee's *Disgrace* and Hitchcock's *Vertigo* that genuine Hegelian mediation dissolves the fantasy frame without positing an excess or remainder beyond dialectics, and that ideological distortion (not ontological remainder) explains why subjects cannot traverse their fantasies.

     the search for such possible 'traces of reason' seems to me a more genuinely Hegelian and still possible prospect than anything that could result from 'abyssal Acts.'

454. #454

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

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject occupies a paradoxical double role in ideology critique—simultaneously enabling genuine rupture and enabling ideological reproduction through ironic non-identification—and that this ambivalence demands a dimension of critical praxis (exemplified by Laibach and Žižek) that exceeds mere theoretical questioning.

     something which must be found in critical praxis in a broader sense

455. #455

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.12

     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.

     Žižek argues that the political act involves the opposite—adhering to the letter of the law rejecting the obscene underside.

456. #456

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

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

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage contextualizes Žižek's theory of the Act by grounding it in critiques of gradualism, the big Other, and cowardice — arguing that true political courage requires accepting the inexistence of the big Other, while situating Žižek's positions on Stalinism, Badiou's event, and Benjamin's critique of violence against his academic critics.

     The problem with Bernstein's conception of evolutionary change is that it explicitly refuses to embrace the event or the act.

457. #457

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.241

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

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" as a three-ring itinerary, arguing that Žižek's key theoretical contribution is to foreground the more implicit and disturbing second principle—that Kant is the truth of Sade (Sade as closet Kantian)—over the better-known first principle (Sade as the truth of Kant), and connects this to the concept of the "second death" as a condition for radical creation ex nihilo.

     the apparent deadlock of this movement between Kant and Sade is then transcended and resolved through the figure of Antigone and, more precisely, the metaphysical dimension of Antigone's act

458. #458

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" is incomplete: while Žižek identifies two reasons for the impurity of Sadean jouissance, Lacan's text advances four deeper observations about the fundamental bankruptcy of libertine ideology, and crucially, Lacan accepts the deadlock between alienation and separation as inescapable, whereas Žižek transforms it into a contingency to be resolved through a reconceptualization of the ethical act.

     Žižek transforms Lacan's constitutive constellation of forces into a largely incidental, situational set of variables... which can be resolved through a reconceptualization of the act.

459. #459

     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.

     an act that concretizes the actuality of freedom as the recognition of constraint and the realization of a logic of causality that is non-linear or determinate

460. #460

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.129

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Bright Side of Stalinism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Stalinism's "inner greatness" lies in its formal structure of self-directed violence—power targeting itself rather than external enemies—and proposes this as a template for theorizing emancipatory governance that institutionalizes self-critique, illustrated by the concept of an "Emendation" system that structurally exposes the lack in the Subject Supposed to Know.

     The regime that corresponds to the radical political act—emancipation in power—must prioritize striking at itself if it is to remain part of the emancipatory project and not become a new version of oppressive authority.

461. #461

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > A Case for Sublimation

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's reading that desire is merely a compromise formation and a retreat from the drive, the passage argues that sublimation constitutes the "shared space" where desire can appropriate jouissance through the objet a — not in its mortifying/uncanny dimension but in its sublime dimension — thereby opening a more affirmative Lacanian ethics grounded in desire rather than the destructive act.

     moving this theory in a more affirmative direction than Žižek's theorization of the destructive ethical act—which by now has become paradigmatic in Lacanian studies—is able to provide.

462. #462

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Israeli refuseniks' refusal to treat Palestinians as racialized others constitutes a genuine ethical act that de-racializes Palestinians (transforming them from homines sacri into neighbors), exposes the lack in the Symbolic order of Zionism, and embodies a universalist "part of no-part" position that decompletes Zionist ideology—against both liberal humanist inclusion and nationalist organicism.

     LaCapra's disciplinary preference for situating causality and the possible within a particular historical framework forecloses the very possibility of an act, of that which makes the impossible possible.

463. #463

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.131

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Bright Side of Stalinism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of the radical act—modeled on self-directed violence (Fight Club)—remains incomplete because it never theorizes what emancipatory governance looks like after the revolutionary act; the author proposes extending that self-directed violence into a "rule of violence" as a structural principle of post-revolutionary power.

     Žižek rightly sees that the radical act must take Fight Club as its model and privilege the blow against itself rather than the blow against the oppressor.

464. #464

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.95

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > II

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against Žižek's "gappy ontology" (holes/voids in being) by proposing that Hegel's negativity is better understood as the normative autonomy of the "space of reasons"—the irreducibility of rational, rule-following practices to natural/neurological causes—without requiring a paradoxical negative ontology or Lacanian lack.

     gaps or voids or holes in being (or 'groundless Acts' in the absence of 'the big Other')

465. #465

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.154

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Psyche

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology operates by harnessing the psyche's capacity for repression and self-destruction, functioning most effectively when subjects mistake ideological experience for authentic feeling (via disavowal); and that Žižek's ideology critique—exemplified through the *They Live* allegory—constitutes a form of existentialist choice demanding a psychic, rather than merely economic, revolution.

     John Nada (Rodney Piper) flips off the aliens before he blows up their signal, an act that kills himself at the same time... what would the most ethical act be at that point?

466. #466

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.101

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > IV

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's Hegelianism turns on a "gappy" phenomenal ontology and a retrospective, open-ended dialectic, and critically examines whether this justifies Žižek's claim that bourgeois capitalist society is fundamentally unreformable and demands "the Act," finding that claim underdeveloped while acknowledging the Lacanian logic that repression creates its own opposite.

     Like many others, he wants to say that bourgeois society is fundamentally self-contradictory, and I take that to mean 'unreformable.' We need a wholly new ethical order, and that means 'the Act.'

467. #467

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12)

     Theoretical move: Friedlander argues that Žižek's radical politics depends on a conjunction of hope and jouissance, where both are structured around temporality, lack, and repetition — and that reading Žižek alongside queer theory (Muñoz) reveals how hope and jouissance together enable the 'impossible' to be both encountered and enacted.

     both hope and jouissance emerge not only in response to the 'impossible,' but also can bring about the impossible.

468. #468

     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.

     the ethical 'act' of rejecting the Other's desire even if, in extreme cases, doing so means destroying itself.

469. #469

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > Shoot the Hostage

     Theoretical move: Žižek identifies the political act with self-directed violence (subtraction from one's own symbolic investments) rather than violence against the Other, arguing that this structure repeats the originary self-inflicted violence of the death drive through which subjectivity itself first emerges — making violence against oneself the irreducible condition of both subjectivity and emancipatory politics.

     the political act strikes first at oneself rather than one's political opponent. The rarity of the act is not simply the result of the ideological strength of capitalist society but more the result of our desire to capitulate to the comforts that ideology entails.

470. #470

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.113

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Pippin](#contents.xhtml_ch4a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends his thesis of ontological incompleteness against Pippin's transcendental-apperception alternative, arguing that (1) Kantian freedom itself implies a "hole" in phenomenal reality, (2) truly autonomous acts retroactively posit their own reasons rather than applying pre-given norms, and (3) every particular social form is structurally self-contradictory in a Hegelian sense, making Pippin's reformist social-democratic horizon abstractly incomplete.

     an act is abyssal not in the sense that it is not grounded in any reasons, but in the circular sense that it retroactively posits its reasons

471. #471

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.68

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Finkelde](#contents.xhtml_ch2a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against any dogmatic a priori (Kantian or Habermasian) as a necessary foundation for rational discourse, insisting instead that Hegelian dialectics submits every discursive norm to immanent self-questioning; ethical and historical progress is real but never guaranteed, and is structured by retroactivity—present acts restructure the past, and the past remains open to future reinterpretation.

     Žižek theory of the act incorporates Hegelian figures of thought called The Beautiful Soul, The Knight of Virtue and especially The Frenzy of Self-Conceit.

472. #472

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

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

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage critically documents a chain of misreadings by Žižek (and others) of Lacan's Seminar VII ethics: the central error is attributing to Lacan the imperative "Do not give up on your desire!" when Lacan's actual formulation concerns guilt as arising from having given up on one's desire—a paradox, not an imperative. Secondary misreadings of Antigone's ἄτη, her desire, and related textual inaccuracies are catalogued.

     For Antigone's act as the emergence of a pure signifier… For Antigone as the autonomous subject who transcends the dialectic between authorship of and obedience to the moral law via the object a

473. #473

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > Pippin on Žižek’s “Gappy Ontology”

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a debate between Žižek's "gappy ontology" — in which the subject as embodiment of negativity is the ontological ground of substance — and Pippin/Pittsburgh School's inferential pragmatism, arguing that Žižek's retroactive logic of the Act collapses the normative space of reasons and risks rendering all rational commitments contingent.

     Žižek's theory of the act incorporates Hegelian figures of thought called 'The Beautiful Soul, The Knight of Virtue and especially The Frenzy of Self-Conceit.'

474. #474

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.192

     [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.

     Zootopia concludes with the idea that coexistence requires a universalist political intervention, like the one that Judy makes when she acts against the forces of conservative identity politics.

475. #475

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.53

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipation is structurally universalist: racism depends on the rejection of universality, and political revolt becomes possible only when one shifts from a particularist identity-standpoint to a universal one — illustrated through the trigger of Nat Turner's rebellion in Parker's film as the master's denial of Christian universality.

     Universality in Birth of a Nation becomes apparent when Samuel denies its existence. This is the trigger for an emancipatory political act.

476. #476

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.23

     <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> > **PARTICULAR ENTITIES**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century turn from universality to particular identity is both a political catastrophe and a philosophical opportunity: by redefining the universal not as a shared possession but as a shared absence, he reclaims universality as the only genuine basis for emancipation and exposes identity politics as an ideological product of capitalism's evacuation of particular content.

     I become who I am through my contact with universality, through the act that enables me to free myself from my given particular identity—that of an unthinking segregationist or a cheerful iPhone user.

477. #477

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.202

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

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

     Jaye answers Norman's rebarbative particularity with an unwavering universalism. The fact that she articulates her commitment to universality through the act of not speaking befits this commitment perfectly.

478. #478

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.13

     <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.

     Brett Ashley decides to leave him abruptly rather than stringing him along... she contends that this kind of act is 'sort of what we have instead of God.'

479. #479

     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.

     An Event occurs when something 'stops not being written,' as he puts it in *Seminar XX*. But how? Not by making the impossible possible, but by performing a *disjunction of the necessary and the impossible*.